Beef And Dairy Network - Episode 28 - Roy Gluck Jr.

Episode Date: October 22, 2017

Andy Daly joins in for this episode in which we speak to Roy Gluck Jr., the CEO of fast food restaurant Burgers Barrel, about the difficulties the company is having trying to open a restaurant in the UK.   By Benjamin Partridge and Andy Daly.   Music: Teddy Bear Waltz Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/   Stock media provided by Setuniman/Pond5.com and Soundrangers/Pond5.com

The Beef and Dairy Network podcast is sponsored by Bove Shield Plunge, the new antimicrobial cattle dip from Mitchell's. If it's not Mitchell's, get back in the truck. Bove Shield Plunge is made using only the most caustic chemicals from our supplier's factory in Romania and is proven to destroy 99% of all living things under one meter long. For 10% off your next delivery of 1,000 gallons or more, use the code I'M BURNING, I'M BURNING! Hello and welcome to the Beef and Dairy Network podcast, the number one podcast for those involved or just interested, in the

production of beef animals and dairy herds. The Beef and Dairy Network podcast is the podcast companion to the Beef and Dairy Network website and printed magazine, brought to you by Bovshield Plunge. Coming up later, we have the beef forecast and the milk prices. But first, an interview with US hamburger entrepreneur Roy Gluck Jr. Roy is the CEO of Burger's Barrel, a Kansas-based fast food restaurant which has, this year, run into problems opening its first overseas branch here in the UK. Earlier this week, I spoke to Roy down the line from Kansas City. Hello, I'm Roy Gluck Jr. I'm the CEO of Burger's Barrel, and we are headquartered in Kansas City, Kansas, right here in the middle

of the USA. Beautiful town. Hi, Roy. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. And I know many of our listeners, certainly outside of the USA, may not know exactly what Burger's Barrel is and may not have heard of you before. So maybe you can just give us a bit of background. Absolutely. More than happy to. We are a hamburgers restaurant of the fast food nature, Absolutely. More than happy to. We are a hamburgers restaurant of the fast food nature. And we've been in business now since the early 30s. Business was started by my grandpa, also named Roy, really just out of the kitchen of his one bedroom shack, you'd have to call it, on the Missouri River. And we have now expanded and we are, I believe now we are the number eight hamburger chain in the Midwest of the United States.

Now, where did the name Burger's Barrel come from? I believe it came from your grandfather, Roy. That's right. That's a funny story, and we're always happy to tell it. So down there on the Missouri River in the 30s, during the Great Depression, they were building a bridge over there. It's now come to be called the Amelia Earhart Bridge. And there were some fellows working on that bridge all the time. And my grandpa, also named Roy, lived just up the river. And he thought, you know, I bet you I could make a dollar or two selling food lunchtime to these hungry fellows. And so he cooked up a whole bunch of hamburgers. And the best way to get them down there was to stack them up in a giant barrel and roll that barrel down there to where those

guys working on that. And that's just what he did. And it became known as a burgers barrel. Can you believe that? Prices have gone up a bit now, I'll tell you that. But that's how it all started. The newspapers over here in the UK have begun to report about your restaurant. Yeah.

Because I believe that you are proposing to expand into the British market. You put in your application for the first British burgers barrel. We did. Which was going to be in central London. And that was turned down for a number of reasons. Now, I guess a burger restaurant getting its permit turned down doesn't normally make the news. But some of the reasons why it was closed down were so extraordinary. I think that the newspapers couldn't help,

but, but publish and you've come under quite a lot of criticism. Maybe you can, uh, I can put some of their, their accusations to you and you could, and you could let me know what you think about them. I'd be more than happy to.

I hope that you will, because it's a lot of misunderstandings and we can clear them up right here. The, the first one, which I think was the thing that most of the papers sort of led with, the Guardian went to Kansas and they DNA tested a single Burger's Barrel burger, which was the Burger's Barrel Classic Deluxe. Oh, that's a good one.

And they found out that as well as containing beef, it also contained the flesh of 11 other animals. Yeah. I've got the list here. It was published. It makes for a pretty interesting reading. It's got horse meat, weasels, a sparrow, squid meat, a giraffe, a lizard, a peregrine falcon, a house spider, a crab, a crayfish, and a snow leopard.

