RLC Talks - California Fish Grill: High-Quality Seafood at an Affordable Price

In this episode, Paul Potvin, Chief Financial Officer of California Fish Grill, introduces himself and discusses the seafood chain’s mission, expansion plans, and innovative strategies. He elaborates on the company's focus on providing high-quality, sustainable seafood at affordable prices in a fast casual setting. Paul highlights how technology, such as digital menu boards and self-service kiosks, has transformed operations and enhanced customer experience, especially during the pandemic. He also shares insights on managing supply chain challenges and maintaining value for customers. The discussion ends with Paul's personal menu recommendations for new guests.

00:00 Introduction to Paul Potvin and California Fish Grill

00:20 Expansion Plans and Market Strategy

00:47 Brand Mission and Vision

01:19 Value and Innovation in Seafood

03:09 Digital Transformation and Kiosk Implementation

07:38 Impact of Digital Menu Boards

11:30 Paul's Recommendations and Conclusion

Transcript

Jeremy Julian: 0:00

so for those that don't know who Paul is, can you introduce Paul to the listeners and we can talk a little bit about the concept and. Kind of the state of the industry.

Paul Potvin: 0:07

Sure. Yeah. My name's Paul Potvin. I'm the Chief Financial Officer for California Fish Grill. We're a, 58 unit seafood chain out of, Southern California. And we're in, three markets, both in the Phoenix and the Nevada market. And we're gonna be heading to the East coast this year to, Virginia and to Maryland.

Jeremy Julian: 0:24

And I'm still bummed that you guys are skipping over Texas. I'm still missing my California fish grill every time I'm back home. It's, it's definitely on my list. So

Paul Potvin: 0:31

Texas is one of the markets that's on our radar screen. We've actually looked at it and we just haven't found the right location. So we had to pick a market where we figure we can cluster as much as we can. And the Mid-Atlantic is the one that opened first. and so that's where we're heading in and we're gonna go ahead and make, that our home base.

Jeremy Julian: 0:47

Love it. So for those that are not familiar with the brand, I clearly am, but for those that are not familiar with it, talk us through what the brand is.'cause I think it's really unique in my opinion. It's a really high quality product at an affordable price, which I think is part of what I want our listeners to hear is just how amazing you can get such high quality food for a reasonable price. And a lot of it has to do with the innovation that you guys have done and kept supply chain in check, which I know is part of your role and part of the hard part that you get to deal with. So for those that aren't familiar with it. Yep. Explain.

Paul Potvin: 1:14

the mission or the vision of the company is to liberate the love of seafood. We want it to be accessible to anybody. And typically when you go to a seafood restaurant, it's super expensive. You're in the 25 to 35 to$45 range. just to get a, a piece of fish with maybe if you're lucky, a couple sides. we came out and said, okay, we want some high quality. Sustainable. And that is a very important pillar in our, in our company's, vision. And we want it to be high quality and affordable. And those were the missions. And so in order to do that, we did that in a fast casual setting, And the fast casual setting allows us to take that labor cost out of the. Outta that server base and give it back to the customer in the form of a great, healthy meal at an affordable price.

Jeremy Julian: 1:55

Yeah, no, and it's amazing. And even the portion sizes, it's amazing to me, you guys have give an eight ounce piece of fish with two sides for 12, 13,$14 at times. I know it's, prices have crept up, but even less than$20. It's unheard of.

Paul Potvin: 2:07

you're absolutely right. and every day that we wake up and we work on. New LTOs, we're always considering the value equation that the customer's gonna get out of it. And it's harder and harder in this time, right? As prices keep going up, whether it's input costs, now it's tariffs potentially for us, which is a substantial impact to our business'cause there's not a lot of seafood being farmed or caught around the US that will supply the needs of our chain. And so therefore we gotta go internationally and anything that comes in internationally is gonna be a significant tariff potentially. So we'll see how it all plays out here shortly. but so value is a constant equation. And so we've been talking about how are we gonna do this if our input costs go up so much. and the ways we do it is obviously you can offer the still the same great quality product. And for example, we introduced a salmon power bowl, which say four ounce. Piece of salmon, that instead of the eight ounce portion, and that way we can keep the price down, they're still getting a great value, great taste, great menu, meal at an affordable price. They can still come in and do that. So we're giving the, the key is to give the options to the consumer.

Jeremy Julian: 3:09

and one of the other things I. I love about your brand is the fact that you guys have innovated not just on the menu side, which chef is amazing from that perspective, but you guys have also put tech at the forefront of, and it's not necessarily cutting labor out, but it's, I've gotta be able to meet your guys' vision, you've gotta create digital channels. I was talking to your IT guy just this weekend. He was telling me something, what are your numbers as far as digital orders coming in, whether that be at the kiosk or online or third party. it's. North of 50% I think at this point, right?

