That isn’t Pret’s model. Like other fast-food companies, Pret wants to grow, eventually providing fresh, wholesome, and delicious sandwiches in cities around the world. Yet even as it expands, a few stores at a time, Pret is also working to create a steep trajectory of improvement—one that rival chains will be hard-pressed to match.
The sheer energy required to pull this off is difficult to overstate. Much of it radiates from Julian Metcalfe, one of today’s most high-energy, high-intensity business leaders. When Tracy Gingell climbed that ladder at 60 Broad Street and set about polishing each of the crystals on the neglected chandelier, he was channeling the soul of Julian Metcalfe.
BACK IN 1986, Metcalfe was not a restaurateur, chef, or small businessman, but a twenty-three-year-old former art student and a chartered surveyor who had dabbled in several fields and formed an attachment to none. He was also highly opinionated and demanding, with a tendency to become obsessed over hassles that other people preferred to ignore or merely accept. One he found most irritating was the abysmal quality of lunches available in the busy heart of London. All the choices were bad. You could reserve a table at an overpriced white-tablecloth restaurant and invest a couple of hours and quite a few pounds for a meal of unpredictable quality served by a snooty and perhaps hostile waiter. Or you could duck into a storefront sandwich place and wait in line for the privilege of choosing from a narrow selection of unappetizing foods—soggy lettuce, day-old eggs, stringy meat, flavorless tomatoes—served by a surly clerk in a smelly apron.
“Why should people put up with this crap?” Metcalfe wondered.
It was a classic eureka! moment of demand creation. Metcalfe looked at the hassles most people shrug at and accept, and saw opportunity. As Metcalfe puts it, “We developed Pret … not by being caterers but by going through a long list of things that annoyed customers and getting rid of them.”
Metcalfe teamed up with Sinclair Beecham, a friend he’d met at Central London’s polytechnic college. They lost eighty thousand pounds in their first twelve months and labored through several “miserable” years of trial and error. Metcalfe spent countless hours in the kitchen behind their first shop on Victoria Street, cooking chickens, baking breads, tinkering with sauces, trying different varieties of tomatoes, avocados, and eggplants in search of the perfect combination of texture, flavor, and color for a mouthwatering sandwich or salad—a veritable mad scientist in his own laboratory of lunch.
By 1990, Metcalfe and Beecham finally had a menu that worked. The Victoria Street shop turned its first profit. They tried opening a second shop, plowing money from the first shop into equipment, décor, staffing, and supplies. The second shop paid for itself within fifteen months.
Pret A Manger was on its way.
Studying Pret today, it’s not terribly hard to list the magnetic ingredients that make it unique. It starts with the look of the stores. No two Pret outlets are precisely the same, but all share a certain sophisticated aesthetic, well captured by one New Yorker: “There’s a real ambience to the place, like a neighborhood coffee shop in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. The industrial chic décor adds to the ambience—the cold sterility of the stainless steel display racks (which Pret people call ‘langers’) and the roughness of the exposed ductwork in the ceiling are tempered by the warm wood tones of the small tables and individual seats and by the rich brown and tan leather upholstery of the banquette seats. The track lighting on the ceiling appears to have purple bulbs, which cast a warm glow into the space.”
Then there’s the welcoming attitude of the staff. Customers invariably notice the Pret people, who are uniformly young, attractive, smart, and friendly. They behave as if they like working at Pret—and in fact they do. As a result, they give service that’s both pleasant and extremely efficient.
The other day, our friend James made his first visit to Pret, hoping to grab a quick sandwich prior to a series of business meetings. The fellow who sold James his chicken and avocado sandwich seemed concerned that he had no drink to go along with it. After James finished his sandwich, the clerk came to the table, cleared the wrapping, and asked, “Anything else I can get you? Maybe a glass of water?”
James shook his head when he told us the story. “He didn’t have to do that!” he marveled. James made a mental note to stop at Pret the next time he needed a quick bite served with a genuine smile.
