🎙️ How Did a Small Bodega Become a Viral Food Sensation? Mike Hauke’s Story
In this flavorful episode, Mike Hauke, founder of Tony Boloney’s, reveals how creative experimentation transformed a humble Atlantic City convenience store into an innovative culinary brand known for viral sensations like taco pizza and revolutionary mozzarella sticks.
✨ Key Insights You’ll Learn:
- Turning unexpected opportunities into culinary innovation
- Creating viral food sensations through creative experimentation
- Pivoting traditional recipes with global flavors
- Building a brand through quality and creativity
- Expanding from restaurants to retail products
🌟 Key People Who Shaped Mike’s Journey:
- His Father: Named Tony Boloney’s and backed the first location
- Italian Grandmother: Instilled love of cooking through pasta-making memories
- Russian-Polish Grandmother: Expanded his culinary horizons
- Nick from Brooklyn: Supported the initial bodega operations
- Michael Burns: Partner in scaling Mad Mutz retail venture
👉 Don’t miss this engaging conversation with a culinary innovator who proves thinking differently about traditional foods can lead to nationwide success.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE
Transcript
Intro: Welcome to another edition of Inspired Stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes how they’ve overcome adversity and explore current challenges they’re facing.
Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Kodespode and today’s guest is Michael Hauck, founder and mad scientist of Tony Bolognese and Mad Mutz. Tony Bolognese is the right place for frickin’ amazing pizza subs and other crazy grub.
They have three locations in New Jersey, Hope Oaken, Atlantic City and Jersey City. This is not your grandpa’s pizza joint. They’ve been tossing out tradition and serving up delicious experimental grub for over a decade. You’ll find things like a taco pizza and it’s not what you think, a sandwich with a T-rex bone in it and a pizza with waffles and fried chicken on it. They offer cooking classes and food trucks to cater your next event and they’ve been featured in more media than you can shake a pizza at including man vs food, cooking channel and live with Kelly and Ryan as well as the Today’s Show. Mike opened his first Tony Bolognese in 2009 as a small deli convenience store.
We’ll hear how he morphed into the creative and edgy cuisine media magnet that he is today and we’ll also hear about his latest food innovation which is just about to drop, something called Mad Mutz and we’ll see if Michael will tell us how to get to the top of the waiting list for it. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year and extra cash flow by implementing one of our proprietary programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.
To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the founder and mad scientist of Tony Bolognese and Mad Mutz, Mike, I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. Yeah, of course, thanks for having me on. So take us back to the beginning. Did you always want to start a food business? Did this happen kind of accidentally? How did this come about?
Mike Hauke: So actually, I had other businesses at the time. I’ve always had my own business since college. I started out with Dirty Business Laundry Delivery Service in Amherst, Massachusetts that started as like a school project for our entrepreneur club and with the creative business plan.
And the premise was you have zero dollars, you have no resources, what business can you start and what business can you scale. And we chose the laundry delivery service. And we basically said, well, we don’t have a laundromat. So how we do laundry, we would sub it out. So we found a laundromat that would process laundry overnight and pay them per piece or per unit or whatever. We don’t have vehicles to deliver it. So how we do that? You can’t use your cars.
Like it was like literally you can’t you have zero anything. We’ll contract with a newspaper delivery service that delivers newspapers from two in the morning until seven o’clock in the morning. And then from eight o’clock, we’ve used their vehicles and pick up and deliver laundry and stuff like that. And little by little, we’re able to piece together a business plan that you know, work that was scalable that we didn’t need any resources for. So, you know, since then, I’ve always had my own businesses. I had 30 business laundry delivery service, then we had the off campus meal plan, OCMP, then Boxo Box, which is a college care package company. And at the time I had businesses in New York, in Chelsea, then we moved to Bushwick. And my father called me up and was like, Hey, you know, I want you to get into real estate, like I’m into and start investing in things.
And I said, Okay, you know, I’m down to try that out. And my buddy was from Bedford, Massachusetts. Good friend of mine, Dave. And he said, you know, let’s pick up a property here.
It’s a six family. I went to the property with my father, the realtor, the owner, we did a walkthrough before we walked in. I saw someone get thrown out of the third floor through the window. Whoa.
Yeah. Fourth to the chest. Guy came out with a metal rake over the head, dragged him out.
I don’t know if the person died or not. And my realtor pulls out a gun. The owner is just chilling.
My dad, who’s from New York, New Jersey, who was in real estate, he’s just chilling. And I’m like, Oh my God, I’m not like this is not I can’t, I can’t do this. There’s no way I’m going to be a landlord in general. And then years later, he was like, Listen, let’s buy this property in Atlantic City.
It’s literally inexpensive. And we’re going to outfit it and rent it out to a bodega because they’re building the MGM at the time was massive construction project, the entire in little of Atlantic City. And I was like, All right, like I’ll go in and up with you, we’ll figure it out, help them out, fit it, get it going, turn out no one wants to rent it. So we had all these construction workers that were wrapping up MGM ended up turning to being called revel. They started construction 5000 construction workers, no one to rent it out. We outfitted it for bodega deli. And I have my buddy from Nick from Brooklyn just come down and run it for like a year. So I’m frozen shit construction workers. And it was fine.
No big deal. He’s sold stuff and whatever. And then rebel went out of business. And they stopped to construction 5000 construction workers are gone. China I think pulled the money out of the project. And basically, and I’m in New York, I’m coming down once every few weeks to check on things. And, and I was like, Holy shit, like what do we do? Because no one’s going to rent it now. There’s no construction workers.
Anthony Codispoti: This Yeah, you couldn’t get somebody to rent it before when there were construction. Wow.
Mike Hauke: So it’s like, what are we going to do? I said, you know, let me just shut it down for a little bit. Start creating my own recipes. I was never a chef.
I never did culinary stuff. I was always the kid late night in college, all my friends, you know, dorms, frat houses, whatever that I’d make like buffalo chicken ramen noodles and like pasta and Zool and I always grew up with by one grandmother who, you know, was on the Italian side. You know, she had rosary, rosary beads in one hand and making pasta, the Zool with a wooden spoon and you know, you know what I mean, and whatever, but all love that my other grandmother was Jewish, Russian, Polish.
She’d be cooking for me, struggling me with her Moo Moo. So I always like was around food, like food, cooked and messed around with things. And I said, you know, let me just try out my own recipes and see, you know, where that goes. And I’m going to make what I like to eat.
And I don’t really care what the cuisine is per se. And I asked my employees in the times like, hey, you guys have worked at pizzerias in the past, we’re going to start making our own dough. And they were like, oh, I’m not showing you my recipe. And I was like, all right, so like, let’s create our own recipe. And they were like, oh, I’m not, you know, this is like my secret.
So I’m like, okay, I was like, you’re gone. I call my food suppliers. I was like, Hey, listen, we’re going to start making your own dough or own sauce or own this.
