A restaurateur's advice to three food founders beats any fundraising class
Danny Meyer's test for a brand isn't whether the product is good, but whether customers still feel cared for when you're not in the room — and that shapes the advice he gives three consumer brands.
The video won't play here. Listen to the audio instead:
The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
Culture isn't values, it's an executable list of behaviors
Danny Meyer says he used ‘family values’ for 15 years before realizing the phrase itself was the problem: a company isn't a family, so every time you let someone go, the team falls into deep grief, because ‘you don't fire family.’ He switched to expected behaviors, so everyone knows exactly what they're expected to do. His formula: culture = the wanted behaviors we actively celebrate, minus the unwanted behaviors we tolerate. The subtraction is the key — what you tolerate defines culture more than what you celebrate.
— Danny MeyerTo judge whether a place has hospitality, watch the staff
Danny Meyer offers a minimal test: walk in and look at the employees. If they're focused on doing the work well and are also having fun with each other, and both conditions hold, that joie de vivre becomes an ingredient in your meal. He says he's been to technically perfect restaurants with ‘no love’ and won't go back. The standard transfers to airplanes — watch two flight attendants pushing a cart and you can tell whether this is your favorite airline. Management's contribution to this, he says, is ‘probably 120%,’ and 150% when things go wrong.
— Danny MeyerWhen the customer can't see you, the can is your bartender
Pony Boy Slings co-founder Janelle Bass asks: when you're not in the store doing tastings, how do you put hospitality into the brand? Danny Meyer flips the question — ‘When someone encounters this product and neither you nor your partner is there, what do you want that person to feel? The answer to that question is your brand strategy.’ His concrete move is to treat the can as the bartender: put a line like ‘come on, join the party’ under the pull tab or on the can. Guy Raz adds: the can is pretty now but too conventional, just a name and ingredients — it could be more playful.
— Danny MeyerDTC lives or dies on repeat purchase, not the first order
Angel Oak Smokehouse's Jade Taylor worries DTC shipping will leave fish spoiling on doorsteps. Danny Meyer recommends Goldbelly — a company he invested in — which ships ice cream and Joe's Stone Crab, handles logistics and lets clients ride extremely low shipping rates. Guy Raz gives the opposite advice: with only 42 Whole Foods and a dozen-plus Harris Teeter stores, and just over a year old, she should solidify retail first and wait on DTC. He gives a hard standard: if customers don't reorder, you don't have a DTC business, you just have an expensive way to mail people salmon they can buy at Whole Foods. Danny adds: first ask yourself why you're doing it, how much growth you want, and whether supply and capacity can hold up.
— Guy RazGoldbelly's real value is a demand map
Danny Meyer tells the case of his daughter's ice cream shop, Cafe Pana, in St. Louis: she had no interest in and no capacity for selling more than a day or two a week, but through Goldbelly she got a national audience and could know precisely which cities had the most demand. She has no plans to open a physical store, but if she ever does, she already has demand data she couldn't have learned any other way. This is Danny's core argument for ‘stick one foot in first’ — not for the sales, but for the demand distribution.
— Danny MeyerUse scarcity for B2B, don't go national on day one
Jade raises another direction: many boutiques and supermarkets email asking for product, but with no national distribution she can only ship. Danny Meyer says this is smarter than DTC — find one or two stores you'd be proud to be in, create scarcity so everyone else wants it but only those one or two can get it, and the brand's luster only grows. Guy Raz adds the execution detail: have a minimum order quantity, don't sell $40 worth of salmon, sell $250, $300 worth.
— Danny MeyerTo get into food service, start with shops already selling couscous
Boost Couscous's Barb Rujas wants to get into fast-casual chains like Cava and Sweetgreen. Danny Meyer advises against going to the big players first: their procurement departments have a stack of forms for you to check off, and they need volume and quality control. Start with one or two small shops that already have couscous on the menu, because then you don't carry the extra burden of ‘convincing.’ Win a few first, then they'll take you to three, four. His judgment: if the product works where couscous already exists, that's the moment to go educate the people who don't yet get it. Guy Raz backs this with Impossible Meat's path: send it first to high-end chefs like David Chang to experiment, get attention and buzz, rather than going straight to Safeway.
— Danny MeyerScaling isn't automatic — you have to figure out how you run first
In his advice to Boost Couscous, Danny Meyer adds a line that's easy to miss: beyond figuring out whether the product suits Cava or Sweetgreen, you also have to figure out whether it suits you. As a very young company, scaling isn't automatic — it needs more people, and with them comes cultural responsibility; it needs more equipment, more purchasing. He also notes Barb is hitting two trends: the protein and fiber moment, and the Mediterranean diet moment — America has never been as interested in Mediterranean cooking as it is now. He estimates six to twelve well-known chefs nationwide already have couscous on their menus, and these people can become proof points and advocates.
— Danny MeyerIn their own words · checked verbatim
I think culture at its most basic is a word to describe how we do things around here.
Danny Meyer3:01
our culture is ultimately all of the wanted behaviors that we celebrate actively minus all of the unwanted behaviors that we tolerate.
Danny Meyer4:08
When somebody encounters the product and neither you or your partner are there, what do you want that person to feel? And the answer to that question is what, what your brand strategy is.
Danny Meyer13:35
if a customer isn't repeating the order, then you don't have a direct-to-consumer business. You're just sending – you have an expensive way of sending people salmon that they could go buy at Whole Foods.
Guy Raz23:11
Find one or two places that you would be proud to own yourself and create a scarcity where everybody else wants it.
Danny Meyer26:15
I think I would tell the young Danny Meyer not to get too upset when the graph goes down because it's always going to come back up again.
Danny Meyer38:52
the root of the word hospitality is hope, and I think we're actually in a business that can actually take pessimism and fear, and we can be the antidote to that.
Danny Meyer39:53
Figures
| Pony Boy Slings tasting conversion rate | 16%–70% | 9:26 |
| Pony Boy Slings ABV | 7% | 8:26 |
| Angel Oak Smokehouse Whole Foods stores entered | 42 | 18:50 |
| Angel Oak Smokehouse Harris Teeter stores entered | 20 | 18:50 |
| Angel Oak Smokehouse Fresh Market stores about to enter | 170 | 18:50 |
| Boost Couscous annualized revenue | $2 million | 30:26 |
| Boost Couscous protein per serving | 18 grams | 28:23 |
| Boost Couscous fiber per serving | 11 grams | 28:23 |
| Union Square Cafe years open | 41 years | 6:21 |
Glossary
- expected behaviors
- Danny Meyer's replacement for family values: specific behaviors the whole company knows and everyone is responsible for embodying.
- day one mentality
- Having the team imagine every day is opening day, using the pride of a new store to sustain an old store's quality and freshness.
- RTD
- Short for ready-to-drink: pre-mixed alcoholic or other drinks you open and drink, the shelf category Pony Boy Slings sits in.
- Goldbelly
- A US food e-commerce platform that ships perishable products for restaurants and food brands; Danny Meyer invested in the company.
- GLP-1
- Weight-loss and diabetes drugs such as semaglutide; users tend toward high-protein, high-fiber diets, and Boost Couscous sees them as a customer base.
How to listen
Founders and early investors building consumer brands, especially teams in food and beverage, DTC and retail channels currently agonizing over whether to expand.
Skip the 0:00–1:01 intro and ad read; go straight to the culture section starting at 3:01.