Of course, it’s the food that matters most. And the food at Pret is strikingly different from what you’ll get at other fast-food places, delis, or diners.
For one thing, it’s fresh—really fresh. Every sandwich is made on the premises the same day it’s sold. (Leftovers are donated daily to charities like New York’s City Harvest, which feeds the poor—more than 120,000 pounds of food in 2009 alone.) You notice the difference after just a bite or two: the creaminess of the mayonnaise, the crispness of the lettuce, the firmness of the chicken or the ham, the juicy tang of the tomatoes. Same-day sale also reduces the need for additives and preservatives, which Pret leans over backward to avoid. “Pret food is real” is the company’s mantra. The contrast with the highly processed, often frozen-and-reheated fare served at fast-food places or the grub of dubious freshness offered at many delis and diners is obvious.
The ingredients are also high in quality. Consider some of the “fun facts” about Pret cookery, which fans of the chain swap like trading cards: The avocados are hand-turned regularly to ensure they ripen evenly on all sides, shipped at room temperature, and sliced in each Pret kitchen every morning … Pret orders handpicked bunches of basil that are delivered daily and placed in sandwiches one leaf at a time … The oats and fruits used in the snack bars are stirred by hand with a four-foot paddle … Every Pret espresso is in fact a double (since they put fourteen grams of coffee into each one) … and so on and so on.
Or consider some of the hundred-odd items currently on the Pret menu. The sandwiches include Balsamic Chicken & Avocado; Egg Salad, Spinach & Parmesan; Slow Roasted Beef & Blue Cheese; Smoked Ham & Egg; and Summer Herb & Hummus. There’s the Chicken Jalapeno Hot Wrap, the Salmon & Brown Rice Salad, the Tuna Nicoise, and the Slim Brie & Tomato Baguette. And then there are the soups—Carrot Ginger, Italian Wedding, Moroccan Lentil, and several more—each served with a fresh-baked seven-grain roll. From the standpoint of a typical customer—a busy office worker or downtown shopper looking for a quick, affordable, and enjoyable midday bite—it’s a brilliant selection: nothing that would strike the average Brit or American as “weird” or off-putting, but with a note of sophistication and cosmopolitan flair that clearly distinguishes Pret from run-of-the-mill lunchtime options.
To keep the menu interesting, even surprising, Pret rotates items in and out of the shops while continually testing new choices. When a new sandwich or soup appears on the shelf, it gets highlighted with a sticker that announces, “I made it through the auditions.” And when customer requests (reviewed store by store in a daily staff meeting) induce Pret to reintroduce an item, it bears a sticker that reads, “I’m back!”
“I compare Pret to the inside of a beautifully made Swiss watch,” Julian Metcalfe says. “If all 10,000 cogs are turning, it works … [but] you only need a few dozen of those cogs not to turn for the whole thing to start suffering. I’ll tell you that.” And when all the cogs are turning—the stylish décor, the charming and efficient staff, the clever marketing, and above all the fresh, delicious foods—the magnetic appeal of Pret is difficult to resist.
BUT AS WE’VE SEEN, building a magnetic product is never a one-shot deal. If you hope to attract enduring demand, you need to begin a trajectory of improvement the same day your product goes on sale.
This imperative is especially urgent in the fast-food world, with its multitude of rival firms and its low barriers to entry. In the fast-food world, you face competition literally every day. As Metcalfe himself observes, “Customers do shop around, of course. If they go to Pret every day, they are spending £20–30 per week, so it’s no wonder they will look at
alternatives.”
In response, Pret is creating a fast rate of improvement on three distinct dimensions. One involves steadily improving the quality, taste, affordability, and overall appeal of its food offerings. Another centers on maintaining and elevating the already high standards of customer service. And the third focuses on expanding store outlets so that Pret becomes a convenient option for more and more people around the world.
