Why Other Vegan Places and Juice Bars Mostly Suck

It might not be the most compassionate way to market a business, talking negatively about the competition. And when you badmouth people, you set yourself up for retaliation. I don't care much about either of those points. Running a healthy restaurant, especially in a city like New York, is as real as the food business gets. I'm writing this for restaurant owners in this specific category, so they think about it long and hard. I have 18 years of experience in this business, and I've built a lot of stores, so I'm going to lay it out as precisely as I can.

First of all, it doesn't matter what restaurant category you go into, the business is always very hard. Every single day there are an unbelievable number of moving parts, and humans on both sides of the counter.

There are landlords, the health department, the Department of Consumer Affairs, the Department of Sanitation, the Department of Transportation, and lots of hidden costs, both in startup and in operation. New restaurateurs get eaten alive, especially when they open in New York. Having lots of money to throw at your problems is often not a blessing, because we spend it incorrectly, we solve nothing, and we haven't even opened the doors yet.

Most operators do not really understand marketing, sales, merchandising, public relations, advertising, and social media, all the things the modern business owner must command, especially in a city like New York where the rent runs upward of $25,000 a month.

Most retailers also don't fully embrace the golden rule of retail, which is that location is everything. We often sacrifice a good location for a cheaper rent, and we pay dearly for it. Sometimes the cheaper rent is the only option, but that is the choice of the amateur operator. Location, location, location is still the golden rule. A location can make or break you.

Let's get past the technical details of running a business and just say it's extremely difficult. That difficulty is usually what causes a restaurant to implode, and it's why so many vegan restaurants fail. The operation itself is the cause.

Beyond the operation, let's talk about the product. Health food, and especially the vegan category, is in low demand. The consumer has spoken. They want more Starbucks, more Dunkin' Donuts, more yogurt shops, more coffee shops, more chicken. That's a fact, and you can see it everywhere. Chipotle is more desired by the consumer than a green juice, so let's accept that as fact.

Many juice and health food restaurants fail because they serve the wrong categories. I'm not going to spell out the right categories here, but look at my menu. I think it speaks for itself. It represents years of refinement, beginning with a company like Liquiteria back in 2005. Doug Green had all the categories right, and at goodsugar we expanded on those categories from our experience at Juice Press.

The next reason most juice bars implode is that the price points are wrong, the store design doesn't flow, the packaging doesn't connect with the customer, and the visuals and messaging strike out. So beware, my friends. If you're going into this business, you'd better have something good to copy. My first Juice Press, on East 1st Street in New York City in 2010, was as close to a carbon copy of Liquiteria as I could get in a store one fifth the size of his. I studied his business for years. I studied the details. I had also been in retail for a number of years before that.

At goodsugar, I had a series of incredibly creative ideas that were born from the torture I endured with my former business partner, who did me more good than harm by pounding on my head with his analytics. At the time it was insufferable, partly because so much of his analysis was flat out wrong. But what he taught me was to be far more analytical about my choices as an operator, as a branding person, and as someone responsible for product innovation.

What I learned is that the brand is easier for me to create if I keep it as close as possible to who I am as a person. I don't have to stretch anymore to create new things, because they come from me and not from an outside source. Of course I get inspired by products I see on Instagram or in other stores, but most of the products on Instagram come out horrible when you try to make them. The recipes are incomplete and need a lot of tweaking.

There aren't many great brands in New York. I see brands come into New York with money to build stores. That doesn't mean anything to me. I had money to build stores with my other brand, and we were never able to outrun the fundamental problems: increasing sales, growing same store sales, and operating at a profit instead of a loss. Duh.

So how do you do this business right in a city like New York? You go all in. You take the best store in a great location, and you work your ass off.

More than ever, I've come to see that the kind of leadership we had at my old juice company was obnoxious. I was too pushy. I was a bully. I was demanding and impulsive. My partner was exactly the same. So was the COO. It was a pack of men leading from a place of anxiety, and that cannot sustain itself.

The approach at goodsugar is entirely different for me. First, I let my team do their jobs. I hire people I trust and respect. Naomi and Peter are extraordinarily talented at what they do, and I want to give them a sense of ownership and the feeling that they are creative too. Building the right team was always a challenge at scale in my former company. We overpaid, we underpaid, we hired the wrong people, we got rid of the right people. We made every classic mistake.

If you're thinking about going into the juice business, don't. I suggest you go back to college and get a degree in something far easier, like brain surgery.
Anyway, what do I know?

Let's get down to the product. Once you get past the location, the operation, the branding, and everything else that goes into opening a business, the product has to be great. Now, the product can be as great as you want, but if you're in a bad location and no one can find you, you're going to fail anyway. Still, the product has to be unbelievable. We're competing against grilled chicken, Caesar salads, hamburgers, eggs, and butter. It's not an easy fight. The product has to be tasty and it has to be filling, and most businesses don't pass that test.

In a health and wellness restaurant, this matters even more, especially if you're serving juice that is supposed to be pristine, or at least trying to give the impression that it is. High pressure pasteurization and traditional pasteurization make juice products taste terrible. You've lost the fight the minute the product hits the customer's tongue. If the juice doesn't taste great, people are simply not going to waste their money on it.

Another thing I discovered is that it's better for people to leave full from an oversized portion than to spend good money and walk out still hungry. If someone doesn't want to finish an entire salad, they can take it home, give it away, or throw it out. It's the tiny, expensive portions that scare people away.

You also have to understand that in the health business, ingredients are popularized and demonized by influencers of every kind. What's celebrated today can be condemned tomorrow, and your menu lives inside that conversation whether you like it or not.

The last key point is that health food, especially raw plants, has to be unbelievably fresh. Most food businesses can disguise a lack of freshness by cooking the ingredients and adding more sauce. In the salad business and the juice business, it doesn't work like that. Freshness and purity are the enemy of profit until you get your business model wired down tight. And you should expect to work extremely hard.