Interview with Rob Giuliani, Co-founder and CEO

Could you tell us a little about your background before we start?

Yeah, I’m 77 years old. I went to Rutgers University, I got my degree in economics and communications, while I was at Rutgers I was in the Air Force National Guard, I got deployed several times. I was in the Air Force for 9 years- when I got out of college, I was in the Air Force, my enlistment ended and I ended as a staff sergeant, I did construction for a while. Construction ran dry a little bit, so then I jumped into the medical device field selling for an orthopedic company called Arthrax. So I would go into the operating room, I would sell surgeons on different technologies that came out, I would walk them through surgeries for shoulders, for knees, and it was an awesome job. I lived up in the Jersey City area, I had a bunch of friends up there, and one summer I came back down to the Jersey Shore and I fell back in love with where I came from. I grew up in Tom’s River, grew up going to Ortley and Lavallette, came back to Belmar for a summer and got a house with my buddies. We partied all the time and then when the summer ended, I said, “You know what, screw it. I’m going to stay down here. I love surfing, I love the wood.” I met my girlfriend at the time, my partner right now, Abby Taylor- she’s a surfer, I’m a surfer. At that time, I was making 200 thousand dollars a year, for me that was just unbelievable, I couldn’t believe I was making 200 thousand dollars a year. Abby was bartending at a bar called DJ’s. She was making good cash, too, but she would always come complaining to me like, “What am I going to do with my life, I can’t bartend for the rest of my life.” So I said, “Abby, you got me as your boyfriend, you got a little bit of money saved up, so why don’t you start selling acai bowls on the side of the road? There’s nothing like it around here.” And she was like, “No, I can’t do it.” We lived above this drunk Greek guy, this guy Jimmy who owned a pizzeria in Belmar, and I was close to him, so I said, “Jimmy, let Abby go down there and sell the acai bowls.” And he was fucked up one day, drunk out of his mind, and he was like, “Oh, go ahead and do it, but give me ten thousand dollars.” And I was like, “Are you kidding me, ten thousand dollars?” At that point I said, “You know what? Fuck it. Ten thousand dollars and he’s going to give us a little spot in front of his pizzeria, let’s do it.” And that’s what we did, man. We set a little cart up, I went to K-Mart and bought this little patio furniture for like 300 bucks, went to a restaurant supply place, bought a piece of refrigeration, a used piece of shit for like 200 bucks, reached out to distributors left and right, but nobody took me seriously. At that time, guys, I didn’t know that you had to set accounts up, that you needed lines of credit, that you had to do this, you had to do that, so everyone kept denying me to serve me any kind of product. Then I started reaching out directly to the manufacturers, Ryan Black from Sambazon for the acai, told him what we were doing, kind of what you guys are doing- calling me, saying, “How’d you become a success?” You know, that’s what I did, I just reached out to these guys that were successful, gave them my story, told them what I wanted to do, and they all kind of rallied around me. Ryan Black sent me cases of acai for free the first time around, and then I started buying all this, and that’s where it got challenging for me. I was like, “Fuck, now that all the free stuff is gone, I’m giving away all these free bowls to everybody in Belmar, now I gotta start making money because I won’t be able to afford this.” So that’s a short story on how this whole thing began.

Why Acai Bowls? Where did that idea come from?

Before I even met Abby, I used to get acai bowls all the time. Traveling to Costa Rica, they were in Puerto Rico all the time. I’d go to Puerto Rico with my buddies and we’d get dinged up the night before, on a Friday night, we’d go out to bars until 3 or 4 in the morning, and we’d wake up at like 6 in the morning to go surfing, and you’re like, “Holy shit, I’m still drunk, I’m still hungover, what am I going to do?” So you eat an acai bowl, they tasted delicious, and I always say this in the interviews. The idea came not only for business, but just because it was such a delicious thing and a refreshing taste for activities like surfing, so like I ate an acai bowl before I surfed to do a four hour session, and I felt fresh the entire day. Now, if I lived in Jersey and ate a pork roll egg and cheese before I surfed, I’d probably shit my pants out in the water (I don’t know how brutally honest you want me to be about this). When I came back to Jersey I just saw that there was nothing like it like what I saw out on the West coast and in Puerto Rico, and that’s where the idea came from. I was drunk with my friend Anthony one night, and he’s a smart marketing guy, and I’m like, “Ant, help me write a business plan for how I can bring acai to the Jersey Shore.” We stayed up until 4 in the morning one night and it was fun, we wrote this business plan even though neither one of us really knew about business, and then I met Abby and the idea came back to fruition. She was making me acai bowls every day, and I was like, “This makes sense.” She’s a cute, young girl, she can sit on the side of the road in a bikini selling acai bowls, there’s nothing like it around here, it’s refreshing, it’s healthy. Dude, I grew up on the Jersey Shore for the past 37 years, and you go up to Seaside boardwalk and it’s sausage and peppers, calzones, and you know, that’s how the idea came up. 

What challenges did you face when trying to grow the company from where it was to where it is now?

My biggest challenge, honestly, is you get to this certain point and you’re like, “Ah, we made it,” and things are getting easier, but you know as an entrepreneur that when things seem to be too good to be true, they are too good to be true, and look where we are now: before the pandemic hit, before BLM hit, many of these situations in society hit, I was on a rollercoaster to opening up 50 more stores, building my team, everyone in my company was in good spirits, and then boom, the pandemic hits, BLM hits, anxiety goes up, depression goes up. I’m dealing with over 3,000 employees, and that’s going to correlate over to your company. That is a big example of the questions you just asked me, there've been a million small ones like that through the past 3 years where I was like, “Oh, I’m on easy street right now,” but there’s no such thing. Every month, something new comes up, and it’s harder than the last thing.

