The Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast brought to you by Custom Business Solutions
The Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast brought to you by Custom Business Solutions
Innovating Tradition: How Groucho's Deli Advances with Technology and Quality
In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, Jeremy is joined by Deric Rosenbaum, President and CTO of Groucho's Deli, an 83-year-old deli chain based in the Southeast U.S. Deric shares his journey from commercial construction to leading Groucho's Deli alongside his business partner Bruce Miller. The conversation delves into Groucho's unique hybrid model between QSR and Fast Casual, their unrelenting focus on quality ingredients, and their innovative use of technology to enhance customer and staff experiences. Deric also discusses Groucho's approach to sustainability, adapting business models during COVID-19, and leveraging tools like Ovation and Marquis for customer feedback and reputation management. The episode wraps up with Deric sharing his personal and family favorites from Groucho's menu, emphasizing the brand’s commitment to both tradition and modern technology.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:09 Meet Deric Rosenbaum: President and CTO of Groucho's Deli
00:44 The Legacy of Groucho's Deli
01:27 Deric's Journey with Groucho's
03:25 Groucho's Unique Dining Experience
05:16 Signature Dishes and Menu Highlights
08:23 Commitment to Quality and Sustainability
11:02 Adapting Through Technology
15:11 Customer Experience and Feedback
29:21 Favorite Menu Items and Personal Stories
33:20 Conclusion and Contact Information
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Jeremy Julian:Welcome back to the restaurant technology guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us. As I say, each and every time I know you guys got lots of choices. So thanks for hanging with us today. Today. I am joined by somebody that, I very much admire in the restaurant industry, restaurant tech industry is a, for me, one of those people that I love to, to bounce ideas off of, I want to let him talk about himself here for just a second, but Deric, Deric is, he works for a brand called Groucho's Deli out of the Southeast. But Deric, why don't you introduce yourself a little bit to our listeners, who is Deric, what does he get to do for a living? And, then we can talk a little bit about what Groucho's is and why it's such a special place in so many people's hearts that, that experience it on a weekly basis.
Deric Rosenbaum:Thanks for having me on, Jeremy. It's great to be here. so I am Deric Rosenbaum. I am currently the president and resident CTO of Groucho's Deli. Groucho's is an 83 year old brand based out of Columbia, South Carolina, founded by Harold Groucho Miller, who moved here from Philadelphia, smoked a cigar, had a mustache, a brass sense of humor. And people from Columbia immediately started associating him with Groucho's March from the vaudeville era and the name stuck and so in 1942 we rebranded from Miller's Delicatessen to Groucho's Delicatessen. And here we are 83 years later. My partner and CEO of Groucho's is Bruce Miller, so he is a third generation family member. His son is now actually a franchisee in the low country of South Carolina. So everything's still pretty much in the family. They call me the adopted brother, but technically not blood. my story with Groucho's, so as I said, Bruce is my business partner. And he and I were fishing buddies, hanging out buddies, having beer buddies, all the things. And, my previous, my first career was in commercial construction, so I used to build restaurants, built catering halls, and several other types of buildings, and he's I know restaurants, buildings, let's get together and start a franchise, and so I opened up franchise 1, 2, 3, 4, got up, we got it up to 8, I was still at that point just a I did both for a little while and quickly realized, I gotta pick a career, so I stuck, went with the restaurant business and I've learned every facet of it from, the accounting to inventory to management to staffing, labor, all the things, customer service relations, and, we got up to about 10 units, we opened up our own central commissary, we had our own trucks, delivery, learned that side of the business, I wanted to understand, I don't believe in half measures. they're all in or I'm all out. So I wanted to learn every part of our business. So we ran that for many years and then flip that over to a national large broad line distributor. We now don't really, we now control it, but we don't touch it. fast forward to where we are today. We are 30 unit chain again based on where in the Carolinas and Georgia. we are a very controlled growth chain. We're not looking to open 100 units a year. This is not who we are. And, I would venture to say we're probably one of the more tech advanced chains for, A group of our size.
Jeremy Julian:agree with that.