And they were like, no, no, no, keep buying our frozen dough or keep buying our canned sauce. And I’m like, no, like, I’m going to make it. Like, no, we don’t, you know, so then I’m like, all right, well, how do you make like cheese? And they’re like, Oh, you need curd. I’m like, okay, well, how do you, how do you get curd? Oh, we could sell you curds of pay in the ass. No one wants to do that.
Are you crazy? So then I’m like, all right, well, how do you make curd? They’re like, no one makes curd, like you need milk and you have to whatever. And I was like, all right, well, sell me milk. I’m going to start messing around.
They wouldn’t. And I’m like, all right, well, everyone’s gone. And I got rid of everyone clean the slate, burned down basically. And Tony Baloney’s really came about my dad, who was the one who really came up with the name, because he was called Tony Baloney as a kid by his grandfather, who was father, they called him, he then called me, I call my two sons. And it basically means naughty kid. So yeah, you little Tony Baloney, get upstairs and wash your face. It’s time for bed. And it was a thing from like way back in the day, 50s movies, you see like, you know, the father walking with the horn and glasses and the pipe in his mouth and the suitcase and the newspaper under his arm is a guy, a little Tony Baloney, he was getting upstairs and and it was like a naughty play on otherwise regular pizza and subs and Italian food. And I ran with it. And I said, you know what, let’s just do Tony Baloney’s my favorite foods, Indian food. I’m Jewish. I’m one eighth Italian.
You know, that’s quite a combo. Yeah, if you were going to tell me about it, my grandmother’s great grandfather’s brother was like Pope Leo the 13th. So like, there is some hardcore Italian heritage there.
But ultimately, you know, it’s like a fun plan. Otherwise, you know, Italian pizza food and we get some pushback used to anyway, sometimes like, Oh, you know, what kind of self respecting Italian place doesn’t have like deal palmish on or whatever. And I’m like, well, I don’t know, we’re not that Italian and be try this. This is my grandma’s recipe bullshit, you know, and and I give it to them and they have this pizza. They call this is delicious. And I’m like, yes, Tika Masala pizza. That’s like Indian Tika Masala, coconut curry sauce with paneer cheese, sesame crust and a green chutney. But I called it something else just to get them to eat it.
And they were going, this is phenomenal. I’m like, you’re eating Indian food. I’m like, yeah, I know. But like, was it good? Like, oh, it’s amazing. I like, I never had that on pizza before. I’m like, all right, well, so
Anthony Codispoti: let’s back up a little bit, Mike, because you you you did a deep dive on a brand new idea, at least it seems like that from what from the part of the story that I’m hearing. And you didn’t have a background in food or culinary, like what made you so interested, excited, passionate, confident to go down this road. I mean, you cleaned house, you’re telling your supplier, you’re out of here, you’re telling the people that we’re working for, you’re out of here. And like, you were very strong in this direction that you wanted to go. But you didn’t have any experience in any of this.
Mike Hauke: No, but I mean, my philosophy in general, and like, sometimes it gets me in a little bit of trouble. But it’s always like, if there’s a will, there’s a way. But more important than that, like, you know, there’s a option ABC, D, and, you know, I’ll expense the alphabet 1000 times before I give up.
And I won’t, I’ll just keep expensing the alphabet until I come to some sort of conclusion and or, you know, place that is going to work for everyone myself, the business, the brand, the customer. So, you know, I think ultimately, the need was for this property, not the Sid vacant, it was to have it generate some kind of income. It was to maybe find a gap in the market that wasn’t currently there, because ultimately in the old school bar kind of thing, sub shops that have been there for a long time. But nothing was like really moving the market or getting people excited. And, you know, I don’t want to cannibalize anybody’s business, I don’t want to ever go into a market and try to cannibalize people’s sales or what they do. So everything I do is really genuine to, you know, what we’re creating.
And I said, you know, no one’s doing this anywhere really. It’s a tourist destination in general Atlantic City are real people that live here and work here and do things. So let me try it out and let’s see how it goes and it ended up working and people really liked it. A lot of casino execs start coming in and then you get big vans that are the high rollers that are coming in on comps. And, you know, little by little, these people just start coming into this place where at the time, you know, it was set up for like a bodega, you had racks of like honey buns and toilet paper and random stuff, which we got rid of. We had plastic lattice literally separating the eating area from the kitchen with a couple like stools. We made it into a wall, you know, and little by little, we adapted knowing that customers are coming in here. And then you have some celebrities that came in and they’re like, dude, where am I right now? Like this place is, I mean, it’s a 150 year old building.
It’s so beat up. It’s barely branded. And then I was like, you know, let me rebrand it and brand it appropriately and have it stand out and make it, you know, representative of the food we’re serving and the things that I like to do and the vibe and people coming to Atlantic City and they are here from God knows where they’re from Norway, they’re from Ohio, it doesn’t matter. We want them to come in and feel they’re getting like that experience.
So the food’s got to match, the aesthetics have to match to a degree and the service has to match and we have to, you know, do the best we can do to highlight those things.
Anthony Codispoti: So for those listening who maybe aren’t from the East Coast or, you know, haven’t been a bodega because it’s a little bit unfamiliar in certain parts of the country. It’s kind of like a small corner store that’s like a combination of like a little grocery convenience store as well as serving food. So that’s kind of how it started out. And then quickly you realize, hey, we’re on to something with the food service part of this. Let’s get rid of the rest of it, rebrand it, clean it up. At what point, Mike, did you realize we’re on to something like this is actually going to work?
Mike Hauke: I mean, in creating all the different recipes and weird stuff, people really start taking to and saying, oh my God, this is really good. At the time, a cheese steak was a cheese steak was a cheese steak was a cheese steak like this buffalo chicken cheese steaks. It’s a brick of shaved chicken packed out and they put it on the grill and they put some maybe Frank’s red hot sauce on it and they just smack it on and American cheese. And to me, I’m like, well, you know, I love a lot of different foods. I love Mexican food. I started making our own cheese case of a hawker Mexican string cheese. And I made this cheese steak that was called the ole it’s still on the menu. It’s one of our top sellers. And it is steak, usually take the steak, um ish thing they put on the grill can be rib eye sirloin, they grill it up and they put some spices on it, maybe salt and pepper and smack it on the and I’m like, you know, let me use real rabbi like just straight up rib eye and we shave that down. And a lot of core legion it and or fat.
It just wasn’t so like appealing. So I know why they use steak. Um, so they use, you know, this like shaved chip steak, if they call it, why don’t I take rib eye and we marinate it in almost like the use of each a, but I’ll do it in like mezcal. I’ll cook it first. I’ll marinate it in mezcal with some spices, some lime, whatever. And then let me put it back and shave it up and it ended up being really soft, really, uh, you know, held its fiber, but it was not as like, you know, gritty.
And I came up with some quality of light and we started making it. I made this homemade chipotle ish house crema sauce, homemade case of a hawker string cheese. And I enter the food network diners, drivens and dives guy Fieri cheese stick battle where the time was all like the big guys that were competing in it from Philly, always like legendary places. And it was in Atlantic city at the food and wine festival. And I was like, yeah, I’m going to enter the cheese stick O.
