Behind Cava Group’s conversion of Zoe’s Kitchen restaurants

How is Cava Group’s integration of Zoe’s Kitchen restaurants going? This week’s episode of the Restaurant Business podcast A Deeper Dive features Brett Schulman, the CEO of Cava Group, who talks about a wide variety of topics, but particularly his company's integration of Zoe’s Kitchen. Cava acquired Zoe’s in 2018 in one of the more interesting deals of recent vintage. Both were fast-casual Mediterranean chains but Zoe’s was publicly traded at the time. Since then, Cava has been converting Zoe’s restaurants into Cava locations. Such conversions used to be relatively popular in the industry in the 1990s but have been relatively rare since, though First Watch used conversions to grow quickly several years ago. Schulman Talks about why that strategy makes sense and what it’s doing for Cava. He also talks about digital sales, the current state of delivery and Cava’s potential plans for catering. And Schulman talks about his company’s strategy to balance demand from all these channels. We’re talking with one of the premier fast-casual executives in the industry on A Deeper Dive so please have a listen.