Deric Rosenbaum:technology is my, wheelhouse is where I live, but I also bring the world of the reality of operations and how does all of this work together in a macro sphere and how does it impact customer experience, user experience, staff experience, and so that's the perspective I take when most of our, Vetting processes and undertakings. So in short, that's who I am today. I'm also a girl dad of two girls and happily married for 24 years.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah. hopefully the wife doesn't hear that you talked about crouches before, before her when she comes to, to post in this. so on that Deric, talk to me a little bit, like for those that hadn't been, and again, you and I, Have become friends, outside of kind of some of the business stuff. But, I got, I personally got the chance to experience your brand in the last year. and it was very different than I expected it to be. So for those that have not been, had the privilege of experiencing a Groucho's, you talk about it being a deli, which, which, to me, oftentimes conjures up a New York deli in New York city, white and black tile and, huge sandwiches and pictures of celebrities on the wall, which there's a little bit of that element, but there's also a lot of other things that you guys do that are different walk, a non Groucho's, customer that's not ever been there through what does an experience look like inside of your guys's brain? Cause it was a very unique experience and I loved it quite frankly, outside of the fact that the food was fantastic, which we'll talk about that in a couple of minutes.
Deric Rosenbaum:we're a hybrid model between QSR and Fast Casual is how I would call us today. for the first six generations, the first six decades of Groucho's, we were a very traditional counter service deli, meat and cheese counter. Traditional Jewish fare, people's diets and the way they eat have completely changed since, no one's eating cream cheese and olive sandwiches, especially in the southeast or corned beef tongue anymore. But don't get me wrong. I love corned beef tongue, but so that evolved and my partner in the late 80s went to his dad and his mom at the time and said, we're going to, we're going to get rid of all this retail stuff. And, yeah. Make it like a true restaurant. So we brought in, we, went from counter service to table service. So when I say we are a hybrid, we have full table service in the restaurant with the central point of payment after service. but, prior or, Since the pandemic, our off prem is now almost 60 percent of our revenue. So things are changing, but I think that's not certainly not unique to Groucho's. I think that's the industry as a whole and definitely within the QSR and fast casual segments.
Jeremy Julian:talk a little bit about the food. So going away from the traditional deli fair, that's in a cold case and you're, I need a half pound of this and a quarter pound of that and all of that, or even sitting down at the table and having a full table service experience. What is the, what is your guys primary items that people are buying and again, I crave that, 45 sauce. I'm telling you, since I had it the first time between that and the sandwich, like I, I think about it, I have dreams about it. It's scary when I think about how good it is. And I know, I know, some friends that are in the, that live down there are just in love with the food, but again, for those that aren't, is it all sandwiches, only sandwiches, talk us through the menu and what is, what are the signature items? And why do people come?
Deric Rosenbaum:Yeah. we certainly still have traditional deli fare. We have corned beef, pastrami, salami, turkey, roast beef, all the things you can get on a regular basis. traditional deli sandwich. We're also known for our clubs, bacon and turkey clubs, BLTs. we have a very large salad selection. our salads are actually, and a couple of our salads are on the top of our p mix as Well, but we're known for our signature open faced, hot open faced deli sandwiches. I liken us to the meat and potatoes of the deli business. we like to focus on meat and cheese. If you want alfalfa sprouts and our avocado spread. We're probably not the place for you. we like simple, clean, whole muscle ingredients, and most of it is, like, all of our dressings. You referred to our 45 sauce, but our ranch is equally as popular. we make all of that from scratch every day in the restaurants. we bake our own cookies. They're 100 percent real butter. we focus on simple, clean, and quality. if you bring the right bread, the right cheeses, and the right condiments, then, like People will tell you, they're fanatic, we're fanatical about our pickles. pickle is part of the deli experience. Yes, some people hate pickles, but nobody wants a limp pickle, let's just be honest.
