How Jagger Transformed From a Chef's Vision To a Thriving Fast-casual Burger Chain

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About The Episode

Welcome to another captivating episode of the Food Service Growth Show, where we’re joined by Christian Brandt, Founder of Jagger and Otto Pizza. In this episode, we unravel the fascinating story of how Jagger transformed from a chef’s vision into a thriving fast-casual burger chain.

Jagger is a burger brand that has taken Copenhagen (and Oslo) by storm, boasting an impressive 16 outlets. Otto Pizza, with 7 outlets, was also started by Christian Brandt and the Jagger team. And we’re going to hear all about how Jagger transformed from just a chef’s vision into this super successful burger chain. Imagine the journey from a single idea to a whopping 16 Jagger outlets in Copenhagen and 7 Otto Pizza locations, for sure this is the episode you don’t want to miss!

Read the interview

Carl: Hello, I’m Carl Jacobs and I’m co-founder and CEO of Apicbase. At Apicbase, we are building the world’s best food and beverage management platform. But in this podcast series, it’s all about finding answers on how to grow and scale your food service business.

I’m talking to numerous experts and industry professionals who are passionate about building a healthy food service industry. Join me on this fascinating journey of entrepreneurship in food.

So welcome to this podcast with Christian Brandt. He’s the owner and CEO of Jagger from Denmark. And welcome, Christian.

Christian: Thank you. And thank you for having me, I’m excited.

I’m very excited as well. So my first question to all my guests is always the same. Who is Christian and where does he come from?

Christian: Christian is me. I come from countryside in Denmark and have an untraditional way into the restaurant scene. I’m a trained chef, but during my training days, I worked as a waiter and kind of fell in love with the service of running restaurants and the love of great food and so on. I’m a family man with two kids and a wife, and I run Jagger as my daily dose yeah.

Carl: All right. So, family man, I hear you say. So are you succeeding in balancing work and life, or is it too much work or too much life?

Christian: I think we have a good balance now. It was harder having one or two restaurants like the early days was tougher on the family for sure. And I’m grateful to have an amazing team and a very great set up now that really supports me so I can be with my family and balance work life.

Carl: So no late nights anymore for you. You can keep it within reasonable amounts.

Christian: Of course. There will be days that stretch along. I’m leaving for Oslo tomorrow with the game plan of opening our restaurants, the first restaurant in Oslo Friday evening.

So that will be a long weekend, but that’s the fun part. But late, stressful days in the office, it’s kind of out of the picture now, but sometimes it’s nice to be where we are now because it’s flexible and it’s manageable. I have great support from home, so it’s good.

Carl: All right, I hear a great team. So maybe you can introduce the business Jagger and talk a little bit about the team behind Jagger.

Christian: Yeah. So Rasmus Oubæk a well renowned Michelin chef, and I opened Jagger back on April 16. And I’ve been working for Rasmus at that point for a couple of years or many years. And we kind of had the idea to do something fun and at ease together. And we figured that fast casual would be the way to go. Because we worked in the classic restaurant scene with fine dining for many years. So Rasmus is a great part of it, and he’s kind of the heart of the operation on the food scene. He does the recipes, he does the thinking.

He does the structure of what to do, when to do and how to do it, on the food side. And I kind of take care of the rest. We started Rasmus in the kitchen, me in the front selling burgers at restaurant number one. And from there, we built the necessary team, kind of as we went on. So opposite for me here in the office, I have my CEO, Emil Schandorff. He’s been with me for almost seven years and started in the front selling burgers, saying hello to customers, emptying trash and cleaning tables. And now he’s doing MBA at the business university here in Copenhagen and running his dailies as CEO.

So very much a structure of doing everything from within yourself and building the business, not with CVs and school and performance, but with passion for what we are doing and a burning heart for really pushing everything forward. So that’s the heart of it, yeah.

And if you talk about starting up this first Burger joint, maybe before we go into that, maybe, can you quickly, for those who don’t know, tell a little bit about Jagger as a concept? What is the concept behind Jagger?

Christian: Sure. Yeah the concept of Jagger is a classic burger outlet. Burger joint, burger restaurant. We come in many shapes and forms. We have small restaurants with, like, four, six, eight seats, very high on foot traffic and takeaway.

