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After graduating from Cornell
University, the brothers went off to prove themselves in the
hospitality industry. But with David’s chain of soup
and salad restaurants acclaimed as “Boston’s Best”
and growing fast, the sons were soon called home. In 1992,
David retired, leaving Bruce and Larry in charge. The business
thrived.
“We need to diversify,”
said Larry now CEO. “Soups and salads, no matter how
many different recipes we make, no matter how good they are,
won’t drive traffic in for every day part, and won’t
keep even our most loyal guests coming back every day.”
“What did you think of those
noodles we had in San Francisco’s Chinatown last year?
Here, try these,” said Bruce who’s become COO with
a passion for R&D. “I’ve been testing them in
our culinary center.”
“Mmmm. These are good,”
said Larry, savoring a spoonful. “But we don’t want
to confuse our guests by straying too far from our brand.”
Bruce came back from Tuscany,
a few months later, with bread on his mind. “Here. Try
this. We can serve fresh bread without kneading any dough.
I've jazzed it up with caramelized onions.”
“I like that,” said
Larry. “It's delicious and easy. How about adding fresh
basil? What our guests like best about our restaurants
is that everything is fresh. How can we capitalize on this
‘freshness’ thing? We need to own it, stock-in-trade.”
More months passed. Bruce and
Larry worked hard. On weekends they worked harder. They traveled.
And everywhere they went, they sampled and analyzed the local
cuisine. From Shanghai to San Francisco; Memphis to Milan;
Paris, France to Portland, Maine, they found the foremost
chefs mixing and matching world cuisine.
“That’s fresh!”
thought Larry, using the word like his teenaged son jumping
skateboards and tuning rap. Reconsidering the notion, Larry
thought, “Fresh Fusion… it’s like jazz but
blending foods instead of music.”
Attending the National Restaurant
Show in Chicago in 1996, the brothers were playing pool and
shooting the breeze with some colleagues. “So… what
if we did a fresh food marketplace…” Bruce went
on to describe the notion he and Larry had been concocting,
“where you could go to different stations to choose noodles
or salads or wraps (yeah, you know, kind of like burritos
gone native in Venice Beach) or smoothies (I’ve loved
smoothies since the 60s and nobody makes them right anymore)…”
“We’d create a brand
new brand, in a whole new category,” chimed in Larry,
before anyone could criticize this seemingly impossible-to-market
notion. “It may sound, at first, like chaos… but
it all ties together nicely when you think of the niche as
‘fresh.’ The freshest ingredients, the freshest
recipes, made fresh-to-order… a fresh new concept.”
“Everyone will love it: students,
workers, seniors, Moms…” Bruce was quite convinced.
“In the city, in the suburbs… all across America…
They'll all be thinking fresh!”
 
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