Jeremy Julian:and I'm certainly one of those pickle people. I was like, ah, I need more pickles in my day. And for me, selfishly, I used to, when I lived in Southern California, I was up in LA, anytime I'd go to LA, it was a Jewish deli. And I promise you every time I'm in New York city, I hit up the Jewish delis, which is why, why I'm still trying to figure out how to get a Groucho's here in, in
Deric Rosenbaum:I still very much have my hands in the purchasing and merchandising world of Groucho's. And with all the crazy things that have happened over the last two decades, we still serve first cut brisket and corned beef and pastrami, we, we haven't. Traded down on our quality. If anything, it's gone up. And we have vetted most of our vendor partnerships. Many of them are multi generational companies, Kaiser Pickles, their third generation, Pantanozzi Bakers out of Baltimore up and up in the mass area, we believe in people that believe that provide products and believe in quality the way we do.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah. and it shows cause, again, having been there. I can't get the, get the thought of the 45 sauce out of my mind since I've been there, Deric, you had talked about, and and the other piece that I would tell anybody that hasn't been any chance you get, I was just, I had just had some friends that were heading down your way. Ultimately, they weren't able to go because of the storm. We're recording this right. and right after the storm, they were heading that way and they were going to go check out your original store in Columbia because he was going to run the, the iron man in, in Augusta, and he said he was going to take a trip over there. Obviously with the storm, it didn't end up happening. But, but with that, the other thing that's always so amazing to me is how affordable you guys can make things. And I think that's just the testament to your commitment to partnership, your commitment to finding the right, the right way to go to market, which I guess, where does that come from? Because I, I think it's going to really come into the technology side of our conversation for today. Deric is, I've gotten a chance over the last, 12, 18 months to get to know who you are. And I can tell, I can tell our listeners that Deric truly believes in deep levels of partnership to understand what is the value that they're going to bring and how are we going to partner together to help each other succeed and win? Where does that come from? Does that come from your upbringing? Is that from the brand? Because it really ultimately is how you guys are able to continue to sustain such high quality and make it at an affordable price that you guys can be on college campuses and still blow the doors off, sales wise with people that Income levels aren't nearly what, what they might be in, suburbia or whatever else.
Deric Rosenbaum:I think it comes from our legacy. ultimately, and I have the privilege of upholding this legacy. I have a commitment to Harold Groucho Miller, his son. My business partner and to the four generations of customers that eat with us. So I sure we could go out and find some rolled turkey product and save 2 a pound and, make a little more money. But what's the longevity in that? I like to sleep at night and, I just, like I said earlier, I just, we don't believe in half measures. take sustainability, for example, sustainability is not an overnight thing. It's a journey. It's an absolute journey and sustainability has many different definitions. It's not just products, it's people, it's culture, it's all these things. And as we've transitioned over the decades and have become like, COVID was the catalyst for us to moving out of most of our, styrofoam product and we still very much a disposable organization, but everything is fully compostable now from our cutlery, which is made out of agave byproduct. Our to go boxes are made out of sugar cane from sugar byproducts out of Florida. so it's a calculated measure and, Is it always the cheapest? Absolutely not. it's what's going to provide the long term sustainability and how are we adapting to both the needs of our guests and our franchisees and our employees. And, we always like to say we adapt, we don't change.
Jeremy Julian:Love that. Love that thought. And again, when you talk to people that grew up with grouchos, it's rabid fan base from that perspective. Again, I told you that story of, I was in, in Greenville and I had two or three people that grew up on grouchos and they're like, Oh, you're going there. Can I come with you? Kind of thing. Cause that was, they just, they love it. I'm going to pivot here for just a second there. Cause I, again, I know you alluded to it. You guys had to change your business quite a bit through COVID. And with that change came the need to, adopt different. Business models or enhanced different business models. You said it adapt to the different business models. Consumers were no longer coming into the stores. They were needing to get up what I guess, talk to me, talk me through where it was at prior to COVID and where you're at now and where do you see the future as far as dining off prem and why that's such a critical component to have it be a good, a guest experience, be a good, staff experience and the like.