And we have bigger restaurants with up to 40 or 60 seats, really, depending on where in the city we are. And is it a high street or is it a neighborhood location? We do an old school classic setup of burgers and fries. So a menu composition, which is French fries and mayo and Cokes and coke syrup and lemonade and burgers. Really kind of we don’t do our own special, like spicy jalapeno. We don’t do our Pineapple special or Blue cheese special.

We do classic cheeseburgers, fried chicken burgers and so on, kind of that very basic setup.

And our differentiator is very much okay say we’re super inspired by McDonald’s and Burger

Kings and the consistency, the skill level of their staff, and you can really trust them.

Traveling to Sydney or having a burger in the airport in Copenhagen, you will expect the same thing. That kind of universe is very inspiring to me because the consistency of the brand is very much what builds trust in the customer market. So that’s super important. And then we just want to say, okay, let’s take Rasmus’ vision of quality and how to do stuff and pair these two things.

So we have our own bun production in Surinboard. We do organic buns ourselves, we do our own pizza dough for the pizza concept and so on.

And then we have the same frying machine as they have in McDonald’s, but we use fresh, organic, farm budget free range beef from Denmark. So it’s very much the same concept as the big guys, timed, machinery, product line and so on. But the quality of the produce is kind of the main differentiator, and love for the great food, respect the product and do everything fresh.

Carl: Fantastic. That sounds very tasteful the way you explain it. And I hear you say pizza dough. So I believe there’s a second concept next to Jagger.

Christian: Yeah. So a couple of years ago, we were, okay, should we expand to the suburbs?

Should we go to another main city in Copenhagen? What should we do? And we were like, okay. The essence of what’s working for us here in Jagger is much more our spirit around it, how we do stuff, the love of great food, and how we take customers, staff, and our product very seriously, and we have Rasmus on the team, and he can do everything.

So we were like, okay, let’s try to make a pizza. So it’s kind of very much the same universe as a burger joint. So it makes sense for us to try to do a pizza concept. And we did call it Otto, where we do Neapolitan style pizzas, but in a super efficient and takeaway friendly setup, also with one ovens being consistent and so on. So very much the same take.

How many outlets do you have by now, both in Jagger and in the Otto concept?

Christian: We have 15 Jaggers, 16 tomorrow. And how many Ottos? We’re doing seven. Yeah, we’re doing seven.

Carl: All right.

Christian: And we’re building a lot more in Copenhagen. So we’re going to end up in around 29, 30 restaurants in Copenhagen at the end of this year.

Carl: That sounds like a lot of restaurants in one city. How have you kind of defined where you need to be and how do you kind of protect that one business doesn’t cannibalize the other one.

Christian: They do cannibalize each other, for sure, some bit. A little bit. But our way of thinking is that convenience food and takeaways are one. There’s one trend, and it’s upwards. The modern family in the cities are doing less and less food at home. I believe within 5-10 years, you will see trends towards what’s going on in New York and so on.

And then you do home cooking when you have guests on Saturday night, and the rest of the week will be convenient. So I don’t want to be a tourist attraction or something special. I want to be a service station, and I want to be local. I want to be where people live.

And if you’re busy coming home with the kids late Thursday night, you’re not going to travel through the city to have the perfect burger for two K’s on the bike. You’re going to have it just around the corner, and you’re not going to think about much about quality or taste because you just need to access something nice and easy.

So with that mindset, we was like, okay, we can have a lot of outlets because people arenot traveling more than like, a thousand meters, so from their apartment to get this quality convenience food.

So that’s the idea about it and how we can spread so much around the city. And Copenhagen is growing as well. So as all capital in Europe, the cities are just growing and growing and growing, and that’s also benefiting us, of course.

How many inhabitants does Copenhagen have?

Christian: I think we are close to 1.2 or so.

Carl: All right. Have you done Mathematics on this like how many inhabitants do need to be in a square mile or a square kilometer around the business? Or how have you kind of defined the exact location? Or is this going kind of I’m walking through the city and I say, okay, this corner needs to be it.

Christian: Yeah. It’s very much me looking at the city with the perspective of a burger joint since April 16. So it’s not that scientific. I think we can develop that site for sure, and it will be beneficial to have some matrix on it, especially like going to Oslo and expanding. It would be nice to be more certain and more sure of, is the structure of this neighborhood baseline good enough for a restaurant? And then the stomach feels like the heart of it can come on top of it.