Paul Potvin: 3:37

Oh, absolutely. So when you break down our sales, it's funny if you think pre pandemic, which we all do, and then we all look at post pandemic. So pre pandemic, we were dine in, 65% of our sales were dine in and the rest was leaving the building. So we had a fair amount of business that was already leaving the building. And the digital makeup of that was very low. It was primarily online ordering of maybe seven or 8% who maybe had five or 6% of third party delivery. And then all of the rest of that was in store transactions and it was done with cashiers and we had lions go out the door. Initially we had paper menus. Eventually we actually switched to a digital menu board, so that we can get out of that paper menu. Gave some more opportunity to offer pictures and, some visuals that the guests can really get a feel for what they're gonna be ordering that now pandemic hits and all of a sudden we are faced with. It's quite frankly some labor shortages.

Jeremy Julian: 4:27

Yeah. It wasn't because you wanted to get labor outta storage'cause you couldn't hire people.

Paul Potvin: 4:30

So initially it was, we couldn't hire the back of house. During, in the middle of the heat of Covid, we couldn't hire the back of the house. But now, as our frontline employees, were having to deal with some customers and the difficulties of masks, no masks and all that stuff. We started seeing the front of house employees not wanting to, wanting to work in the industry. It was just too stressful. You were worried about getting covid from potentially the guests walking in and whatnot. so we found ourselves in predicament. We were, we opened a restaurant and we can only hire, I think it was four cashiers in one of our new openings. And we're like, okay, we gotta solve this problem. And so Kiosk became one of those solutions, right? And you'll go into some restaurants that are existing, you'll have people walk right by that. and I literally had a customer, I was in our, one of our locations and she's I hate those things. They are killing jobs. And I'm like sitting here, ma'am, first of all, we can take you over here with this cashier, but understand sometimes. we, we actually are short employees and it's a way to make sure that guests can get through and get their, their, their fish, their healthy fish quick and get out of the building and be able to enjoy lunch or be able to enjoy dinner. So it, it's a, meets the needs for everybody, but we'll still take care of you at the cashier. so we did add the kiosk and the placement of the kiosk was a big challenge for us. Initially, we were leading in, in. Initially we put it off to the side. So you walk in the door, maybe it was right by the door, and people would just walk right by it and go to the cashier. So we weren't, we actually didn't get a lot of traction. I think we were maybe 10% of our in-store transactions were being done at the cash register or at the kiosk. So eventually we the light bell went on and we said, okay, let's put two of them. In place of two cashier slots, we'll leave one cashier over to the left and see if we can get that improved and overnight. we saw where now on average, we're about 60 to 70% of in-store transactions are actually done at our two kiosks, and typically it's. Either the cash payer, that wants to go ahead and get themselves to the cashier.'cause they, we don't accept cash at the kiosk. or it's people maybe where they have a discount offer. and at a period of time we couldn't accept discounts, at the kiosk. or something

Jeremy Julian: 6:27

super customizable where it's really hard to do on the kiosk. I know for me that when I do that, it's like I'm calling or I'm walking up to somewhere because I want something special. That's hard off menu type of thing.

6:36

And typically it's also, older guests, right? That, that aren't comfortable with technology. They'd rather just have somebody interact with them, help'em through it, and make their decision to move on. so I see that, anytime I'm in our restaurants, you can see that. But it's interesting. So we took one of our. one of our cashiers, which would've been in the back, and sure we eliminated one, but we took the other one and we brought'em out in front and the goal was, Hey listen, we can create a hospitality opportunity here. Yep. Let's interact with our guests, help'em with the kiosk if they need help. And, make it so that we have a hospitality'cause. Up until then, we were order takers. Man, you had lines, you just tried to get the order in, you tried to get out. And so the cashier had an opportunity to now to interact the guests on a personal level. and we found that to be, as long as we're executing that, on a consistent basis, right? It's typical restaurant operations. Sometimes someone calls out you, you can't execute that. but as long as we're executing that, I think sos the difference. Now, with that said, we've been on kiosk for a year. And we found that, people now walk up and they pretty much know what they're doing. Yeah. So the asking for help is really dialed down quite a bit. And so now it becomes that inter interactive opportunity.

Jeremy Julian: 7:38

Love that. prior to you guys putting in digital menu boards for those operators who are out there, to spell the myth about digital menu boards, because I, to me, while it was a strange thing when I first walked into the first store that changed the digital menu boards, it has changed my ordering habits because I'm, I've been made aware of things that I might not have seen or didn't understand what it was gonna look like. So for those that haven't gone digital menu boards and even your guys' digital menu boards that used to be in front of the cashiers, they get me with a damn shrimp skewer every single time I was in the property. So for those that aren't, I guess at that space Yep. help them understand, help our listeners understand why that was such an effective thing and how it even changed some of the ordering patterns and things like that.