Deric Rosenbaum:Yeah, I think prior to COVID these Changes we're seeing were already well underway. They were just, exacerbated by 1020x, whatever you want to call it. prior to, let's see, somewhere around 2010, 2011, 2012, I had this whole concept of a technology, franchise technology. construct in a box. And, we tried to work with a vertical integrated company at that time. And so we would have the but we're still on legacy point of sale, obviously. So we had legacy point of sale. We had loyalty built in. We had gift card built in. And then in 2014, we started working with the third party provider, building out our own online ordering. So the white labeled online ordering an application solution and launched that in 2015. And it was growing incrementally. But It was maybe five or 6 percent of total revenue, which at the time was great. Right? it had curbside functionality built into it. We did not use it. So the days they literally shut our dining rooms down. We toggle the switch. We had curbside functionality. We operationalize that over the next couple of weeks. And, you can't make because you're not just training your team members, but you're also training your customer base. And, everyone's still in the wild west. No one knew what the hell was going on. It was like, Walking dead going down the streets. And, so We've definitely been tech advanced and prior, just before COVID, in December of 19, we went to our first cloud based solution and integrated many of the partners that we were with prior and then brought on some new partners because we had to get out of, we had to break that vertical structure that we were in and go more horizontal, which is how I still lean today and believe and, I'm very much an open and bi directional API kind of guy. And. I believe in best of fit for my brand and my brand's objectives and where we're trying to be today, tomorrow, and in 20 years. I don't, I'm not of the school of thought that a vertical solution can provide you all of that at the brand centric level that you want it to be. It makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. It just doesn't make sense for us. and to your point, I think a lot of operators, myself included, thought that once we got back to normal, third party was going to slow down and, we all scrambled to board as quickly as we could and bring in middleware integrations and operationalize that and remove the friction when and where we could. we still do, right? But, it's, That has not slowed down at all. And the way that consumers are choosing to interact with brands is very different now. And I think the correction that we're seeing in the marketplace is reflective of that. And the stores that have made the investments in the infrastructure, not just in technology, but in systems, and SOPs, and training. All of these things, because labor is just a whole different layer of this. That's a whole different issue that we're dealing with in the industry now. I think they're in a much better position, to optimize the omni channel ordering experience. I'm, and we, in my office, we are definitely of the opinion, we just want to be where our customers are. We are channel agnostic 100%. Whether that's DoorDash, Uber, Native, third party, EasyCater, Carrier, or Pigeon, I, we don't care. just want to put our food in your mouths.
Jeremy Julian:and with that, Deric, I think it's, I think it's a critical, cause philosophically you've talked about doing, best for you guys products. you want to be able to be where the guests are. And I talk about this often is, people will ask, what is the future of restaurants? It's it depends on what your brand wants to be for you guys. You want to be able to serve them in all of those venues. Some people are like, you know what, I don't care. I just want to back in the dining room. And if my sales are less because I just want to back in the dining room. That's fine. But I also would say, and I know you and I've had some offline conversations about this, that the idea of creating the best guest experience, regardless of how they interact with you is very critical. Walk me through why that, why you think that's important. You and I both have teenage kids that. Are going to be the next generation of buying. they interact with the brand very differently than you and I might. And so I think it's, I think it's interesting to get your thought process as to why it's so critical to meet the people where they are and be able to give them that guest experience the way that they need it
Deric Rosenbaum:like you said, my children are 15 and 23. And, one is 100 percent digitally native and one is like a cusp, right on the cusp. But, basically digital native. And, to them and their friends and their peer groups, ordering online is completely second nature. They think nothing of it. They don't associate anything with it. The cost of convenience at all, like at all. It's not a consideration to them. So thinking of third party is, something that you have to do, I think, is the wrong approach, especially early on in covid. A lot of people are like, once it leaves my door, it's not my problem. That's not true. Absolutely is not true. it can be frustrating because you're relying on a third party vendor, basically, at this point, to get your product from A to B on that last mile delivery. And, how is that being executed? But, there are things you can do. there's, services you can use to engage your customers. we text all of our customers 20 minutes after they pick up with just basically five emojis and, asking, how is your experience? and I, we view it as an interventional tool. So if we messed up, it gives us an opportunity to bring that corrective reaction and show our customers that we care. we are very much a customer centric organization and we respond to every piece of feedback, whether it's direct, whether it's on Google, whether it's on Yelp. I'm sorry, 98. 6%. If you bring crazy to the table, we're probably going to step away from the table.
Jeremy Julian:as most should.
Deric Rosenbaum:Yeah. I think what it has definitely proven to me is customers just want to be heard. I read an interesting article the other day. I don't even know where I read it. Probably on LinkedIn. But somebody was like, you can go to McDonald's a thousand times and they can mess up your Big Mac and you won't complain. You just expect it. But you go to your local deli and they leave the deli mustard off your pastrami. It's like the end of the world and they're never coming back and they're going to go 12 times. Help 12 people and blast you on Facebook, right? unfortunately, social media has provided a platform to everyone's voice, good, bad, or indifferent. you have to be there and provide. Not only the service recovery when necessary, but also the reputation management to control the perception, your digital relevance perception. And then also to play into Google's algorithms, right?
