In this long‑form interview, host James Barry talks with Jesse Konik, co‑founder of Jesse & Ben’s (the frozen‑fries brand behind Swizzler’s restaurant). They trace the evolution from a college‑friend food‑truck selling hand‑cut fries and grass‑fed hot dogs, through a fast‑casual pivot to Swizzler crispy chicken and smash burgers, to a COVID‑era decision to produce their own hand‑cut, twice‑fried Belgian‑style frozen fries. The conversation dives deep into why most industrial fries use seed oils, dextrose, and long ingredient lists, while Jesse & Ben’s stick to three simple, real ingredients (potatoes, a healthy fat—beef tallow or avocado oil—and sea salt, with optional rosemary‑garlic seasoning). They recount the historical use of beef tallow at McDonald’s, the 1990 switch to seed oils driven by a saturated‑fat scare, and how that change altered flavor. The founders explain their supply‑chain choices: sourcing non‑GMO Idaho russet potatoes, building a 6,000‑sq‑ft in‑house manufacturing plant, and using regenerative grass‑fed tallow (with plans for duck fat). They discuss pricing philosophy—making a premium‑quality fry affordable enough for mainstream grocery shelves—while aiming to replace seed‑oil fries in every freezer. The interview also touches on future product ideas (organic/regenerative variants, Pluck seasoning collaborations) and the broader movement (Organuary, health‑cost trade‑offs, nutrient density of animal fats). The dialogue ends with quickfire questions about favorite dip (ketchup, Primal Kitchen burger sauce) and a call for community input on new flavors.
Questions this video answers
Jesse prefers ketchup (especially unsweetened Primal Kitchen or organic Heinz) and Primal Kitchen burger sauce, often paired with a regenerative grass‑fed beef burger.
Chapters
TranscriptAuto-generated · 38 min
Now, okay, Jesse Konik, it's great to finally meet. Actually, I think we last talked on the phone, so we didn't actually see each other. And you're in Costa Rica right now, right?
Yes, I was, I was saying before we jumped on, this is a rare jungle Jesse sighting. Usually I smell like french fries or have a baseball hat on with Jesse and Benzem decked out, and today I'm in the, uh, in the jungle. But I'm very glad that we're getting a chance to meet. Uh, we gotta crazy year behind us and a crazy year ahead. So escaped for a week to do a little quick recharge, but couldn't miss out on this opportunity to chat with you because it's been so fun to be a part of Organuary. And it's been great to see how people have been responding. So I'm very excited to dig into Tallow and all the fun stuff.
Yeah, well, let's, let's get into it. So, so college friends, you and Ben. And what though made you Jump on Fry's specifically.
Yeah. So I know we have somewhat limited time, so I'll try to do the quick version. There's a little bit of a longer version, but basically Ben and I have been friends since college freshman year, kind of like on the same hall, became friends. We're both thinking we'd end up doing kind of like general business, you know, things. Didn't really know what we wanted to do after college. Business was like, we were told is if you're not a doctor or lawyer, sounds like a good thing to do. Um, so we were pursuing that. had friends going into the working world, not loving what they were doing 9 to 5. And we just basically decided, okay, let's try to like solve a problem on our campus, start a food business just because food was a problem on the campus. And it just got us hooked on building brands, you know, getting the immediate feedback loop of being in the food industry. We actually started in more of a traditional hospitality restaurant space. So we launched a food truck right before we graduated as like 22-year-olds in Washington, DC, which is a very competitive food truck scene, build like a food truck brand that did really well. It's like won awards for best new truck and, you know, build a following.
What was the food?