But as it is now, I take a stroll through the city and see, okay, that all makes sense right here.

Carl: Yeah. Did I just hear you say that you opened 15 restaurants in one year?

Christian: No, No, No, we opened like spread out since April 16.

Carl: So you’re in Seven years in business, and you’ve opened let’s say 20 stores by now, including the Otto and the Jagger concept.

Yeah It’s still very impressive. The question I have about that is, how do you finance a thing like that, especially the first one? Is it your own money? Do you have investors on board? And yeah. How do you scale a business from 1 to 20 in six years time?

Christian: Money is necessary. And Rasmus was kind of the main investor on the first location.

He owns classic restaurants throughout Copenhagen as well, and he had funds to invest in the first Jagger, and we built two, and then we started on the third.

And we were approached by some of our friends in Copenhagen, and they suggested we should invest more in the concept because they saw potential, and we did as well.

And we joined with the investors pretty soon after, like I think, at the end of 17. So one and a half years after we started. So half of the business was sold to three private investors.

Carl: All right. Okay.

Christian: And we have structured the finance along the way they started out, and now we have some good agreements with the bank set up and so on. But it’s a super important part of growing fast casual with platform sales and now energy crisis last year, and produce rising in price. The finance and liquidity is very crucial to push what you want instead of navigating too stressfully. For sure, it’s a big part of it to have a very structured and strong finance situation.

Carl: Yeah. And if you talk about the investors, are they involved in the concept and in the food and do they kind of demand a place on the table, or do they say, no, no, Christian, we believe in you. Here’s the money. Just go and build this brand.

Christian: Yeah. So it’s kind of a two part story. So our chairman in the board is leading the team of investors, and he’s very much involved in our strategic decisions and our daily do’s and don’ts. We have a very close relationship with him and how we run the business.

And then the others are kind of on the backseat and trusting the process. But it’s 100% the team and I that kind of take the business decisions in the daily. Where are we placing the next restaurants? What are we putting on the menu, and how are we structuring ourselves, and how are we training our staff?

And all the kinds of core value decisions are run by yourself, and the investors kind of sit back and trust that process.

All right, so that sounds like a healthy relationship with your board, which is already well done. If you talk about scaling and going from this first restaurant to the 20 you have today, you have investors on board. So I assume that all of the restaurants are owned by your company or by the company. Is that correct? Or do you also franchise?

Christian: We don’t franchise. We own and operate everyone, every unit ourselves.

Carl: All right. Is that an obvious decision? Is that a conscious decision?

Christian: We kind of play with it for a short period of time looking into the possibilities. But I think I have a passion for great food and good restaurant experiences. And I have a passion for kind of making my staff succeed. I don’t have a passion for doing contracts with a franchisee.

I don’t have a passion for having as many restaurants as possible. I don’t have a passion for growing this into a gigantic monster of navigating money and transactions and kind of devaluing and spreading the brand.

I much rather have the business as close to me as possible and make sure that our values are executed every single day on every single outlet. And it’s fun.

It’s fun to do restaurants. We’re going to build it, and I think you can structure it. If you look at Chipotle from the US, they have well over a thousand units and they own and operate every single one of them themselves. So you can do it at scale also. So that’s very conscious and we

I want to stick to that style.

Carl: All right. If you talk about the way you started, I will come back to that again. You say it was a kind of a duo, the chef in the kitchen or doing the concepts, and you selling the French fries.

What was the moment that you said, I have to stop selling the French fries and my value is somewhere else? And how difficult was it to move away from selling these French fries and having the customer contact to going into kind of a more CEO role where you have to safeguard strategy and open up new businesses and things like that? When was this? And how difficult was it for you?

Christian: I think naturally, I’m not made to be sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day and looking at a computer. I will not be described as my national trade. So from time to time, I still miss running dailies in the restaurant. But I also saw if I need to spread what I know and what I do and what I want on a broader scale.

So I need to step away from this selling like the point of sale in the restaurants, and I need to step back. So I was so busy at the time, so I didn’t think it was difficult because I was building restaurants, I was having construction meetings, I was having marketing deals, I was doing everything and letting somebody else take care of the sales points when necessary to get scaling.