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Deric Rosenbaum:first of all, you have to ask yourself, why am I doing this? And then you need to understand the service recovery paradox. that's been here long before any of this technology suite existed. it's been proven time
Jeremy Julian:room, it was a heck of a lot easier because you could walk up, you could see that somebody was disappointed. They only ate, A third of their sandwich. And you can go, hello, Mr. You know, Deric, what helped me understand what was it not made, right? Oh yeah, you screwed it up, but I got to go. Let me give you a comp card to come back or whatever it is that your guest recovery is, sorry, I'll let you finish. But it was so much easier when they were 90%, 95 percent of the guests were coming into the store now that
Deric Rosenbaum:again.
Jeremy Julian:everywhere else, it makes it so much harder.
Deric Rosenbaum:Yeah. it is basically a digital table touch. is what it is. we just happen to be able to do it at scale with technology. it's harder for an independent operator because you're, A, dealing with everything going on in your store, and then you're going to sit down at night and do all this service recovery. And, it's overwhelming, right? I think that's where the advantage of, a franchise or a larger corporate entity is. can aid because we can focus on those components, team members on our team can focus on those components and then operations can address the operational insights or the sentiment analysis that we're getting from these tools. So to, ultimately, so Yes. we use Ovation for direct feedback, or interventional feedback as I like to call it, through our own native solutions, through order online. through in store receipt messaging, QR codes. The vast majority comes, the vast majority of our feedback from Ovation comes from our native digital ordering solution, because it's fully automated. It's a text. It's five emojis. It's quick. And it starts a process and, we can provide that service through that tool via texting and then offers within the tool if we need them. But, by and large, most people just want to be heard. they just want to be acknowledged. And, if we really messed up, we're going to take care of you. We're going to refund your money. If you were missing an incremental sale item, like a brownie wasn't in your order, that's a quick, easy fix. We can refund it right then, right there. Provide some loyalty points to you and engage you back and you can see how the service recovery paradox works. We do the same thing with Marquis on our third party side. Not third party, but online side, so Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google. they have what they call an AIHI review response. it's using artificial intelligence and human intelligence, and I also layer in hospitality intelligence, because You need that to know how to engage customers. we have automated most of those types of reviews. we still see them. For a long time we approved them while we were getting comfortable with the AI HI combination and learning that. And then like still the one star, the one and two star reviews come directly to us. we can intervene more quickly. knock on wood, they're limited. Uh, if you take just those two components together, Ovation is also what I call a five star review generator. So if you leave us the best emoji, we're going to push you to Google or to Yelp or TripAdvisor or wherever it is. it should probably be pushing to Google or Yelp because, Those are the big boys. Google owns 80 percent of the review space. we've bumped our score ratings up within Google, which also increases your relevance within Google. where do you place when you type sandwiches near me? you want to be in that top three, right? Top five for sure. Definitely not on the second page. all of these, there's no one thing. it's, it's recency, it's relevance, and It's velocity of reviews. All of these things contribute to your digital relevance. And then customers, if a new customer is shopping for whatever. I want Jeremy's salad bowl, You need to come up first. And when you do mess up, they want to see that you actually engage with that customer and have addressed that. And there's nothing wrong with that being in a public forum. in and of itself, hospitality is human derived and humans are fallible. Period. End of story. We are not robots. We are not perfect. We make mistakes. People have bad days. Just customers have bad days. We have bad days. I think it's showing ultimately that your care and, we see it time and time again. people will come in real hot on a piece of feedback and we just, you can take it down really quick by just listening. it's the same with a human conversation, right? we use voucher for third party. so Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub, feedback stuff, it's a different customer base for sure. Absolutely it is. I think rightfully Expectations are a little different when you order from a third party provider. when we order at home, my expectations certainly aren't the same as when I go into the restaurant. granted, I'm certainly biased, but, it's, these tools allow us to do this reputation management service recovery at scale. With a limited amount of people,
Jeremy Julian:and
Deric Rosenbaum:if you had a team doing that.