A. You know, everyone’s doing Philly cheese steaks. They’re very proud of those things. And, uh, we’re just not that place. So I’m going to bring to the table what we bring to the table.
Anyway, we did it. Everyone’s like, you’re out of your mind. Like, you know, everything is classic, classic, this classic that. And by the way, I love a classic cheese steak. Like anyone says to me, Oh, who has a better like Philly cheese steak, you or, you know, uh, uh, Pat’s or geno’s or Tony Luke’s or whatever. And I’m like, they do like Pat’s invented the cheese steak. So you may not like it or not, but like, that’s what a Philly cheese steak is. So like that’s not to me, if I have an argument, they make a Philly cheese steak. I don’t, you do something different. Right.
So it is what it is, you know? So I brought to the competition and I ended up winning. I beat all those guys out. And, and that was like 2010, I think. And, uh, and people then started noticing like, wait, what are they doing over there? What are they, what are they doing on their subs?
Or what are they doing on their pizza or whatever it is? And I started really diving into that because ultimately, like we can build your own sub. You can make a sub with steak and sauce and cheese. And, you know, we have that on our menu.
You could add potato chips to your sub and like, you can make your own crazy concoction. But ultimately we have subs that we really put a lot of work, time and effort into that are way different off the grid. And we hope you enjoy it. So when you come to the shop and you have one of our subs, you know, there are our own creations. We make it ourselves. We make our own chimichurri. We, we, we do different stuff and it really took off and people started coming in the shop. And instead of them saying, yo, let me get a cheese steak with American cheese and, you know, fried onions.
I want them fried hard. We say, we listen and we’re like, hold on. First, what’s your name? Second, if you’re here to go.
Third of all, have you looked at the menu? And most times it’s no, I just came in here and I heard about you guys and I want to see your cheese steaks that’s up against the rest. And we tell them, if you want to fill a cheese steak, there’s a million places you can go with.
Anthony Codispoti: You don’t want a filly cheese steak if you’ve come here.
Mike Hauke: You want is or whatever it is. I mean, if you want something similar, you want the whole thing. It’s our Cooper sharp smoked cheese whiz that we make in house, fried long hots, caramelized onion, Sicilian chili spread that we harvest incisely ourselves instead of like wet, hot, you know, pickled peppers.
Try that. If you like a filly cheese steak, this would be like the closest thing to maybe that. And they get it and they love it. Oh my God, this is amazing. It’s one of those things where we’ll do it for you. That’s just not really a stick.
Anthony Codispoti: So how do these ideas come to you, Mike? Do you have like a process where you’re like, okay, we’re starting with the filly cheese steak. How can we make it creative? Let’s pull from Indian flavors. Let’s pull. No, like you just sort of sitting there and like crazy thoughts pop into your head. Yeah.
Mike Hauke: And I like something. I like to eat something. I’m interested in something. I have had an idea rolling in my brain about something that I would like to eat or make or a customer take on it. And a lot of times it’s, it’s, you know, what will a customer be okay with and what will they not be okay with?
So, you know, there’s always like that fine line where you can’t push it too far because it’s either a price issue or it’s a menu item that is just really like wacky. For example, everyone loves chicken fried steak. You wouldn’t know it because most people don’t eat chicken fried steak unless they’re in the part of the country where they make that in the South or whatever.
People don’t know Alabama white sauce, but when they have it, they love it. So, you know, one pizza we put on the menu, I think it was called at the time, Bischte Audi, but now it’s a different pizza. And it was Rocky Mountain fried oysters, which are bull testicles, a Alabama white sauce smoked, smoked homemade mozzarella.
And it was delicious. But like knowing that people are, you’re selling them something and they’re eating testicles, like there’s a very small niche of the population that will actually eat that pizza versus us just having fun and doing what we’re doing. And that eventually turns into something else because you can’t put down the pizza. And then I put chicken fried steak in a sub I call the rodeo clown. And it’s smoked grits homemade smoked mozzarella Alabama white sauce, fried chicken fried steak, which is basically it’s not there’s no chicken. It’s a piece of hanger steak pounded out that’s battered and fried. And people love it, but people also don’t really know what chicken fried steak is.
They think it’s chicken. They think so like this is fine line between like what you can can actually put out there that people will adopt versus a great idea that actually tastes delicious. And then it’s really up to the staff to be able to shove it down their throats in some sort of sense or find that that that medium marketing angle and word it properly or market it properly. So people would actually adhere to it and some things just don’t work out and some things, you know, as amazing as the sub repeats is, people just don’t get. And there’s other things that they really do get that you have to dumb down to such a degree because they are so familiar within the product.
They’re so familiar with a flavor. So there’s a fine balance of it and for me, I always want to go off the rails. You know, I want to fully go off the rails and have to tame myself down sometimes and say, you know what, I don’t think, you know, we can put this on a pizza or a sub or or there’s just no way to get around this. And if I’m going to do it, it’s just going to be for like my own enjoyment.
Anthony Codispoti: I was going to say, do you ever just put something on the menu with a strong suspicion that people won’t adopt it, but you just enjoy that shock factor? I mean, like the Rocky Mountain Oyster pizza. Did you think that people were going to adopt that or you’re just like, I’m just going to have some fun here?
Mike Hauke: I wanted to see. Yeah. You know, I wanted to see what it was like another pizza called the jerk oof. So it’s a beef jerky pizza. My buddy James Jerky down in South Jersey, we use his jerky on it and it’s called the jerk oof. Like oof, like, wow, like, you know, you eat something.
That’s a lot. And it was smoked ranch, beef jerky, like to me, jerky is like the new pepperoni. It’s so good on a pizza and it worked really, really, really, really well in Atlantic City store in the summertime. It didn’t work so well in Hoboken Jersey City just because of, you know, I think the high transactional value of what we do in slices there.
And it just didn’t, it didn’t like translate. We’re in Atlantic City, people heard about it and knew about it. They came in for it. They were excited about it.
And they still ask for it every single day. Like, can I get, you know, jerky as a topping on a pizza? So, you know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it’s the marketing thing. Sometimes it’s the right time, right place, luck, like a lot of things, you know.
Anthony Codispoti: Tell us about the taco pizza. When I first heard that you had a taco pizza, I’m like, oh, it’s got, you know, probably some, you know, Mexican flavors. It’s, you know, some Mexican sauce. It’s, I don’t know, maybe they crumbled up some, you know, tortilla chips and put it on top of it. But when you see this thing, it’s, it’s out of this world. Can you describe it for us?
Mike Hauke: Pizza basically came about because we’re in Hoboken. I was definitely a little bored that day. We were busy going through the motions. I just sat like one of those days and just get a little bored. And these kids came in and they were all stoned and they’re like, yo, it’s up. It’s taco Tuesday. And they get, can I get some tacos? And I’m like, dude, it’s Tony Bologna. He’s like, we don’t make taco pizzas, subs, whatever. Like, I know, bro, but it’s taco Tuesday. And I was like, you know what? I was these kids at one point skateboarding around.