Carl: So it was kind of a natural move away from selling to organizing rather than a conscious decision.

Christian: But in a healthy way I think strategy and building a vision on behalf of the company and really leading a team. And so it’s super fun and a very giving position.

Carl: Yeah, of course, I can imagine. I am a bit in the same position so I know what you’re talking about. And then about when you’re building that business one day you hire your first employee, he takes over the point of sales.

Basically, you move away from that. What are the values that you’re looking for when you hire new people? And also, are you still involved in every hire? Or is this now something else that you’ve sourced out in a way? Or are you still looking for that same value that you hired in the first employee?

Christian: I for sure have a people radar. I can understand the social structure in the room super fast. I see this as a gift, especially when you end up as a CEO. So being able to pick up on social relations and social dynamics is super crucial. And I see it as a power weapon every single day. I’m not involved in every single hire. I think we have 500 employees in contract, not full time, of course everyone, but everyone has gone through a conversation and a hiring process, and management throughout the company is taking care of those decisions.

Carl: How do you maintain the values that you started? Because of course when you don’t hire themselves anymore, and it’s understandable if you’re 500 people, you can’t talk to all of them, but how do you make sure that the guy that is standing today in front of all of these customers of Jagger or Otto, that they still ooze the same kind of passion that you had when you were selling those French fries?

Christian: That’s a difficult part, and you will not succeed in that 100% of time. So sometimes there will be a situation where you kind of misjudge, who’s hiring, who’s structuring it, and mistakes will happen. But of course, we talk a lot about the values of how to behave in the restaurants and what to look for in staff.

And it’s very much for me, it’s super simple. It’s something to do with who you are as a human being? Are you kind and outward and have a natural attraction to be socialized and so on?

You’re kind of good most of the time because selling burgers and cleaning and doing food and so on, everybody can learn that. But being social, intelligent, and smiling and waving as a the natural trait of you is really difficult to learn. So we talk a lot about just looking after the good people, look after the smile on their face when they come into an interview and look for those who kind of seem like they put energy towards you instead of just taking energy away. So it’s very much a gut feeling. And always balancing and spending time on it. Management are spending most of their time evaluating staff and developing that.

Yeah, I believe of course you have 20-20 outlets. All of them are managed by someone. How many people are there in the headquarters? How big is the headquarter team?

Christian: Overhead we are, I think we are 10-15 people. We have some staff up here, which are, we have a HR office, we have a managing of marketing, PR office, we have office management taking care of the chat support for customers and our emails and all those guest relation communication from the office side. And then we have a flexible team of management having workspaces up here, but also visiting their responsibilities in the restaurants. So it’s kind of a flexible, dynamic situation with that. Around ten fixed management and then I like to have a balance with.

So management is coupled with a practical function or a closed in responsibility. If it’s five restaurants on the kitchen side, five restaurants on the sales point of sale, we have some guys taking care of all the infrastructure of building, maintaining and so on of the restaurant. So, yeah, kind of split already.

Is it already necessary in Copenhagen alone to have kind of regional managers where you bundle managers, where you bundle restaurants into a cluster, or is this still a very flat organization where all managers directly report to let’s say headquarters?

Christian: We’ve been experimenting with this a lot, because sometimes these structures develop naturally and sometimes you need to pull back them, and sometimes you need to rethink and so on.

And for now, I like the idea of putting as much responsibility for the actual product and guest experience as close to the guest as possible. So in a restaurant, you will have a kitchen manager and a restaurant manager, and those two will have sous chefs, who take responsibility for the service when they are not there.

That’s kind of the main step. They will take care of cleaning, maintenance, quality staff managing, schedules and all of that. And then we have regional managers on top of them. And I try to communicate with the regional manager.

The main function of you should be, you are the toolbox for the restaurant manager. You should not dictate like you need to do so and so and so. You need to say, expect quality X, Y and Z, but your toolbox, so they can grab you and you can help them with the schedule, you can help them

With hiring, you can help them with firing, you can help them with structuring new routines and so on. But I want the restaurant to be leading themselves and structuring the day. And then they just need guidance from the operations manager.