Jeremy Julian:this is back to your point of doing the right thing. I find so few people don't do these things and then they get, they, they turn around six months from now and go, why are my sales down? Because they haven't taken care of the guests. The world has changed and moved on and without implementing some system, and that system could be to your point at scale. You need, you need more than, more than just somebody sitting or looking at the reviews and responding to them, manually, you've gotten to a place where you're automating much of that, but I think all too often people go, Oh, you know what? We're great. We don't need any of this. Let me just keep doing our thing. And at the end of the day. You do have some crazies, but more and more of the digital native consumers continue to come into your brands. And if you're not meeting them where they need to be and hearing their feedback, Rev was on the show recently. It hasn't posted yet, but he had talked about, he had talked about his hamburger chain in New York city and somebody had missed something, back to your humans are fallible. And he told the story of somebody using table salts instead of kosher salt to salt fries. And their reviews showed that there was a problem that they kept getting the salty fly fry review You probably have heard this story But for our listeners, that's a piece of critical feedback that says something's wrong at that store that you've got to fix Not only do you need to recover that gas, but there may be an operational problem. There may be an ingredient problem There may be a some kind of problem internal to the brand and without hearing and seeing that it's almost impossible Especially when you get beyond one or two stores
Deric Rosenbaum:Yeah. it's hard to identify that with like anecdotal knowledge. if you take these tools, and they all have sentiment analysis and measurement capabilities built within them. it's taking, All the direct, Ovation, for example, takes all your direct feedback, all your online feedback, and puts that into one sentiment tool. And then we measure across nine major categories, and each one has I don't know, three or four subcategories. speed, accuracy, service, cleanliness, food, whatever. I don't know all off the top of my head. And then it heat maps the entire chain by store across those things. every Monday morning, my operations team goes straight to that heat map. We look at a word cloud analysis to identify, okay, is there some sort of systemic problem here across the chain, or is this isolated to a certain unit, so then we can benchmark a unit to the chain. And then we can dig in and figure out, okay, Something's wrong with XYZ. is it an employee? Is it a product issue? Is it a storage issue? Is it a rotation issue? Whatever that is. And then we also do the same thing with metrics across, online ordering and downtime and, There's lots of ways to measure all of these things, and so it just makes my operations team so much, their jobs so much easier. And it allows them to identify the real issues where they should be spending their time, instead of just random routine inspections. we still do those, but, it's much easier to make a targeted strike now with this data that is, with the results that are derived From actual data.
Jeremy Julian:the customers. and we've talked about it. I've talked about it on the show quite a bit. It's it's hard enough to get the customer in once you need to get them to become a regular. And if you can't get them to become a regular, it makes it really challenging. And if they are a regular, and then you mess them up and you can't recover it. It's a huge deal. and ultimately I'm sure you guys have some kind of statistics about what lifetime values are for customers, but it's pretty high in a high frequency, high frequency type brand like yourself, where you could have a Groucho's deli sandwich twice a week. If if you were so inclined and losing that customer potentially could be really hard for one of the stores. if you
Deric Rosenbaum:Yeah,
Jeremy Julian:it,
Deric Rosenbaum:for us, we focus. soundly on retention, like we do new guest acquisition, but we focus 10 times the effort into guest retention and the results are proven data driven. we are a partner with Vicki and there are CDP tools that we measure everything six ways from Sunday. you can't prove what you can't measure, right? With BICI, we have, and the cumulative effect, and I'll show you this graph when we're offline, because I have actually measured it, and, with all the incremental things that we've done to improve over the last five years, and again, everything's incremental. You can't do it, at one time. You have to start with the big rocks and work your way down. currently we were rocking like a 46 percent guest habituality rate, which is unheard of. in our industry.
Jeremy Julian:What's your name? Starbucks, maybe or Dunkin Donuts, right? which is a very different experience. It's not food. I'm gonna flip things away from tech here for just a second there because we're getting close to the end. Talk to me about, you, you would share with me. I'd love for you to share with our listeners. what's your favorite three items or, what's your family? to eat when they go into grouchos because, there's some, you guys have some pretty special products and having looked through the menu, had somebody not walked me through it, it was one of those things that I'm like, Oh, I'll take one of each because at the end of the day, they all look so good, give our listeners that, that might be going to a grouchos for the first time in the next six months, what are the one or two items that you say, you know what, If you've never been, these are the two things that you need to have. And maybe you can even tell the story of, the story that you told me when we were at FS tech of that, that guest that, that said, I have not, I can't order anything different.