I got you. I went back in the kitchen, Lena was like, yo, can you make up some tacos? They’re always making tacos for themselves. We got Maseca, which is corn flour. And she’s like, how many do you want? I’m like, I don’t know, make me up like three orders, like nine, nine tacos. I don’t know, whatever. Anything on them. Yeah, whatever.
I don’t care. Any subs just make it into tacos. And they were loving it. They came out like, oh, yo, thank you so much.
You’re the best, whatever. And then I came back in the kitchen. I was like, you know what, fuck this.
And I just had something in my brain. I’m like, you know what? I got to like, I’m like getting a cage.
I get cagey little times sometimes. And I said, you know what, fuck it, Lena, make me up like 24 tacos. And she’s like, of what? And I told her what to make. I made the pizza. I took our Molle sauce and my grandmother’s babushka sauce, which we used for the password brisket. And I mixed it up and I made my own sauce with it, took a case of a hawk of string cheese, put down the pie, put it in the oven, popped it out, assembled all the tacos, made some guacamole. And I kept telling the guys, yeah, don’t leave.
I’ll be right out. And I brought this pizza out to them and they bugged out. They were like caught the holy ghost like, holy shit, like I want you to adopt me as my dad. It was hilarious, but they were loving it. And I was like, but listen to me, favor, don’t tell anybody about this because ultimately, like my staff is going to kill me if I actually try to like sell this and make this on the menu.
It’s just a lot, right? The next day, literally, yo, how about the taco pizza? And like one after the other after the other. So now I’m like, all right, AC at the time was a little slow.
It’s like off season. So I called up our manager there and I was like, listen, Fernando, we stole this to the state. He actually heads up Mad Mutt’s production. And I said, listen, I want to start making tacos, shells, tortillas. He said, well, we can buy him this factory’s out there.
I was like, no, I know, but like I want to make them. So we started making like, I don’t know, 2000 tacos a day in Atlantic City in between what’s going on. We had a a Mercedes Sprinter truck, refrigerated truck. We’d bring them up to Hoboken, you know, at the time we were selling like 300 taco pizzas a day only on Tuesdays. It was lying out of the door crazy. I mean, every single show we were on, the only arts, I was offered to be flown to Dubai and make taco pizza for someone.
We brought pizza at the Teterborough Airport to go to the Bahamas. I think it was Michael Jordan. I mean, from what I understand, you know, they wouldn’t tell us who it was for a lot of stuff like that. And it took off and then we started offering it every day because people wouldn’t come in and I’ll never forget it was like a Wednesday and these two guys come in, shops packed and like, yo, I want to tackle pizza. I’m sorry, it’s only Tuesdays. And like, do we just drove from Denver? And I was like, get out of here.
Like, no, I’m serious. Like we literally just drove from Denver and like we, and I’m like, I got to make it for him, you know, and I made it. And then so we started saying, you know, we’ll offer it every single day.
We have to just figure out how to do it and do it properly and do it, you know, in some kind of scale. And from there to go off and
Anthony Codispoti: so for people who are listening to the audio version, I brought up some images on screen, find your way to a video version spotify on our website, YouTube. So there’s a like a semi traditional pizza crust underneath, but then there are soft taco shells arranged around the edges. And each of those taco shells is filled with a different kind of taco. And then in the middle, there’s a giant portion of guacamole. And so I mean, just at home
Mike Hauke: made crema, carne asada is one taco, beer braised pulled chickens, another taco with some people, jalapeno crema, we have our mezcal marinated rib eye steak with Chipotle underneath is this base of like a mole ish sauce queso la jaca, the crust is actually a meseca cornmeal dough and cross to the whole thing through and through.
And they’re all corn tacos pressed, you know, through and through it’s it’s its own animal and it is a beast to make. It’s not this thing that you just throw together. A lot of people think that it’s just like things on things in general.
Anthony Codispoti: And it’s like, no, this looks like it would be incredibly time consuming. And and I mean, you’ve got a lot of really high quality ingredients, lots of meat in here, lots of, you know, avocados for the guacamole, the cheeses, these are not inexpensive. I have to imagine what is one of these pizzas go for typically that pizza right there’s 100 bucks.
Mike Hauke: Yeah, that’s all you guys are killing it.
Anthony Codispoti: It’s like, no, that actually sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Mike Hauke: Well, and if like people walking the shop and the slices $15, tacos on it $15 for a slice when you guys crazy. And it’s like, if you went to any taqueria and got three carne asada tacos, forget brisket, forget whatever, three chicken tacos, what would it cost for them? I don’t know, eight to $12 minimum.
Yeah, right. So caught 10 bucks. If you got a cheese quesadilla, how much would that cost? $6, $8? Yeah. If you got an order of side order guacamole, what would that cost? I don’t know, five, six bucks, right? So you’re getting every one of those things in a slice of pizza that is absolutely delicious, you’ll probably not be able to finish. And then they get it and they’re like, Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense.
Anthony Codispoti: So yeah, for those listening, if you’re in the New Jersey area, I recommend you go and get one of these before Mike Wysons up and jacks up the price because it sounds like the deal of the century. You get a lot of great press, Mike, like I’m looking at your website, like, I mean, every food show you can think of a lot of the big morning shows. How did you get to be so good at this? Do you just have the world’s best PR agent or what?
Mike Hauke: No, I do it all myself and house. I think people think it’s just, you do things and people notice and get on TV shows or whatever it is. But like a lot of it is relationships that you form over time. A lot of it’s you actually producing the thing that you say you’re going to make a lot of times for Instagram, people just make crazy things and hope that like someone catches on to it. And the next thing you know, it takes off and there’s like a need for it. So then you start making it more. And like that in business is always something you test things out with and you mess around with. But like, for this, like if we’re making the log on to an example or the swine fighter, these are pizzas that really are their own things to facilitate.
They’re not easy to manufacture. There’s a lot of prep. There’s a lot of recipe. There’s a lot of coordination behind it. And like when the Drew Barrymore show calls and says, we want to feature this, you can’t just like do it for the show and then not have it for the customer.
It was ultimately that wouldn’t be helpful to the business, but it wouldn’t be helpful to the show either because they’re letting their credibility or whatever, whether they need content or not, it doesn’t really matter. And you got to be set out for it. So for us, it’s like to get to the place and over the years, like I’ve been way better at this, but in the beginning, you would do things that you maybe weren’t fully set out for, but running a business and having, you know, 50 to 100 employees at any given time, there’s a lot of, you know, spinning plates, there’s a lot of things in motion, and everyone’s got to be on the same page. So if we’re saying that we’re doing this thing, and then the Drew Barrymore show has it on national television, and then people want to buy it, you got to be ready for that. You got to be set up for it.
And you can’t be this like cross your fingers and like hope it works out. You got to be ready in some way, shape or form, you can run out of things, which, you know, we often do because we’re making everything, but It’s just, it’s a lot of time, coordination, relationship building, you know, being consistent and you know, showing up when you say you’re going to show up.
