Shake Shack's Danny Meyer & Randy Garutti: Burgers & Business

Boss Files with Poppy Harlow

CNN

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.6 • 538 Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2020

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

**A live CNN podcast recording with Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer and CEO Randy Garutti** Danny Meyer, founder and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, is known for New York City institutions like Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern. In 2001, he founded Shake Shack in a park by accident and CEO Randy Garutti helped bring the company public in 2014. They are focused on creating an inclusive culture with wages, equality, four-day work weeks and a supportive community as a way to both attract and retain talent. The two discuss leadership lessons they've learned from each other over the years, the plant-based diet trend, how their upbringings shaped them in the hospitality industry and some of their most memorable guests. Produced by Haley Draznin, CNN.To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Boss Fowles, listeners, Poppy Harlow here. Ever head of ShakeShack? Are you hungry? I'm hungry. Well, you are about to meet the people behind it. Danny Meyer, of course, he built Union Square Hospitality Group. They're behind restaurants like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern here in New York. But he also founded Shake Shack by accident.
0:24.5	Fast forward to the summer of 2001, we had opened two restaurants on Madison Square Park.
0:31.7	And we really, really wanted to rebuild a park that had gone into great disrepair. we raised a bunch of money to do that and one of the
0:38.9	things that crossed our mind was if you're going to have a great looking park you better give people
0:43.5	a reason to use it and art was was our answer so we got this artist from thailand he came up with
0:50.5	the idea of having taxi cabs on stilts with a working hot dog cart asked us to do it,
0:55.6	and we said, we'll do it and we'll contribute the money to the park. And after three years of doing
1:00.4	that successfully, where we'd had lines of 100 people waiting for a hot dog, we said, let's turn
1:06.3	this into a full-time kiosk. And we named it Shake Shack. Well, today, ShakeChack is run by CEO Randy Garudy.
1:14.3	Danny and Randy go way, way back.
1:16.9	Like Danny met Randy when Randy was 19 years old, but he saw a passion in him.
1:22.5	And they've had this sort of mentor-mente relationship for years now, learning from one another.
1:29.6	Well, Randy took ShakeShack public, and you know how it has expanded.
1:33.8	The growth has just been incredible to watch all over the world.
1:39.7	Before we even had 10 Shake Shacks, we opened in Dubai.
1:43.1	Now, 40% of our company is overseas.
1:46.0	So we dive deep on Shake Shack, the business, what they're trying to do ahead, and all sorts of things, like wages and equality.
1:54.8	Nothing pisses me off more, Poppy, than when people use the term flipping burgers as the lowest form of work. And also, what about
2:03.5	plant-based items on the menu? And of course, some of their best memories. There was been an
2:10.0	email from Sam Cass, who had been the chef in the White House. The subject line says,
2:14.8	good news and bad news. And it says, the good news is, I'm off tonight.
2:19.6	The bad news is you're working.
	...

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