That's exactly right. And that was all in one burger. Now, how did that happen, and why and how is that acceptable? Well, our burgers, and we're very proud of it, have a total of 12 different meats, including beef, and all the ones that you mentioned there. You know, down here, I don't know if you have KFC. It used to be called Kentucky Fried Chicken. I guess they're embarrassed to be from Kentucky.

But they advertise, you know, 11 herbs and spices, and everybody gets all excited about it. And we're sort of doing the same thing. We're advertising 12 different meats in every single Burger's Barrel burger. And it's had people real excited here. But you're asking how we started doing that. Funny enough, like all the great innovations of the world, it happened quite by accident. We've got a meat distributor. It's called No Teeth Beef. And they also, in addition to processing high quality beef for restaurants, also process dog food. And when you're in the

dog food business, that's not going to be one source. You know what I mean? That's going to get to be sort of a catch-all and it's whatever's around. Well, we one day got a shipment of beef from them. We made it into hamburgers and people went bananas. More so than ever before. Regular customers coming up to us saying, this is the best hamburger you've ever served me. The people were so excited. I got right on the phone to our beef distributor. I said, what did you do differently this time? Because people are so excited. And I'll never forget that call because he was so our beef distributor. I said, what did you do differently this time? Because people are so excited. And I'll never forget that call because he was so apologetic. And he said, you know what? We accidentally sent you, in addition to some of the beef, we sent you a fair amount of what we're processing as dog food.

And he said, and it could have been anything. And I said, well, you find out exactly what it was today. And the list you just read off is the list he read me. And I said, send us that from now on. And it hadn't been easy because they just happened to, there was a zoo where a giraffe had passed, and they'd send him over to the dog food processing factory, and that was just, they don't always have giraffe.

They don't always have a lot of these things. But they happened to have it that time, and it was such a success that we have demanded it every single time. And it's not easy to source all those different animals. Well, no, I was going to say the snow leopard. Very difficult. Well, it's one of the most endangered animals on the planet. Yeah, I think that's true.

But, well, I want to make it clear that we're not. It's not that we're going into the wild and hunting down snow leopards. These are farm-raised snow leopards. And we raise them up from puppies, and we've got just a giant farm out there in the Nevada desert. I think they probably prefer to be in a colder climate, truth be told, but they're just gambolling around this desert enclosure and very happy until the day that they are slaughtered for our food. And if our distributor is having a hard time laying his hands on something, we'll actually go over to the UK. We've got a wonderful guy over there by the name of Eli

Roberts, and he will slaughter absolutely anything. So if we say to him, hey, we can't lay our hands on any giraffes right now, he'll be more than happy to do it. Anything you can name, he'll slaughter it for you. And so we've used him a fair amount of the time. And how is he managing to source those giraffes? He's based in the UK here. If you say to him, Hey, we need a certain, you know, tonnage of, of giraffe meat. How is he able to get his hands on that? Do you know? Uh, I, I don't know. He has referenced a few times the dark web, which I don't even know what that is, but he, from time to time, I'll get an email from him and he'll say, I, you know, yeah, there's plenty of giraffes on the dark web. And that's where he finds them.

On top of the 12 kinds of flesh that the Guardian DNA test found, one of the things that I've learned subsequently, and actually hasn't been published yet in the paper, but is something that I believe probably will come out, is that they found DNA from a meat that they couldn't actually identify. Wow. Where'd you find that out? Well, I was talking to one of the journalists who's been involved in the investigation, and we were drinking mead. And after probably his 16th or 17th mead, he whispered to my aunt,

he said, there's something actually quite disturbing going on, and said, the guys at the DNA testing center said that it's basically impossible for them not to be able to identify the the the animal from which the flesh comes from yep well listen i'd be a fool to to comment very explicitly and in detail about that for numerous reasons mostly that i don't want people copying our recipe you know like restaurant, we have explored the possibilities of food science and biotechnology, and that's all I really want to say about it. Any suggestion that the source of this meat has the intelligence of man would be scandalous and libelous and slanderous, and I wouldn't even respond to that.