Anthony Codispoti: So you had the one store location, the first one to start out as a bodega, you know, quickly realized where the money was coming from and where you should put the attention, did a rebrand. At what point did you decide this is going so well, we need to open up a second and then a third location?
Mike Hauke: I mean, I won Labouin Kelly’s nationwide food truck competition for the Cheese Thick Olay also. It’s like Chef Jean-George and Josh Capone who at the time I used to love his restaurants, I still do, but he had some, you know, in New York City, very well respected chefs in general and good people. And I won their nationwide food truck competition, started with like thousands of trucks and it whittled down to this and that. And I said on the show, they said, what do you want to do next? And I was like, I’m going to open up at Hoboken.
You know, that was kind of what I had in my brain and my wife and I were talking about it. And so we ended up starting looking for leases shortly before then maybe a little bit after that. And we opened up at Hoboken shortly after that.
And then we were at Hoboken and we got approached by some gentleman that came in the shop that were running the food hospitality for the Prudential Center. It was Legends at the time. And we got into Legends.
We had like two kiosks in the Prudential Center for like hockey games. And little by little, we just started building on brand, building on, you know, our menu, building on the business and little by little. So you know, in Atlantic City, we started with that shop that I got a food truck because people were scared to come to Atlantic City.
And I was like, what are you scared of? Like, well, we want to have a birthday party. And I’m like, you know what? I’m like, get a food truck and I’m going to drive to your house and I’m going to serve Tony Bologna’s menu. So we had a food truck and then I got to approach and do farmers markets and sell fresh mozzarella. So I started making fresh and manufacturing fresh mozzarella, which is called Tony’s Farm Table, which is a separate business that we harvest our own olive oil in Sicily, we manufacture mozzarella, we do focaccia, flatbreads, fennel, and we started doing farmers markets.
And then we opened in Old Boken and then we opened the Prudential Center. And then from there, we started, you know, shipping out DTC to customers because people in Ohio and California or whatever, like we want Tony Bologna’s too. And I’m like, well, how fast can I open up shops? Like, you know, let me just start shipping stuff. And then we opened up in Jersey City. We had a store in Long Branch, which is a very seasonal market on the boardwalk that we since closed. And then and we just started, you know, pushing forward.
Anthony Codispoti: And what kind of food are you shipping nationwide? Like, can I get one of these taco pizzas sent to me? Is that travel?
Mike Hauke: There’s a waitlist right now for it on Gold Belly. But yeah, our taco pizza, our swine fighter, the Bologna Rex, we we ship it nationwide. I mean, we started doing it right before COVID, COVID it started picking up. And, you know, we were doing 2000 packages a week, shipped nationwide. And we picked that back up, I think next week on Gold Belly. And we shipped pizzas and you could choose, you know.
Anthony Codispoti: And so are they shipped like, cooled or frozen? Are they coming hot? Like, they’re all frozen.
Mike Hauke: Packaging has gel packs, ice liner, great unboxing experience. We do pizza making kits. We ship nationwide. We teach virtual classes. So we have a lot of corporate customers that we ship worldwide. We ship everywhere, by the way.
So we’ll have a customer that is in, let’s just say, cybersecurity. They have a team all over the world. Buenos Aires, Mexico City, London. And we’ll ship pizza making kits everywhere that we hop online. And it’s like, hey, what’s up everyone? We have a studio upstairs in Atlantic City, where we film all the classes and we teach pizza making classes in Montreal and Brona making classes. And we do this for corporate, where, you know, corporation, white label their kits and in the kit that is branded for their company, all the packaging, a pizza cutter and apron, whatever. And we ship this out, you know, worldwide and do these classes. So, you know, that’s kind of part of DTC.
Anthony Codispoti: And so these classes, did the idea, the online virtual classes, did that come about during COVID?
Mike Hauke: That was basically us saying, holy shit, what are we going to do? We don’t even know, like, how to operate a restaurant right now. You have to shift everything. That was the massive upheaval. And I went online on Instagram one day and I was like, hey, whoever wants to do a class on Sunday, I’ll teach from my house, come pick up a pizza maker kit from any Tony Blaine’s location and go on Instagram Live at like six o’clock. And I did it. And like thousands of people bought the kits and went online.
Anthony Codispoti: The next thousands of people came locally to buy kits.
Mike Hauke: Yeah. The next week we said, you know, we can deliver them to your door. People are like, well, I’m in like Montclair, New Jersey, I’m in whatever. So, you know what? I bought some software that was a truck routing mapping software. And sign up, pay for your kits. We put in the software.
It calculated a route. I had a guy go around the whole entire state of New Jersey delivering kits literally to your door. And we did that. The next week we had more, a couple more thousand people. And then we started getting funny with it. And I was like, you know what? Next week we’re going to do like a Peaky Blinderstein class.
And I would dress up like you can Google it on YouTube. Tony Baloney’s, uh, Calzone class, we did Meatball, Makin’ Cloud. We did all different kind of classes and we made it fun for kids.
So everyone throughout Hoboken, Jersey City, Atlantic City, or Jersey in general, would log on to these classes and we would have a themed kid. I dressed up like bad boy, brat, crazy wig. I was, uh, uh, the, um, the, uh, the tire king. I fake tattooed zombie with a mullet and bangs. Uh, I dressed up like him. I talked like him the entire time. I got my cubs, tire cubs. And we did these classes and we then we started shipping.
So I was like, this is, you know, un, it’s not sustainable for us to drive over the state with these kids. So we figured out DTC, we linked up with Goldbelly. DTC direct to consumer. To me up and we started shipping these kids, you know, uh, nationwide and people were logging into these classes that we were doing for, you know, a good, maybe two months and then corporations started getting involved and saying, Hey, listen, we want to do this for our team building.
We want to do this for our company. And we started white labeling them. We’ve done a lot of TV shows like, uh, sci-fi network alien TV show. We got on with Alex and their whole entire crew, uh, and we had glow in the dark dough for the class along with a fully branded.
Anthony Codispoti: What do you put in the dough to make it glow in the dark? Okay. All right. Don’t tell us, but, uh, but you know, will it make me glow in the dark? That’s what I want to know. Am I going to be ready to act if, okay, so it’s safe to you.
Mike Hauke: A lot of stuff like that. We do a lot of corporations where we’ll manufacture, um, you know, kits for them. Some are, are constant. We do a lot of classes with them on an ongoing basis where, you know, at least once a month, once a quarter, we are facilitating them. They have their own little stores locker in our, you know, in our, in our, in our, in our shipping warehouse.
And, um, you know, we, we basically drop ship for them. These kits that we manufacture, Scott’s pizza tours. Um, he was doing it for a while. We, we, we manufactured all Scott’s pizza making kits for all of his customers, fully branded for him during COVID and slightly afterwards. So, you know, we started doing that. And then, um, you know, we operate the stores and we’re always keeping busy with that stuff.
