This past Wednesday I showed up at CloverHSQ at 7:10am and immediately knew something was wrong.

We launched the Impossible Sausage Egg and Cheese sandwich at all Clover locations. You might remember this idea originally came from our contractor Justin Kelly. I told him at the time that it would be wicked expensive (given how much the impossible meat costs) and he said do it anyway. We’ve been testing various versions at CloverHFI since November and in April we decided to roll it out company-wide.

The promotion was intended to run 7am – 9am. Even though we were giving the sandwiches away we didn’t expect to “sell out.” But at 7:15am CloverHSQ was already through their supply. Other restaurants fell shortly after that. We had people waiting pre-open at many of the restaurants. The app didn’t hold up to the onslaught.

On one hand this is a fantastic dream. We want to launch items people are really excited about. On the other hand it was a terrible nightmare. We want everybody to have a great experience. And we want working at Clover to be a terrific thing. If you were there Wednesday morning it was pretty chaotic. We weren’t prepared for the demand and our systems fell down.

The image on this post is Jane’s Garmin heart-monitor. She was working at CloverKND on launch day. Crazy!!

This isn’t the kind of work environment I want for Jane or anybody. So sorry to anybody (not least of all employees) who faced confusion or frustration on Wednesday. That wasn’t our plan. We just wanted to share this great sandwich with everybody. I feel I didn’t really do my job properly to prepare for the promotion and let you all down. So sorry! I’ll learn from our mistakes here and we’ll do a better job next time.

And for those who haven’t tried the sandwich yet it’s available daily at the restaurants, and the chaos of Wednesday is gone.