Is there not a chance that this substance is the rumored fifth meat? Ha! You know, I was afraid you were going to ask me that, and I'm offended by the question, quite frankly, and it's absurd. In no way at all are we messing around with anything that anybody would ever characterize

as the fifth meat, and I know you like to talk about this on your show, and I think it's ridiculous. And the answer is no, categorically no. As far as I'm concerned, there is no fifth meat. More from that interview after the beef forecast. High pressure beef in the north giving way to a band of tender, thinly sliced beef in the south. Anyone caught between those two systems needs to be ready for a beef fog and potentially cold beef hail on higher ground. Big chunks of beef batter western regions and you could be waking up to a beef frost in the highlands and islands. And the milk prices. Full fat rallied hard this week and it's now up to nine. Skimmed and semi-skimmed are stable with fermented yogurts dropping off. And over on the

US cheese index, the cream cheese is creamy and the hard cheese is dreamy. Now back to our big interview with Roy Gluck Jr. I asked Roy about the problems he's having with the British authorities. Yeah, there have been a number of stumbling blocks, to be honest with you. And we're just trying to get to the point where we see eye to eye and are speaking the same language, if you will. And I'm confident that we will get there. But one of the things that I'm trying to get going right now, there was an incident, probably the most famous incident in the history of beef in England, I'm guessing. And you might have to remind me of some of the details of this. But I believe you had a minister of food down there some years ago, back when all this mad cow business was going on and all that nonsense.

We all know that virus never existed. There was never any such thing as a mad cow business was going on and all that nonsense, we all know that virus never existed. There was never any such thing as a mad cow disease. That was all an illusion that Big Lamb came up with. Big Lamb came up with that to discredit beef, and people fell for it, and that's a shame. But anyway, at that time, your minister of food was really standing up for beef. And he fed his young daughter a hamburger in front of the television cameras. And she just enjoyed it and had a wonderful time eating that hamburger. And it sent a real powerful message to people. Come on now, you can eat this. It's just fine. And so

that's why I met with your minister of food recently there in England to try and tell him, you know, it'd be real great. I don't even know if he has a daughter, but any child he could find would be fine. I said, if you could feed a child one of our hamburgers, a Burger's Barrel burger, in front of the television cameras, it'd send a powerful message to the people of England. And I think he's going to do it. I mean, he was a little skeptical, but I left there, you know, I came in there with a bag of cash and I can't find it now. Let's put it that way. I shouldn't say that. Well, you'll cut that out. So specifically, what are the problems that the British authorities have with burgers barrel?

Well, I was handed a list of reasons that they don't want to approve my application to open a restaurant in London. That is a list of all of the things about our business and our burgers that I am proud of. So that's what I say when I would say we're not seeing eye to eye because everything he said to me, you can't come here because of this, was all the things that make the business work. And I know we're going to iron it out, but it's just we're in a bad spot right now. Was there any mention of your employment practices? Yes, quite a bit. Indeed. You face a lot of criticism for this. And again, there were allusions to it in the newspapers.

But I wonder if you can just clarify for our listeners, a high percentage of your staff, according to reports, are paid in meat. Yeah. How does that work? Well, how does it work? It's simple. They take meat home. And we've got a formula for determining you work the X number of hours and that equals Y amount of meat. Take that home instead of money. What else are you going to spend your money on? Meat, right?

Well, can I put a scenario to you? Yeah. So imagine one of your workers is working hard in one of your restaurants and they would like to buy a house for their family. And they go to the real estate agent and they say, I'd like to buy this house. And they say, sure, that will cost $200,000. And they say, sorry, I haven't got that, but I have got these barrels of meat. Now, what do you think would happen in that situation? Because I think I know what would happen. I'm not a banker, okay? I'll tell you right now, that's not my business. I don't know

if somebody comes to me with a barrel of some of the best hamburger meat in the world and says, I want to buy a house with this, what the banker would say. I'm not claiming to be a banker. In my opinion, that banker would be very lucky to receive that meat. You know, there is such a thing as commodities trading out there, and that's a commodity. And I don't know what a good banker could get for that on the open market. So the answer to your question is, I have no idea, and I don't think you do either. But more to the point, these folks, you know, more than trying to trade away the meat for other goods and houses and whatnot, they get to eat it and take some pride when they're eating it and that this is the product that they're putting out there in the world and they eat it. And I think it's wonderful.

And they're lucky they get paid at all. Did you just say that? Your staff are lucky they get paid at all? Absolutely. You kidding me? Some of these folks, they don't do such great work. And, you know, and we don't always, listen, if you haven't met our standards of professionalism, you know, in a given shift, you might not go home with meat or anything else. I mean, that's, you know, that's standard employment just in terms of making sure people are working at their best. But you as the CEO of the company, when you give yourself a dividend from the company or you pay yourself, are you paying yourself in meat?