Anthony Codispoti: Uh, tell me about the food truck experience. Do you park these trucks in like, you know, busy areas or are these just like rent for your event kind of a thing?
Mike Hauke: Rent for your event. We have a private party come to our house, two hours, Tony Baloney’s experience. And we’re out. Um, I’ve never done the street pull up. I’ve never done the street hustling business. There’s a lot of mercantile things involved, especially Atlantic city. There’s permitting involved. There’s, it’s all parking, the truck and space. And it’s just one of those things where like, you’re really just caution your fingers and saying like, hope it doesn’t rain, hope it doesn’t snow, hope it’s busy. Our truck, you know, keeps busy enough, um, where we just bring it out for private parties.
Anthony Codispoti: How far will you go with the truck? Where can people get it?
Mike Hauke: I mean, we’ve had our truck freighted to Chicago before for an event. So if they want to pay for it, you’ll do it. All right.
Anthony Codispoti: So tell me about Mad Mutz. What is this?
Mike Hauke: So we started manufacturing mozzarella in 2010 in Atlantic city. And I started taking milk and making curb, you coagulate the milk. I’m in Sicily at my buddy’s place. And I’m like, why did they make mozzarella here? And basically they kill calf, take its stomach out, take the bacteria out, call rented, put it in the milk, boil it, coagulate it. And it separates out. So if you had milk in your refrigerator for three months, what happened? It would separate into curds. Well, they do it quickly to then be able to restretch it, which is called pasta philata stretch curd. So I came back and I was like, that’s kind of gross. I can’t imagine that’s how people do it. A lot of cheese on the market in general, not vegetarian.
People don’t know that. So if you’re vegetarian, most times the cheese that you’re eating is not and use an animal, rent it. So for me, I want to use a vegetable, rent it, start researching this kind of stuff, boiling the milk, coagulating it, making curd, making mozzarella, selling it at farmer’s markets, selling it in our restaurants. And then I was like, how come no one has like truffle mozzarella? And it’s really difficult to take milk, flavor that milk in some way, shape, or form, make truffle curd, stretch the curd.
Like you’re talking about pH levels, fat, the structure of the cheese, which is the buttermilk solid versus the buttermilk fat, the exoskeleton. Like there’s so much into it that I learned with trial and error over the course of God knows how many years and I started making flavor in mozzarella and perfected that spicy mozzarella, truffle, chimichurri, whatever. And then I started saying, well, why doesn’t there no mozzarella sticks with fresh mozzarella? And the truth is it’s typically, you know, fresh mozzarella is too moist to fry.
It just explodes, which is the reason why people use string cheese or blocks of cheese, they cut them down, they roll them out and they do whatever. And I was like, well, why don’t I really try to perfect this? Because on my menu, I think our customers would really appreciate my flavored mozzarella in the form of mozzarella sticks. So I started manufacturing them and we have a whole mozzarella laboratory in the Atlantic City, we call Tony Bologna’s mozzarella laboratory. And we’re making, you know, in the summertime, thousands of pounds of cheese and all these different things. And then we start putting them on our menu.
They’re really popular. Some of our top category sellers, truffle mozzarella sticks. It’s truffle mozzarella plus truffle batter and the outside’s a homemade panko truffle crust. We use real truffles from Italy, or Bonnie truffles, which is like the largest. You know, they are like the name in truffles worldwide.
Look, I’m up for Bonnie. So we start working, buying our bodies, real truffles and, you know, going through that process. And then it came to a point where we started getting hit up by a lot of restaurants, food service providers, grocery stores. We want to carry your mozzarella. We want to carry your mozzarella sticks. And I was like, well, first of all, a couple of problems.
One, I’m not really set up, licensed to like sell to you in that scale. But that’s can be overcome. You know, I can figure that out. I have a 2000 square foot manufacturing facility, so like, you can figure that out. And the second thing is, you know, how do I produce these things at scale? And I spent really the last few years perfecting that process to be able to get it to the point that we can produce at scale. We can produce 60,000 sticks a day, fresh mozzarella. You’re talking about clean, honest product.
We get it from the milk from real farms. And I called up my friend, Michael, who owns a real estate investment company. He’s got his hands in a lot of things, but he’s a super well oiled machine. He’s got a couple of mature companies.
And I said to him, listen, I’m getting hit up from everyone from shop right and Driscoll Foods and Performance Food Group and Restaurant Depot. And like, I can do it. I’ll get it done. And I said, but I love a partner that, you know, really can help me facilitate this, whether it’s on the bookkeeping side, the AR side, the compliance side. I know how to make a really good product, interesting, fun, honest.
But, you know, this is a little bit different of an animal. And I got him involved. And since then, we’ve been able to not only, you know, have the idea of getting the scale, but we actually built this factory out and tweak things and added onto things that we can actually hold over a million sticks in inventory, produce 60,000 sticks a day. We just got into Restaurant Depot. They just did a second reorder of our product that’s down here in Egiber Township, which is super exciting. Great partner of ours, by the way. We’re getting at the shop right in the next few weeks for the retail packs. And we’re starting DTC probably early next week, where we already have a waiting list that’s over like 9000 people right now that are waiting to order and us to go live with a direct to consumer. So between these things, you know, I was able to, you know, find a great partner in Michael Burns.
He’s on the website. It’s kind of funny, you know, really put all that hard work, heavy assets and, you know, investment to good use. And instead of just making it for Tony Baloney’s and being a top category seller, you know, now we have a lot of restaurants in the local South Jersey area. Or over the years, I’m sending out packages to Canada. Literally, people, can I get the, the, the hottie stick and I get, and I’m literally packing it up. I’m doing, I’m sending it to them.
They’re like, I don’t care. I’ll pay for the shipping hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of packages. This is a little bit more hub and spoke and we’re able to really get it out to the masses and scale and get it out to those food service providers. We’re working with a sea shore down in the South Jersey area that feeds a lot of the restaurants. LBI to Kate May, Restaurant Depot, Driscoll Foods, Performance Food Group, Shop, Brighton Retail. You can make them at home, you know, at your convenience. The unicorn mozzarella sticks. And so it’s exciting.
Anthony Codispoti: So if I have this, if I have these cheese sticks shipped to me, how am I prepping them? How am I heating them up, getting them ready?
Mike Hauke: So on the website, once you select your flavor of stick, there is going to be on your box, a QR code, but more importantly, on the website, cook it like the Cacio Pepe. And, and if you scroll down a little bit. Yeah, there’s instructions on there.
Anthony Codispoti: Air fry, deep fryer oven. Yeah. So we always recommend deep fryer pan fry 100%. These are mozzarella sticks. Mozzarella sticks are literally like
Mike Hauke: such an indulgent, awesome food and they come out the best. It’s like any food in the air fryer. Like you can’t really expect it to be as good as yeah, even french fries.