Deric Rosenbaum:We'll start with that sandwich because it's hands down our most popular. It's 20 plus percent of our revenue comes from this one sandwich. so it's an STP dipper. our dipper sandwiches were invented during the 60s, during the space race. So they represent like a space capsule getting dunked into the 45 sauce. But the STP is roast beef, turkey, bacon bits, Swiss cheese served hot and open faced with a chip pickle and our signature formula for the 45 sauce, which. I can, closest thing I can liken it to is a Russian Thousand Island dressing, but a thousand times better. And of course, Groucho Deli award winning sweet tea, which I mean, we won best sweet tea in the state of South Carolina. That is hard to do, bro.
Jeremy Julian:Yes.
Deric Rosenbaum:so I asked a good friend of mine who I went to school with here at the University of South Carolina, and I see him in Groucho's off and on, and I was down there a couple years ago, and he was down there with his wife and kids, and I walked up to him, and his nickname is Toontz, and I'm like, Toontz. He always eats an STP. Every time he comes in. And I said, if you eat something different today, I will buy your entire family's lunch. He stopped and thought about it like really hard. And after 10 seconds, he looks at me and goes, I can't do it. And I said, why man? He goes, because if I walk out of here and get hit by a city bus, my last meal from Groucho's Deli cannot have not been an STP. And I'm like, can't argue your logic.
Jeremy Julian:I love that story. You told me that story when we were most recently together and it made me, and again, the first thing I had, because I had a couple of rabid fans that, when I was down in green Greenville, they, they were like, dude, You, you try nothing other than the STP with 45 sauce. Get extra 45 sauce if you can, because that's where things are at. You want to go a second time, third time, fourth time, go try something else. But, but the s st p is where it's at. But what's your guys' family's order? what are the girls, what do the girls eat? And what's their, what's their go-to, what's your most popular salad? What's your most popular sandwich beyond the STP? Maybe
Deric Rosenbaum:my go to is our Reuben variation, which we make with pastrami, but we have a second variation of That which is the slaw Reuben. we take our house made mustard based coleslaw and substitute the kraut with mustard cheese and German mustard on pumpernickel. So good. First cut smoked brisket. We use saddle brothers out of Baltimore. It's it's an amazing product. Our go to, our My Wife Salad Bowl is hands down our favorite. there's actually a story I'll, if you do come here, I'll show you on the wall. our second floor is like a museum. Um, I, my, the second generation of Groucho's kind of brought the first, lunch salads to the Columbia area. the My Wife Salad Bowl is just this enormous salad with turkey, ham. Tomatoes, cucumber, cubed cheese, bacon, shredded cheddar. it's just everything's in the salad. So it hands down. And then in, 2018, we revamped our healthy lifestyles menu because it was previously made in the 80s by a different generation when low fat was the craze. But everybody means everyone now knows That low fat means high sugar, right? we revamped that menu and, In 2018 and we brought in this new, fire braised chicken breast and it is magical. And so our Arcadian chicken salad is delicious. So it comes in a bed of organic greens with feta cheese, Greek olives. Fire braised chicken breast, your choice of dressing. It's to die for.
Jeremy Julian:sounds amazing. And you just got to top it off with the best sweet tea in South Carolina. Is that the deal?
Deric Rosenbaum:That's it.
Jeremy Julian:Love it. Love it. Deric, how can people stay in touch with you? Can I get connected? I know you're pretty active on LinkedIn, but how would you say they should connect with the brand, how to, keep up with what you guys are doing and, or quite frankly, if they're, if they're interested in potentially even opening up a store in their neighborhood, is that something that, that you might consider talking to them about?
Deric Rosenbaum:grouchos. com is always probably the best place to go. And if you scroll down to the footer, you can find lots of information about franchising and some of our philosophies and the things we do and our campaigns and programs, you're going to get past, obviously ordering is going to be at the top of the page, right? But, if you're looking for me, Outside of LinkedIn, you're not going to find me. but you can certainly submit an inquiry on our website and it will get to where it needs to go. email logic is pretty simple.
Jeremy Julian:Love that. Deric, thank you for coming on. I know, Like I said to you before we hit the record button, I, respect all that you do and genuinely, I think you're an amazing operator, amazing technologist, you get it. And it's a privilege to hear what you get to do. you know what you get to do for a living and how you think about the brand. And, again, selfishly, they need to put some Grouchos out by me cause, it was so damn good. to our listeners, guys, thank you guys for hanging out. Like we said at the beginning, make it a great day.
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