You and your co-founder won E&Y’s innovator of the year for New Jersey, so how have you innovated to make Playa Bowls stand out?

It’s a mixture, it’s a trifecta. I’ve got competitors, and you’re probably aware of them: you’ve got the Frutta Bowls, the Vitality Bowls, Sweetberry bowls, there’s probably 50 other bowl shops out there. The one thing they’re always missing, it’s a trifecta, Abby and I have put so much time and energy knowing what’s gonna make the company successful, you’ve got the atmosphere of the store, they might hit one of those things but they’re missing the three other ones, and they’ll never be successful.

Did you have any culinary background, and if so, how did you come up with the bowls?

It’s an evolution, like everything else, if you look at our first menu we had three acai bowls, three pitaya bowls, and three smoothies, and fast-forward six years, we have over 70 or 80 bowls because we have fun with it. You have to put two things in perspective; A) I want it to taste really good, I want these concoctions to taste really good, but B) we have to make sure that I’m not adding too many products into the stores for employees for distribution. Burger King, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, all these big chain restaurants that you see, they know their market, like Taco Bell will take a taco and use other ingredients and throw it in with it and go, “Introducing the new Loco Tacos Supreme Crunchwrap,” but they have all the same ingredients in that restaurant already, they’re not adding any new ingredients. That’s what we do at Playa Bowls. There are times when I’m coming up with new concoctions that will require us to add new ingredients into our rotation, but you have to be conscious of that too, and most importantly it has to taste good, and be cool, too.

A big part of Playa Bowls is sustainability, so how are you trying to be eco-friendly as a business?

That’s a good question, guys. It’s really hard. It’s really hard to be eco-friendly, and going into the whole business philosophy, you can’t make everyone happy. We’ve got franchisees who care about the bottom line, the dollar, and we talk about being eco-friendly, but the reality is being eco-friendly correlates with being very expensive. If you’re using the bowls that are plant-based, spoons that are plant-based, straws that are plant-based, recycled bags, we do all these things at Playa Bowls, and it costs a lot more. Just to put it in perspective, the green spoons that we use at Playa Bowls, they’re plant-based, eco-friendly spoons. If you were to go and you see our competitors, they’re using the black plastic spoons that you can find at any supply place or Costco, those spoons that they use cost half a penny per spoon. My spoon costs four pennies per spoon. I know that it’s just pennies when you talk about it in the grand scheme of things, but do the math at the end of the year over 96 stores serving millions of bowls per year, it adds up pretty quick. But to answer your question, there’s a lot of marketing behind it to make sure that we hit all aspects of what’s important to people. When the straw thing was really big a few months ago, we stopped using straws for a minute, we started introducing metal straws. We didn’t really do this intentionally, you know I design all the stores and I’ve been using the same guy for the past 10 years, he’s designed my house, my properties, we use all recycled products, all the wood, all the metal, a lot of the stuff you see in the stores are reclaimed materials.

Now with COVID-19, everything’s changed, but how do you plan to continue to grow the company?

I can see where you’re coming from with that question, like a lot of other companies and my friends who own restaurants, that’s a tougher question for them to answer because they actually had to strategize, and there’s things that we’re doing to keep our employees happy, to keep them employed, we got PPP money from the government to keep us funded to get through the pandemic, but in terms of future planning for the Coronavirus, for us, we’ve been very fortunate because we’re a fast-casual restaurant. A lot of the full service restaurants that are out in New Jersey right now, they’re operating at about 20-30% capacity, they’re losing a lot of money every single day, so they’ve had to come up with these new strategies and plans for how to move forward. Just to be completely blunt with you guys, and I’ve told a lot of people this, we’ve been very fortunate with all of this. The first two months were very tough for us, but the last two and a half months our numbers are up 40% from last year- we’re killing it. Because think about it, customers now want to come, get their food, bring it home, and eat it, and we’re using third party delivery. So things are really good for us now, but like I said earlier, all good things might come to an end, so for our strategy moving forward, I’m just going to keep pushing the family package deals, I’m going to push third party deliveries, things of these nature that you just have to amend with how society is changing.

How’d you use technology and social media to market Playa Bowls, and make it attractive to customers?

Instagram. There’s no secret behind it. Instagram, six or seven years ago when we started Playa Bowls, I was with Abby at the time, she was my girlfriend but we’re no longer together, but I’d be up until four or five in the morning and hitting certain hashtags. DJ’s was a bar around here and every girl goes to DJ’s in the summer, so I’d get that hashtag, figure out where they were, I’d target them and send them pictures of our bowls, and always comment on their pictures. From there, we built our instagram organically. Going back to our competitors and what they’re missing, I’ve seen my competitors like Frutta Bowls, and I don’t know how familiar you are with Instagram and the technology behind it, but you can put robots on instagram, and you can buy followers, and that’s what they did. We never did that one time, I always told Abby that it’s important that every single follower that’s following Playa Bowls wants to follow Playa Bowls, and they’re relevant and in the area. If I have a follower from Nebraska, what’s that going to do for our business? But you see a lot of people doing that on Instagram.

If you had to sum up all your experiences and give a piece of advice to a young entrepreneur, what would it be?

Generally speaking, dude, honestly, just have thick skin. Don’t take things personally, and I know that’s cliche, but if you take things personally you’ll start letting emotions drive your decisions and emotions will take over.