Like it just doesn’t do that. But anyway, they are set up to be an air fryer or oven. We recommend pan fry or deep fry. And we give you the instructions along with that on those little drop down tabs. There’s going to be a video and you’ll see me in video form and stick skew form explaining how these sticks operate and what to do with them and how you can do them. Plus we got a lot of fun little competitions that go along with the box that are fun, unboxing stuff. Instagram posting videos and little competitions.
Anthony Codispoti: So again, for those not watching a video version of it, recommend that you check out their website. Mad Mutz is spelled N-A-D-M-U-T-Z dot com madmutz dot com. And there’s currently I’m showing a picture on here. I just think it’s the greatest picture. There’s what five different cheese sticks that are kind of cut in half. But this long, gooey, delicious looking stringy cheese stretching from end to end. But the really fascinating thing is the different colors of the breading and then the different colors of the cheeses inside. We’ve got red cheese and black cheese and red coating and black coating.
Mike Hauke: And so it’s an all natural by the way. Yeah. One official color is we use red number dye and 40 dye and this and that. It’s all natural. So like, you know, our truffle mozzarella sticks were on the left. Those are real black and white truffles from Italy. And there’s a yellow hue on the outside of the stick to panko we make. And the cheese actually has a little bit of like black and yellow speckle to it. The Cacio Pepe sticks are black pepper and pecorino.
They’re slightly different color. The one in the middle is the weary weary, which is a Jamaican beef patty golden flaky crust. So it’s like a yellow kind of curry crust. And the inside is a Guyana and weary weary pepper fresh mozzarella. That colors come from the peppers.
Nothing to do with any kind of coloring. Those are the hot. They’re like a if you want to call them like, you know, we can’t really say flame and hot cheeto, but like we make our own style of cheeto. And it’s almost like a savory, spicy, dry aged fresh mozzarella on the inside and a snack cheeto outside.
The one in the end is called the Lucifer. It’s 2.9 million Scoville unit, black Carolina Reaper, Italian Scorpion, Indian Boo Pepper, 10 different peppers in there with a Sicilian charcoal crust. It is ridiculously spicy, disturbing to a point. But it has milk, so it kind of cuts out a lot of that.
You can still eat it, but like it’s semi painful in general. A lot of fun and like they’re a top seller of ours. And it just it’s it’s kind of a little bit of a mind fuck to eat them too, which is fun. You know, a lot of customers eat them and they’re they don’t know what to expect in their black cheese. Like, you know, I still was in close your eyes and just eat it. And they’re like, oh, my God, it’s just really spicy. If you can get over the look of the black cheese, you’re good.
Anthony Codispoti: So as we promised in the intro, here’s how you can get on the wait list madmuts.com slash contact. There’s a place to join the wait list there. And when did you say it’s going to drop, Mike? I think Monday.
Mike Hauke: Oh, OK. Next Monday.
Anthony Codispoti: So by the time this episode comes out, you guys will have been rolling in this for a few weeks now. So that’s exciting. OK. Let me shift gears on you. Mike, we’ve talked a lot about the successes along the way, which have been a lot of fun and look forward to following more of those.
But I’m kind of curious to hear maybe about a particular challenge that you’ve overcome, personal or professional, what that was like and some of the lessons that you learned coming through it.
Mike Hauke: Yeah, I mean, there’s a will, there’s a way and, you know, A, B, C, E, you know, expense in the alphabet. But there’s also sometimes a cost to that because, you know, nothing’s guaranteed and there’s nothing that is, you know, so calculated that you can anticipate COVID or you can anticipate, you know, unforeseen events. So, you know, that’s one of the things that to me, you know, being like the creative type side and really enjoying living in that world is also the real unit economic side or business side that you need to make sure that you’re living up to your end of the bargain and you’re paying your bills and you’re paying your employees and you’re able to make money out of these things that you’re selling. And sometimes there’s businesses with massive years of burn like an Amazon, I guess, you know, those business models are different than what I deal with on a daily basis. So, you know, to me, I was to be conscious of cash flow versus, you know, really investment and, you know, leverage on what I can and can’t do.
And, you know, over the years, there’s some things that I’ve had to just put on the back burner or not fully pursue because, you know, it just it may, may not work out or it may be too much of a risk for me to do. I mean, there are certain stores like our loan branch store that we opened up and I had a different partner at the time that was in the nightclub business and he ended up living down towards loan branch and it was familiar with the market and he thought it would be a great place to open up. Well, for two and a half months out of the year, it’s really busy. For the rest of the year, it is flat on top of that, can fees or H O A fees, you know, that were $2,000 elevated to $6,000 within four years because they were going to be the boardwalk and who knows, I don’t know. And to me, I can’t anticipate that.
I think it’s going to be a good market. I can control my labor in the summer and I can keep it stable at 28%. You’re told my food cost, but ultimately how much can you do?
And that was period of time and how much are you going to eat it or float the rest of the year? And unfortunately, I took an L there. You know, like you can call it a successful store if you put it on paper and looked at the numbers, I guess. But, you know, ultimately, I had to make a decision to close that store and take a loss because I just wasn’t willing to continue to invest in this two month out of the year market. I had to stay open.
You can’t close your doors to the mall kind of thing. It was a hard lesson for me to learn because to me, I always think I could figure it out either way, anyway, and I can make it happen. And ultimately, you realize like it’s just not worth sometimes making it happen.
Anthony Codispoti: Sometimes the best way to move forward is to take a step back first. Yeah.
Mike Hauke: So that’s hard to do. Yes, it’s hard to do. Same thing with our Margate store. Margate store, we opened up in summer 2023. That store was a last minute kind of thing.
We opened that up and we had a great summer. If you know the restaurant business, you know, you start off with inventory and training and labor. You don’t really ever see those dollars until you either liquidate, close, or you float throughout the course of how many years you’re in business. And then, you know, seven months ish later, they decide to do some construction in the building that was going to be for three days. Then it was three weeks.
Then it was three months. And, you know, that’s another thing that you don’t anticipate that. You don’t think that the landlord is going to knock down your building and you’re going to be out of business. And you really run the numbers and you’re like, wait a second. Oh my God. Like it was like $80,000 just in labor, startup food costs and waste at the end that you can’t recoup plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. And like that was another really good lesson for me to learn. What I couldn’t done different. I don’t know. I don’t think there was anything
Anthony Codispoti: different other than sometimes life just throws you curveballs and yeah.
Mike Hauke: Yeah. So, you know, between those things you learn and you figure out and you know, you try to take corrective action and not make those mistakes again. Yeah.
Anthony Codispoti: It’s not how many times you get knocked down, right? Mike, it’s how many times you get back up, dust yourself off and take another swing. You guys have obviously been super focused on getting mad months off the ground. But are there any thoughts to open more physical store locations in the future? Yeah.
Mike Hauke: You know what? I’m always approached a lot of times by like franchise companies and that sort of thing, which I’ve gotten on that road before and I’ve looked into extensively. Ultimately, it is a huge lift and you know, unless you have a company or partner that you’re working with that does this and that’s all they do and they’re the vested party behind it and they, you know, get involved on that level.
