Chicken Salad Chick: Stacy Brown

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2018

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For many of us, chicken salad is just another sandwich filling, but Stacy Brown turned it into a $75 million business. In 2007, she was a divorced mother of three looking for a way to make ends meet. So she started making chicken salad in her kitchen and selling it out of a basket, door-to-door. She eventually turned that home operation into Chicken Salad Chick, and took her recipes to cities across the U.S. Today, Chicken Salad Chick is one of the fastest growing companies in the country. PLUS, for our postscript "How You Built That," how Dan Kurzrock and Jordan Schwartz up-cycled beer grain into ReGrained nutrition bars. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:51.0	That event is on October 16th, and it's sponsored by American Express. You can get your tickets at npr.org slash summit, and now onto the show.
1:01.0	We hit the ground running on what we called our southeastern fundraising tour, and packed up coolers full of chicken salad to hand out to possible investors, and we pitched to anyone that would listen.
1:20.0	In every single meeting that we had, we heard you want us to invest this much money for a minority share of a business that does not have a single franchise open.
1:34.0	Thanks, but no thanks.
1:37.0	We laughed out of the run.
1:52.0	I'm Guy Ross, and on today's show, I was staying at home mom, went from selling homemade chicken salad to friends and neighbors, to building one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in America.
2:08.0	She calls it chicken salad chick.
2:14.0	So chicken salad never really had strong thoughts on it either way, you know, totally solid lunchtime option.
2:22.0	But if you live in most parts of the Southern United States, then you know that chicken salad is much, much more than just a solid option.
2:31.0	It's like a lobster roll in Maine, where it might seem like it's the same thing everywhere, but it's those small nuances, those delicate differences that fuel passionate debate over which lobster shack is the best lobster shack.
2:45.0	And these are the kinds of debates southerners have over chicken salad.
2:49.0	These are the kinds of debates Stacey Brown would have with her friends, and Stacey happened to make really great chicken salad.
2:57.0	Now today, chicken salad chick is one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in America.
	...

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