So the operations managers seem to be more kind of an enabler than a controlling function. Is that correct?

Christian: Yeah. Of course, in the dailies there will be some controlling, but my main philosophy around this is very much too. They should be able to leave for holiday for a month without any issues. So I don’t want them to have any function in the daily runnings. The restaurant and the schedule shouldn’t fall apart if they are not there.

Carl: Yeah, I totally understand sorry. Let’s stick with people and human resources for a moment. If you look at 500 people, do you want to share something about turnover rates and

How do you kind of control that? Because that’s one of the important things, is finding people and keeping them. How is that with your concepts?

Christian: We have. We have a, you know, we have an amazing position because I think when you operate in a city, you will kind of hit a critical mass of staff members. And if you’re able to give them tools to succeed, responsibilities, they will also help you with new staff.

So if you have a group of 500 staff members who are used to having responsibilities and we are taking care of them in training, and of course, we are tight on our deadlines with salaries and social benefits, and everything is smooth and totally 100% professional, they kind of pay back with spreading the word and making sure that the pool of staff is maintained.

So you don’t have any big issues with turnover itself?

Christian: No, we have the usual cycle of youth workers, like stopping school, taking a savage year, starting school. So that’s natural. And I don’t think you can change that much. But we have next year. I just talked to Emil, next year we will have 15 or 16 staff members having a five year anniversary and we have existed for seven years.

Carl: Yeah. So that is already quite a nice thing. So if you look at the menu, let me change to the food. How many times do you change the menu? Or is this, let’s say, a fixed menu that hasn’t changed for seven years?

Christian: It has changed for seven years, for sure. It has developed a lot. We started with having I remember back in 16, we did 80% of our sales were beef burgers. And now I think we are down to 50, 45% of our sales of beef burgers. So there’s natural development in the product line.

So we have a lot more vegetarian vegan solutions now. And chicken has played a bigger part of the menu the later years, but in general, you’re not going to see differences over the month. But okay, we added a Falafel burger. That might be the only change this year. So it’s a slow development, but very stable. You can get the same product every time and you can kind of depend on it.

How are you looking towards one of these big trends that is happening now? When I talk to a lot of owners and visionaries let’s say they all say it needs to go greener. What’s the Jagger approach to plant based burgers and things like that?

Christian: We had a vegetarian option, plant based burger since day one. We added to that. So we have a couple now, and I think it’s very much banishing. So I was at a conference yesterday with the branch organization of restaurants in Copenhagen and top of mind of ourselves, like the restaurateur and the brands are green transitions and low carbon footprint and so on.

And top of mind for the customers were accessibility, price, online convenience, and so on. And then the agenda of going green is much further down. Like in daily life. I think you need, as a big player in the market, to take responsibility for that aspect in a way of not forcing it upon the customer, but kind of changing classic products so they perform much better in that aspect. So going from two years ago, we went from traditional Danish conventional beef production to now selling only free range organic raised meat.

And the carbon footprint difference is kind of second to none. So it’s almost neutral because the cow’s job is now several before being a meat product instead of being raised as a meat product. So that makes a big difference. So I think it’s critical to not say, okay, now we have the vegan burger.

If you buy this, you’re going to change everything. But say, okay, stick to what you do and your routine and the values of having comfort in our food, and we will take care of the transition, like going to organic production, producing our buns ourselves, keeping stuff local, buying as much as possible within our own country, and taking these transitions kind of out of the customer’s decision range and changing classics to be better for the planet and ourself and so on.

Carl: So I definitely hear a conscious entrepreneur here and somebody who believes in making or reducing the footprint, but a much more moderate approach than just saying we go all in green. Green is the new black in a sense. I totally get you there.

You just mentioned a few of those topics that customers expect from the restaurants. Can you go over them again? Because it was very interesting, but I didn’t catch all of them. Can you reiterate them?

Christian: Yes. So we looked at this chart of a customer survey from the branch organization yesterday. The main point of it, the topic agenda as us as producers and product makers, builders in the market is much more on what is the topic of mainstream media.

So we need to change the CO2 footprint, we need to do animal welfare, we need to take care of these situations. That’s kind of me and our colleagues’ perspective, but the customers were in their daily lives. Everybody knows what to answer.