The first two challenges—maintaining and improving the quality of the food and the service—are in the hands of founder Julian Metcalfe, now in the role of “creative director,” an appropriate job for someone with a natural flair for trajectory thinking. (“I’m never satisfied,” Metcalfe says. “Things could always be slightly better. I really don’t like praising my work. I tend to see the faults in it rather than the joy.”)
Metcalfe’s obsession with improvement is quite real and even a source of some exasperation to Metcalfe himself. As he says (the words coming out in a rush), “That’s the difference between mediocre and great and it’s extremely elusive and some of our sandwiches are bloody great, they really work. It takes years—years—of relationships with the suppliers to get the right cheese, to get the right seasoning mix in the mayo. You can’t just go and buy Hellman’s mix and bung it together. It looks so simple but it isn’t.”
Pret constantly reinvents its offerings, even those that are popular and successful. Thus Pret’s pickle recipe has been revised fifteen times, the chocolate brownie thirty-six times, and the carrot cake fifty times—in fact, restaurateur Sally Clarke, the “grande dame” of English cooking, reportedly worked with Metcalfe for nine months to perfect this single confection.
Metcalfe also keeps pushing to improve the quality of Pret’s foods in other ways. One of the lunchtime hassles that first motivated him was his disgust with the unhealthful qualities of most fast-food lunches—loaded with salt, sugar, chemicals, and ingredients from ecologically disastrous factory farms. Now as more and more consumers go green, Pret is under ever-increasing pressure to raise its wholesomeness bar still higher.
So in June 2009, after Julian Metcalfe saw the documentary film The End of the Line, about the dangers of overfishing, he promptly banned the use of endangered bluefish tuna in sandwiches and sushi served in Pret stores. Similarly, in 2010, after fielding complaints about the saturated fats in some of its sandwiches, Pret began posting basic nutritional information, including calorie counts and fat content, in every store, and providing additional detail online. Most food chains do this only when mandated by law.
Like other great demand creators, Pret has the courage to listen to customers. In every Pret store you’ll find a box with cards that read something like this:
My name is Tamir. I’m the General Manager at this Pret Shop.
My team and I meet every morning.
We discuss the comments you’ve made, the good, the bad and the ugly. If we can deal with it ourselves, we will.
If we can’t, I’ll forward this card to Julian Metcalfe back at the office. I know he’ll do what he can.
If you have a minute, please do ask to speak to me or one of my team right now.
The bit about “Julian Metcalfe back at the office” is quite sincere: Metcalfe’s phone number appears on each food package. (He says he gets a couple of customer calls every day—but only a couple, since most people assume the number is a joke.)
Pret store managers review the latest customer comments with the entire staff each morning before the front doors are opened. Good ideas for improving the store, the food, and the service are quickly acted upon. In the New York stores, for example, the mix of products is continually adjusted based on customer feedback and requests. (The Seventh Avenue store, in the heart of the fashion district, stocks lots of vegetable wraps and Caesar salads; customers in the Wall Street shops prefer hearty meat sandwiches like chicken bacon.) Based on customer requests, one manager suggested providing baby-changing facilities in the stores. They’re now being installed throughout the chain.
Thanks to Metcalfe’s obsession with continually raising his team’s already high standards, Pret remains several steps ahead of even its closest competitors. Here’s how one critic compared Pret with the Eat chain in Britain, which has sought to rival Pret by opening superficially similar stores:
The principal difference between the two concerns is that old chestnut, service. Eat never seems to make enough of anything; most of the nice stuff has gone by 2 p.m. They put up a silly sign saying something like, “Oops, we’ll try to make more tomorrow,” but they never do. They also always seem to have an endless queue. Compare this with the speedy service at Pret, even during the lunchtime crush, and the well-stocked shelves. (I once expressed my disappointment at the lack of tuna sandwiches, and the manager simply made me one.) Eat is full of good intentions, plastering its walls with fun signs and a jovial tone of voice, but its staff seem less trained, less friendly and less motivated than their counterparts in the maroon overalls.