For me, that lift right now is just not something we’re focused on. So, you know, we get hundreds of requests every single week to open up locations to franchise to partner up licensing and branding deals to a certain extent in food halls and like we’re always exploring them or always open to talk to everyone about it. But for right now, you know, we’re kind of exploring options of what we can handle and what would make the most sense.
It wouldn’t be the craziest heavy lift like me going literally and opening up locations. And we’re working on some things. So there are some things in the works on the Tony Bologna side, but just not.
Anthony Codispoti: Not Mike doing the whole thing. Exactly.
Mike Hauke: Yeah. Which I love to do, by the way. Yeah. I’m down for it. I love it. It’s like, it’s like, you know, part of my, my vernacular at this point, although, you know, it’s not that scalable and for me to do it. So we’re always looking for, you know, different deals or getting a push by the right partnership. I doubt it forward. Yeah. That’s the main thing.
Anthony Codispoti: What’s the labor market like where you are Mike? Is it still pretty tight? Yeah.
Mike Hauke: I mean, we’ve had the same people on board for many years. So, you know, Atlantic City shop, we have some employees that have been there for 13 years. We’ve opened for 15 years. The first two years were weird, you know, the bodega and this and that.
So we’re lucky in that sense. We’ve taken, you know, some of those employees have transitioned over to Mad Mudside that have built me for those 13 years and are now heading up production and compliance, which is super exciting. It’s a new role for a lot of these people, but it’s a clean slate of like a new process of what we’re doing and it’s not serving a customer food. It literally is a different kind of focus, but it’s still an exciting, you know, brainpower worthy exercise that they really enjoying.
So that’s amazing. Hoboken, same crew really has been there for 10 years, Jersey City, same crew for six years. So we don’t have as much fluctuation and turnover as maybe other places. We keep it really small. We have a tight little group in each of the stores that all really communicate with each other and talk to each other. And in the summertime, you know, it’s really a lot of seasonal employees. So we balloon from 40-ish employees to maybe over 100 employees in the summertime between the farmers market, the food trucks, special events. The Atlantic City shop is crazy in the summer and, you know, we always seem to figure it out or get by. So I can’t, I can’t say it’s rough or it’s tough or it’s, it’s, you know, we’ve always been able to get the right people on board and we’ve learned that if usually they’re not the right person from like to get, we got to move on because
Anthony Codispoti: it seems like it would be a pretty fun place to work. I mean, you guys are taking a very creative approach to things. You’ve got kind of a reverence sense to you.
It’s not like super buttoned up. I mean, business is business. You got to take care of things. But my perception from the outside looking in is that this would be a place that people would enjoy coming to work to. Yeah.
Mike Hauke: I mean, the tough thing is on the kitchen side, a lot of the kitchen staff over the years that have come in seasonally and or just for a job, they’re really well versed in the normal pizzeria or diner or sub shop. And for us, we don’t do that. So like there are fundamentals like hygiene and compliance and stuff that is standard everywhere, like first in first out and checking temperatures or hot holding temperatures. Like all that stuff is the same. Nothing changes and sanitizing a slicing machine like in washing dishes.
Like none of that changes. Although the way we do things that would be build our sandwiches and repeats and we manufacture our ingredients and treat them, that is different. So a lot of times that’s something that some employees have a hard time getting into that mode because they’re like, I got to make a taco pizza. Like, like I just want to make cheese pizza and like go home.
And it’s like we’re not that place. I mean, for me, I don’t want to be in a robotic state in any sense at any time. So for me, I don’t want to be that robot that does the same thing over and over again. I want to mix it up sometimes. I want to have fun with it.
I want to be able to put a spin on it. So, you know, you do weed out a lot of, you know, people that otherwise just can’t fit that mold and they’re so used to doing that same thing. And for a dishwasher, that’s okay. For a pizza maker, for us, it’s not same thing. Counter, you know, employees like they have to have a little personality. They have to be able to articulate the product. They can’t just take an order like a robot.
It’s just not, it’s not what works in our ecoverse. So sometimes, you know, if we’re seasonal, we’re short staffed. Luckily, we have some like tech to rely on and we have self-ordering kiosks. So like sometimes those things are needed because we just don’t have the right staff or enough of the staff to be able to articulate those things. Yeah.
Anthony Codispoti: Mike, I just have one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things for everyone listening today. You like today’s content, please hit the like, share or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you. Mike, what would that be?
Mike Hauke: I mean, best way to get in touch, Mike at TonyBalones.com or Mike at MadMuts.com. You can hit me anytime. Doesn’t matter what it’s for. You know, pretty open and receptive. Oh, yeah. People, I mean, after my pizza main class, they tell everyone, you know, I talk about the most disgusting ingredient ever on pizza, which is the Icelandic fermented shark, you know, and I tell people, listen, if you’re ever an Iceland, you want me to hook you up with the people that I went to do, you know, to get the shark from, I’ll hook it up if you’re ever around the world that pizza friends everywhere or you’re at home making pizza, you’re more than happy to help you if I can.
Anthony Codispoti: That’s great. Last question for you, Mike, what do you see being the big change is coming to your industry in the next couple of years?
Mike Hauke: I mean, AI for sure on a number of levels on the marketing level, on the custom requisition level, on the quant level, which excites me the most. I love numbers and I love unit economics. So, you know, on the quant side of things, I wish I had a little more time to spend on that because, you know, I wrote my own numbers. I wrote my own formulas.
I have macro spreadsheets. Like, you know, I go crazy with that stuff, but ultimately there are certain things that like I wouldn’t even know what to look for or trends that I wouldn’t even see and I think that’s where probably some form of AI would be extremely helpful in understanding, you know, make customers a little better or their propensities or ordering habits or manufacturing practices and stuff like that. So that that’s change wise. I think that’s probably part of it. And then the other piece of it, I feel like, you know, we’ve done, you know, a great job for a long time, vegetarian, vegan, like it seems to also be continually on the rise. So for us, I was vegetarian for 16 years, vegan for five of them.
Like I’m super sensitive to those things. I understand, you know, the multitude of reasons why people are those things and you know, want to be vegetarian or vegan or not. So I get it and it seems to be, you know, a focus of ours year after year where people really do want more and better options for those things.
Anthony Codispoti: And you guys are going to continue to offer those. Oh yeah, for sure. Well, Mike, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.
Mike Hauke: No, I appreciate you having me on and listen to anything else comes up. Any questions you have, anybody out there listening wants to get in touch with me. Reach out to me at any time. Doesn’t matter what it is and I will do my best to get back to you.
Anthony Codispoti: Very generous. Well, folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today. Music
REFERENCES
🔗 Connect with Mike Hauke:
- Website: tonyboloneys.com
- Email: mike@tonyboloneys.com
- Email: mike@madmutz.com
🎯 Special Thanks to Anthony Codispoti & AddBack Benefits Agency
📺 Watch on YouTube: Inspired Stories Podcast by AddBack Benefits Agency