Okay, is organic important for you? In a survey, everybody will say yes, but this survey was done much more of what they’re actually doing. So behavior and accessibility, convenience, online appearance and so on were so much higher on the list than these kinds of beneficial trends.

There’s just a mismatch of everybody knowing what to do and what the actual values are from the customers. So I think we need to take that responsibility upon us. We cannot just make one product that serves the purpose of being greener and kinder to the environment and let the customers drive that. We need to build in, in our stable of classic products a much more healthy approach to that issue because people are not going to take the right decision in a stressful everyday situation where money, time, convenience play a lot more than being conscious around the environment.

Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. Maybe to round it all off mean I’d like to go back to your newest endeavor which is opening up in Oslo, I believe Friday night it’s going to happen you said, can you quickly walk us through maybe the main challenges that you had to overcome because you did it 15 times in Copenhagen? I guess it’s not that easy to open up a first one in Oslo. Or is it?

Christian: No, the easy part is that we know who we are and the base analytics of doing Oslo is okay. Oslo is a nice city. It’s very similar culture wise to Copenhagen. They have money to pay for quality produce and we have in our own mind a very good concept and we believe as soon as we get customers through the door, we will take care of it. That’s the base.

The hard part is doing deals with landlords in Oslo is a totally different game than Copenhagen. Most of the staff management rules, government rules on food safety and so on are very similar. So it’s kind of the same. But Oslo or Norway is not a part of the EU. So that’s a hassle. Getting all our own produce through toll and registrations and import rules and so on, that’s been a challenge. We haven’t never faced that of course in Denmark you just call a producer and they deliver it. If we moved to Sweden, it would be the same.

If you go to Germany it will be the same. But Norway is out of the EU.

So all that paperwork with getting produce into the country, finding local organic meat up, now that has been a challenge. And then we have two superstars of staff members who’ve been with me for five, almost six years in Copenhagen, Falereke and Erics, who’ve moved up there and taken charge of getting the restaurant going and kind of the parachute troops dropped in Oslo and taking care of the startup.

So they’re doing a tremendous job up there and fighting to be ready for Friday night. So that’s exciting, but very much like custom rules and a totally different setup, so that’s been challenged.

Carl: Would you have chosen Oslo again if you knew all of this, or would you have stayed within the EU?

Christian: We are through it now. So I think Oslo is the right decision. I think Oslo, it’s a city where you kind of feel at home when you’re from Copenhagen. From the first second, it’s the same structures, you have the same dynamics of different neighborhoods and so on. I think it’s the right decision, but it wasn’t easy.

My final question to you is one that I also ask many of my previous guests. What are the three big trends that you see happening in the coming years as an entrepreneur in Food and Beverage, what Are the things we need to take care of and what are the things that are coming towards us?

Christian: I think staff management and being professional around your HR, the business of doing restaurants doesn’t have the greatest history of staff management.

So having a future in this business, you need to be on top of that. You need to find a Business model where you can pay fair, you can structure your HR. So it’s a good experience for your staff to work with you then very much what I talked about regarding you as a provider of the produce need to take the responsibility of the transitions to a much more sustainable way of producing food.

So I don’t have a dogmatic approach to this. So I don’t want to empty the table and do everything as environmentally friendly as possible. I need to reach some certain volumes and then I can change products along the way.

So taking care of that process as a professional provider of food and convenience is a major.

And it’s not a question, it’s a license to operate. Within two or three years, if you don’t have this sorted out, you will be dead. It’s not possible to go on the dark side on this topic anymore.

And then convenience food in general. So the development of, during the energy crisis and the rise of Inflation here last year, the gap between eating out and cooking at home has been relatively smaller.

So it’s relatively cheaper now to have a Burger with me on a Wednesday night with the family compared to twelve months ago. And I’m afraid it’s going to be this ongoing development. So affordable, quality convenience food is the way to go in my perspective. And doing food that people can live off and not be sick of, but providing quality nutrient food in the convenience market is the future.

Carl: All right. Thank you very much for those insights. Christian Brandt, it was my pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you very much and see you next time.

Christian: Thank you.

Carl: Thank you. Goodbye.

Guest & Host

Christian Brandt

CEO & Founder
Jagger

Carl Jacobs

Co-founder & CEO
Apicbase

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