Such customer-centricity has to start at the top—and at Pret, Julian Metcalfe carries the principle to an extreme.
In August 2009, Metcalfe received a tongue-in-cheek letter from customer Paul McCrudden, complaining about the time he’d “wasted” waiting in line in Pret stores and demanding reimbursement. Rather than consigning it to the circular file or fobbing off the correspondent with a canned missive, Julian Metcalfe sent the following personal response:
Dear Mr. McCrudden,
Thank you so much for the invoice for the time spent in our Cafes. I understand your time on the planet is valuable and I am indeed sorry you were not able to spend more time in my competitors’ establishments.
You are of course, absolutely right. The time you spent in my Cafes will greatly help the profitability of our company.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for the generous discount you have applied to your bill.
I believe there is an error with this invoice as you’ve forgotten to add the £22 spent with our company, no doubt also an inconvenience. I’ve taken the liberty of adding this sum to what we owe you and what’s more, I have added a nominal sum to cover interest.
I hope you will appreciate prompt payment. I’ve asked our accounts department to issue a cheque today as I see no reason why you should be kept waiting.
I’m sorry to have to pay you by cheque as I am aware of the effort and time it will take you to pay this into the bank.
I have therefore taken the additional liberty of increasing the amount by £1 to cover your walk to the post box.
I’m so sorry that we have put you to all this inconvenience and thank you for taking the time to read this correspondence.
Best wishes,
Julian Metcalfe
Founder
A check for £62 was enclosed.
The amount of positive coverage this story is still receiving—just Google “McCrudden” and “Pret” and see how many links pop up—was worth much more than £62. Especially when contrasted with the negative publicity received by some of the other companies McCrudden billed at the same time as Pret. The managing director of Cranberry, a chain of franchised fruit-and-nut shops, responded with an invoice for £18.75 for the “12 minutes of my valuable time” that it took him to read McCrudden’s letter.
Metcalfe’s response to McCrudden was impressive. But more impressive is his determination to transmit his own obsession with quality to the employees who are Pret’s direct interface with customers. Such determination is rare in business—except among the demand creators. They know that creating a steep trajectory is virtually impossible unless the entire organization—right down to every local manager at Zipcar, every classroom instructor from Teach For America, and every cashier at Pret A Manger—is an enthusiastic participant in the ascent and a cocreator of demand.
CEO Clive Schlee is an experienced executive who’d spent seventeen years working in Hong Kong for the multinational corporation Jardine Matheson, including help
ing to run their fast-food brands (Pizza Hut, Sizzler, Taco Bell), before Metcalfe brought him to Pret in 2003. Schlee has been working to devise managerial, organizational, and training systems to replicate Metcalfe’s cheery obsessiveness and replant it in store locations around the world.
The process starts with a unique personnel system. Rather than following the usual fast-food practice of hiring most any youngster who asks for an application—and then living with the exceptionally rapid turnover that inevitably results—Pret invests significant resources in selecting, training, and rewarding its entry-level staff members. Prospective recruits are asked to spend a day working, for pay, in a typical Pret shop. Then their fellow workers vote on whether they should be hired.
When was the last time you heard about a company that treats hiring decisions as a matter for democratic input rather than autocratic fiat? Pret really does it. Clive Schlee talks proudly about the fact that his nephew applied for a job at Pret and was voted down by the store staff. Another time, a prominent business executive in line for a board directorship was asked to spend a day working in a Pret shop. When his fellow sandwich makers found him insufferably arrogant and lazy, the directorship offer promptly vanished. Like Wegmans, Pret A Manger has created a rare company culture in which social norms—relationship-centered and built on respect, caring, and community—play as great a role as market norms.
To maintain a living connection between the front lines and the back office, every Pret manager is required to spend four days a year on the shop floor. And frontline employees are empowered to resolve problems based on their own best judgment—offering a free meal to a disgruntled patron, for example—without waiting for a manager’s permission.
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