No. I mean, listen, I take home plenty of meat. You bet I do. And most of my meals are burgers barrel meals. I'm more than happy to eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But no, I mean, listen, I take some money. But, you know, I mean, I'm the third generation CEO of this business. I better be taking some money home. That's a silly question. Okay, well, we'll move on from your employment practices to the last thing, I think, that came up in the reports, which was the criticism of your

business from the point of view of public health. I mean, I think something that seems to encapsulate that point of view, I think, is that your company logo is a picture of a man who is so obese that he has eschewed the wearing of clothes altogether and is instead wearing a barrel. Now, what message do you think that sends to your customers and to the public at large? Yeah, that's Fat Bob, sometimes known as Fat Barrel Bob. Is he a good role model for children, for example? Do you think children should grow up thinking, one day I might be so obese that I'm going to have to wear a wooden barrel? Well, that's just reality. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if you have the same amount of obesity over there in England that we are proud to have here in America. But sure, people get big out here.

And it happens. You see people who can no longer shop in the stores for clothes. That's just a reality. And maybe you're going to get fat on cakes and treats and baked goods and cream puffs. But what we're saying is, hey, get fat on this instead. You're saying that Fat Bob, the character on your logo, he's just a reflection of actually what's happening on the ground around you in Kansas. Yes. If I came over there, would I see people wearing barrels? It depends where you went. If you went into some of the more rural areas, I believe, would I see people wearing barrels? It depends where you went. If you went into some of the more rural areas, I believe you would see some people wearing barrels.

You know, it's not that uncommon. I'm not saying it's the height of fashion. I'm not saying people go to work dressed like that very often. Certainly, if you were to go to the Appalachian Mountains, you'd see every third person is wearing a barrel. But, yeah, I mean, I think he's a lot of fun. Kids really do enjoy him. And I think a lot of kids think I'd love to grow up because it's liberating to wear only a barrel. You don't have to get all caught up in what the latest styles are and fashions are and all that business. It's just, it's a barrel. That's all it is. Beautiful oaken barrel. Put it on.

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That's ziprecruiter.com slash beef. That's ziprecruiter.com slash beef. Slash beef. Slash beef. In a world where beef is banned, only one man can stand up to the state. Oh my God, somebody help me. They've taken my meat. Did somebody order beef? Oh my God, who are you? Of slash. Did somebody order beef? Oh my God. Who are you?

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Slash Beef. ZipRecruiter.com. Slash Beef. Okay. Your recent television advert, you've got a whole new campaign going on at the moment in the States.

Yeah. I was sent a copy of it. It's a video, the one I saw anyway, was a video that shows a man who is experiencing a cardiac arrest. Yeah.

And then an ambulance arrives and the paramedics get out of the ambulance to attend to him and he waves them away and starts shouting at them and says that they should leave him alone until he's finished his family barrel meal.

Yeah. Isn't that great? I love it. I mean, it certainly sends a message. Yeah, it sure does. It says, this family barrel meal is so great that I would rather eat this than anything else, including saving my life. And I think it's a very powerful message, and I just love it. When the ad agency pitched that to me, I mean, they had pitched a whole bunch of other ideas of just like, you know, all kinds of boring things that wouldn't have had the impact of people just enjoying their meal in the restaurant and having a picnic and bringing it home and the kids cheering. You know, I just said, I want an ad that makes clear the importance of our food in the priorities of people's lives.

And they came to me with this and I said, that's the one right there. That's the one. I have to say that when I watched it, I found it quite haunting. Oh, great. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Because it's clear to me, at least, that there's a sense in the advert that that man is going to die. And he's a man who knows that he's on limited time and he's got to eat that fast because his heart is giving out on him. His blood is not being oxidized. He doesn't have long. And so he's really going at that meal. And isn't there an argument to say that in that situation, even if you did want to finish the family barrel meal, you could let the paramedics attend to you, maybe restart your heart, giving you more time to enjoy family barrel meals in the future. But the point of it is that that would be an interruption in your enjoyment of it. He's enjoying it right now.

What am I going to wait a half an hour while they put the paddles to me or heaven forbid, put me in the ambulance and bring me all the way to the hospital? And, you know, when am I going to get back to this meal? The point is he's enjoying it now. Now I want it now. We're looking for a sense of urgency to get back to this meal? The point, he's enjoying it now. Now, I want it now. We're looking for a sense of urgency to really communicate to our customers. Go now. Go get it now. Go eat it as fast as you can because you're dying. You know what I mean?

