QSR Interview | By Sherri Daye Scott
Have you found value in Ted’s membership in groups such as Green Foodservice Alliance?
Bazor: I go to these meetings and there are ideas being thrown around all the time. Sometimes they don’t stick, but the things that do, that make sense, we’re jumping on those.
We can make some positive impact without any additional cost.
You mentioned fielding phone calls. How did you get the message out to the supplier community that Ted’s is interested in eco-friendly products?
Bazor: George and Ted have done a wonderful job of going around the country and encouraging awareness.
McKerrow: Here is the CNN version: Ted has an audience; when he speaks, people listen. He’s been an environmentalist forever. We did the restaurant, and, for the first four or five years, nobody gave a hoot about the fact that we were doing a lot of things. We opened with wooden stir sticks, paper straws, recycled materials, to-go containers that were aluminum. No Styrofoam, no plastic. We bought energy-efficient equipment.
Then also what happened is I sit on the NRA board. I sat down with one of the directors, and I said, “There needs to be a green movement in the restaurant industry. If you started some green initiatives, you could go to environmental foundations and get some funding which could then create a support system, a knowledge-based system, sort of like ServSafe.”
I hooked them together with the Turner Foundation. They made the case that if the restaurant industry was to become sustainable and conscience and use better environmental practices it fell within the Turner Foundation’s mission. So Turner funded it.
That first year they did research. The second year they launched the Web site. And this year they are giving a third grant, which will undertake getting the word out to entrepreneurs and independents.
We need to know how to educate people. That’s the biggest problem. It takes a lot of time, energy, and money. But we’re fortunate. Ed’s into it. He likes it. He’s good at it.
Does every idea work? No. The guy who brought the thing that was going to take our waste and turn it into synthetic dirt was pretty impractical. So, Ed kicks a lot of tires before he finds a great idea. He found the light bulbs. And it took a long time.
What about sourcing from an ingredient perspective? How much attention is paid to that?
McKerrow: It’s impossible right now to buy locally.
In Georgia, if you’re a fine-dining, white tablecloth restaurant, and you say, “Well it’s winter vegetable time so we have acorn squash, rutabaga, and kale.” That's OK because that’s a chef-driven restaurant.
But if you come to Ted’s and we go, “We don’t have any tomato to give you on your hamburger because it’s not in season in Georgia,” that’s not going to work.
But could we cause produce companies to start thinking about localizing the growing through old-fashioned greenhouses like there used to be when Georgia had year-round supplies? I know a guy who is putting 40 acres worth of greenhouses up to do just that.
Then, all of a sudden, you start to change the supply chain to where the stuff you need is closer to you. So we’re not bringing tomatoes from Mexico or Florida or California in the winter. We’re actually growing them in Ohio still, but in a greenhouse.
Lots of things we’re going to do are about going back.
Bazor: We’re not reinventing things.
McKerrow: The average foodstuff travels 1,500 miles to get to the retail shelf. Ted and I had a meeting with the governor of New York. He was talking about how they’re really starting to think about ways to incentivize people to buy products only from New York. They want to cut transportation from 1,500 miles to 500 miles. That’s less trucks that tear up our roads. Less pollution. More local jobs.
We have to start thinking more locally in everything we do. There’s a practicality behind that, too. If you don’t think about, talk about, start a broader conversation about it, nothing changes.
And what is Ted’s Montana Grill doing to encourage that conversation?
McKerrow: We took Ted around the country, at his expense, just to start the conversation. And we’ve started a big conversation. Atlanta, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, Boston. That started a national conversation about this subject.
All great ideas start with conversations and forward thinking. There is lots of trial and error and costs associated with it. But eventually the laws of economics, supply and demand, take over. The more we demand, the more we are going to see things change.
Bazor: I share information all the time with local restaurants. We’re willing to pay the dollars to invest in researching products and finding better ways to do things. I am willing to share that with the guy who doesn’t have the money to do that, who doesn’t have an Ed Bazor who can spend a third of his time searching for products and testing things.
I sit on these committees, and that’s what I do. We’re helping the local guys, the guy who owns three delis downtown. We’re helping him figure out how he can better manage his business.
It’s real easy when you don’t have a lot of resources to say, “I can’t really do anything.” But I’m finding more and more that there are a lot of resources out there. People who have already done the work, who already have products in place.
You don’t have to trash everything you’ve been doing and start over. Nobody can really do that. We can’t do that. We decided not to go and replace all our equipment because a new piece comes out that has a better ENERGY STAR rating. But when we need to replace equipment, we consider the new piece. Those are little things people can do that over the long haul will mean real savings.