Paul Potvin: 8:15

So if you think about it, up until then we had just words, right? We had words on our menu and that was the extent of it. So we took blocks of, some of the screens and if we had an LTO, we made sure there was a nice, beautiful picture price point on there and something about the item. And so they had an opportunity to go, Hey. That's something new. I haven't tried that. I'm gonna go ahead and order that. so that, that's on the main menu board up at the top. We also have another section where it has a rotating screen of kind of our top selling items so that they can visibly see what, what it is and it might spark, you know what I'm interested in, something spicy. It just saw the dynamite shrimp bowl go by on the screen. I'm gonna try that today and see what it's like. Or maybe I wanna try a taco today.'cause I saw the taco combos, flow by on there. And then. In addition to that, so we had the main menu of above, but in front of the old cashier stands, we had what we call the shroud. It's a little, just call it, think of a computer screen. And on that, that featured upsell opportunities. So as you got suckered into the, every single time, the shrimp skewer, for 3 99, that's one of the things we have on there. It'll rotate through maybe with the asparagus, which is a, which is an upgrade to the side, where you pay a little extra for that. And so it gave an opportunity, again, to visually see, Hey, that looks really good. I wanna give that a try. And so it, it does change customer behavior and that's what was important. The second major benefit, all of us had paper menus, or menu boards. Every time you wanted to change a price, even if it was like, one or two items, you had to go through the cost. The reprinting, you had to get it all shipped out to the store. Did the store get the menu, the new menu up, and did they, did it time with the time that your POS changed over the price points? So this gave us an opportunity that was basically controlled all by the IT department, and they were able to change menu prices when it needed to be done. All the menu boards had it. And because we integrated with our POS, if something was 86 during the day, the store can go ahead and 86 it. And it would reflect up on the menu board, so the guests knew before having to walk up and go, Hey, I'll have the ma mine. You're like, oh, I'm sorry. We're outta that right now. They already knew that. And so they can make their decisions and it made everything speed up a little faster. Yeah.

Jeremy Julian: 10:18

Huge. huge. Sorry, I'll let you finish. But that's, to me, especially in the volatility of where supply chain is at today, without it, it makes operating a business incredibly difficult.

Paul Potvin: 10:27

yes it does. And so having flexibility is what it's all about. Obviously, it's gonna cost you a little extra. We don't have a lot of scenarios where the screens break down'cause we all worry about that. All of one screen's out. we, it just doesn't happen very often. So that's, that is not a big risk that you really need to worry about. but it is certainly a concern and, you wanna have backup maybe in the region so that someone can come out and, replace that screen or do whatever you need to do. but one other thing on the kiosk that I wanted to talk about. So we found, kiosk have an opportunity at pictures of every item. And that digital, that's your next digital billboard. And they gives an opportunity for the guest to really look at it. Now with that said, it does slow down the queue line a little bit. We found that. An average order through a cashier is about two and a half minutes. You actually put it over to the to the kiosk. It's about three and a half minutes. So the guest is using that time to scroll through, figure out, look at different things, maybe choose one now I want that instead. So there is a little bit of that, but it gives them a better experience'cause they know exactly what they're getting. Now you gotta make sure your food that comes outta the kitchen looks just like that.'cause they'll hear about it otherwise.

Jeremy Julian: 11:29

Absolutely. So for those that are going to experience California Fish Grill, whether it's in their local market or they're in California. What is your go-to, suggestion for a new guest, and then what's your favorite item?

Paul Potvin: 11:40

So it all depends on what you're in the mood for. So I bounce around quite a bit. some, salmon is typically the go-to. That's what everybody wants. I would suggest step away from that. Bronzino is an amazing Mediterranean sea bass. It comes outta Turkey. We imported in here. Skin on, you get the whole filet. So you get in two pieces of the bronzino and it's just delectable. And so it's a really good item. it's one, now it's moved up into one of our top sellers. and it's at a great price point, that you really, if you're gonna go there, you're gonna see that usually in an Italian restaurant for 35 bucks, and you're gonna be able to get it for us, for a lot less that's what I would recommend if I'm in a low carb mood, which a lot of times I am, I worry about my health and my fitness. I will pair that with, our zucchini or our, Roma tomatoes with the seasoned olive oil on it. And I'll also throw on an upgrade of the cauliflower rice, so I keep that low carb, so I'm out of there for less than 500 calories. And I had a complete meal.

Jeremy Julian: 12:32

Yeah. I replicated the zucchini the other day at the house for dinner and the kids loved it. So that's one of my go-tos is the zucchini as the side. Those things are amazing, Awesome. thanks for taking time, Paul. I'm excited, quite frankly, for our listeners to hear about the concept. I, I love it. It's one of my favorite places to go, so congratulations on the continued success.

Paul Potvin: 12:49

Thank you very much. Awesome. Perfect.