That's the message. Do you not think it's also slightly at odds with the fact that you've recently opened a number of burgers barrel branches in hospitals? We sure have yeah we've contracted with some of the largest uh hospital chains in in the united states to get our our burgers and that's all integrated that's all this is not a coincidence this ad and the restaurants in the hospitals it's all of a piece we're trying to you know we're really getting to people's lizard brains and say you are running out time. There's not a lot of time left for you to enjoy these meals. You know, hurry down here.

Pull the IV out and get in the elevator and get yourself down to the lobby and get yourself a Burger's Barrel family meal. So that's the extent of the criticisms against Burger's Barrel. Is that all? I mean, that's, you know what I mean? We're really being pilloried by your newspapers over there. And one day when everybody in England is eating at Burger's Barrel restaurants, you'll look back on this time as very silly

with all these concerns. You seem very confident that you are going to be opening Burger's Barrel restaurants in the UK, but there's no suggestion from the authorities that they're going to let you do this. Well, sure. That's a negotiating position, right? I mean, you recognize that. You say, absolutely not. You know, but it's all theatrics, drawing a line in the sand and all that. And so it's just, you know, they want certain concessions out of us and, you know,

we want certain concessions, but we'll figure it out. I am very confident. So are you willing to make any concessions to the British government? Well, yeah, I'm willing to part with a certain amount of money. I'm not going to tell you what it is right now, but I have a number in mind of cash outlays that I'm willing to misplace on people's desks. Again, you'll cut that out. But I mean, I've been doing that. I've been leaving just bags of cash all around members you know, members of Parliament's office and various ministries and whatnot. And in addition to cash, I've also been I've been traveling to England with full barrels of hamburger meat. And I've been leaving them places and saying to people, you know, listen, cook this up at your next barbecue and you tell me it isn't great. So if you see any barrels of meat around your parliament

building, you'll know where they came from. But as far as concessions in terms of what we're serving and how we're employing people, now you're talking about changing the nature and the character of a treasured American business. And I don't think we're going to do that. A big thanks to Roy Gluck Jr. for that enlightening interview. Since we spoke, the situation with Roy and the British authorities has developed somewhat after an incident where Roy left a barrel of burger meat outside the Houses of Parliament, which led to a security alert and a controlled explosion, which sent superheated burger meat flying through the air, burning the faces of a busload of Spanish schoolchildren.

Roy has subsequently been banned from travelling to the UK for a period of 20 years. But at least you tried, Roy. At least you tried. So, while it may not be possible to eat a burgers barrel meal here in the UK in the foreseeable future, if you are ever in the American Midwest, Roy has extended the following offer to network members. Buy a family barrel meal and get a free safari special burger. That's the Burgers Barrel Safari Special Burger. Get ready for the big game. Also, you will have heard during that interview that every Burgers Barrel burger contains 12 meats, which may have puzzled some of you. Of course, as we all know, there are only four meats, beef, lamb, pork and chicken. The 11 meats you referred to using

their colloquial names are actually all variants of the four meats. To clear up any confusion, we've made this helpful guide for you. Horse. Ride on beef. Weasel. Small long pork meat. There are also three meats present in the burgers which classify as fish. Crab, crayfish and squid meat. However, modern science is beginning to be able to map fish onto the four-meat taxonomy. It's an inexact science at the moment, but we can be fairly confident in saying squid meat can be considered a beef, crayfish a chicken and crab is a type of lamb. So that's all we've got time for this month. But if you're after more beef and dairy news, get over to our website now,

where you can read all the usual stuff, as well as our off-topic section, where this month, we see how long Bill Gates can play squash against himself. What will happen first? Will he collapse from exhaustion, or go mad?

Get over to the website to find out. So, until next time, beef out. So, until next time, beef out. Thanks to Andy Daly. Also, if you have a friend who you think might make a good network member, why not send them a link to this episode? investigate paranormal claims, and participate in pseudoscientific medical treatments and report our findings to you. In a time where alternative facts reign supreme, we cut through the murky spin to give you the real deal on topics like UFOs, the IT vaccination movement, Scientology, and even apocalyptic churches. We're even undercover for some very exciting investigations right now. Well, not right now, right now. Yeah, that would be unwise. That's Ono, Ross, and Carrie at MaximumFun.org.

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