Swizzler Gourmet Hot Dogs was our first concept. We did hand-cut fries as part of that. So fries have been in there since the early days, but the feature originally were these spiral-cut hot dogs that were grass-fed, grass-finished beef. And this was 2014, so it was fairly early to be sourcing grass-fed, grass-finished beef at all. And hot dogs, they didn't exist. So we were getting like custom manufactured hot dogs made for us when we're like 22 and didn't know what we were doing, which is an interesting thing. But that experience was very awesome because we didn't know anything and we were surrounded by chefs and people and we just asked a million questions and got really curious. And we learned that for the most part, most things in the food industry, it was sort of like never really a good answer when you ask why a couple times. It's sort of like, well, this is how like I learned how to do it, or this is how it's always been done. So that just led us down this rabbit hole, like learning about things from first principles, like reading books and like Omnivore's Dilemma and watching Food Inc documentary, all the stuff that was out at the time that was relatively new. And grass-fed, grass-finished beef became the big thing that we were really excited about. We were just like, you know what, like factory farms, all stuff is crazy. You learn about the meat industry. We were all in on that and spent 3 or 4 years building our food truck brand, did pretty well, but it was a really hard thing to do in the restaurant industry. And we realized like, all right, we love this, what we're doing. We love making an impact on better sourced meat, better, higher quality food sourcing locally. We did farmers markets, food trucks, catering. It was just sort of this hustle around DC and running around learning a lot. And around this time, 4 years in, we decided, okay, let's pivot the concept to something that we think like we can get excited about for the next 10 years because we know that this is just gonna be hard and we've gotta be making sure it's a good business, big impact, can touch a lot of people. And hot dogs, like we learned that most people eat a hot dog like twice a year, like for, you know, it's like a barbecue for like July, 4th of July, and then a baseball game. But there was this nugget of like nostalgia and doing better versions of these like mystery meat type of foods. We realized all that aligned perfectly with fast food. So we started a fast food concept, basically pivoted our brand Swizzler from Swizzler gourmet hot dogs to Swizzler crispy chicken and smash burgers, what it is today. And the idea was like, okay, can we bring this really high level of quality around sourcing, this fun of fast food and bring it all together at an affordable price point where we could truly be competitive with McDonald's and Chick-fil-A and these bigger brands? Because our thought was like, yeah, we might not open 2,000 of these things, but if we can even just show there's a model out there for a better fast food concept, it's actually using high-quality ingredients. And around this time too, we had started learning about regenerative agriculture. This was like 2017, so relatively early still for that, but we kind of had like transition to learn more about grass-fed, grass-finished beef into regenerative agriculture. We're sourcing regenerative grass-fed, grass-finished beef from a farm in North Carolina doing this awesome stuff, sourcing local buns, making these smash burgers. Everything was going really well going into 2019, signed our first lease. We're getting ready to open our first restaurant and COVID hit. And we're in DC, was one of the most heavily impacted cities. Absolutely. Yeah, shut down. So we had a lease signed, we're supposed to open a restaurant April, May 2020. And we were just in survival mode. So we put our heads down, we're trying to figure out everything we could do to keep the restaurant alive. The food trucks were already kind of dead. So we just sort of like said, hey, okay, we'll let those sit for a while. We'll try to figure this out. And one thing that we knew, because it was like we'd changed our concept over the years, but fries had always been a main thing we did from day one through now, you know, 5, 6 years into it. And these hand-cut fries were sort of like culty famous for locally. We couldn't change the quality, but they were a lot of work. And we were going to try to get the food trucks back up and running. We were trying to get the restaurant up and running. We knew that we couldn't be hand-cutting fries and potatoes all over the city. It just didn't really make sense, especially not knowing if we could even staff people because no one even knew what was gonna happen with COVID at the time. So we decided, okay, we need to do a frozen French fry. We tried all of them. We didn't like any of them. It didn't taste like the real thing. They had weird ingredients. So we made our own hand-cut fries and froze them at our commissary kitchen, started making a mini French fry factory for our own restaurant, started making frozen fries for our restaurant to make a truly restaurant-quality fry. And that just like little nugget happening that during COVID restaurant survived. The concept actually exists in DC still, Swizzler crispy chicken and smash burgers. We're in some stadiums. We've got a brick and mortar in DC. But so we still run restaurants, which is kind of a funny part of all of this too. But, you know, we just realized like, oh wow, we have this frozen fry. We walked the grocery stores. There was nothing that was actually using real ingredients, actually tasted like the real thing. And we started doing the same deep dive we did back in the day on meat and local sourcing into potatoes and oil. And we just had this moment of like, oh my God, there's this thing happening right now with seed oils. And we started learning about it, started taking it outta our diet, started feeling way better, started seeing some of the research on it. And we just realized there's this really big opportunity to try to set a new standard in a very weird, boring industry you don't hear a lot about. And it's pretty much owned by like 3 companies. The weird thing about potatoes, like there's 3, 4 giant potato companies that own the entire business almost worldwide. So for us, we were like, okay, there's this big potato, there's a kind of like big enemy out there. And we thought, well, we could do things they can't do. Like we can be the guys behind the fries. We can actually put ourselves front and center because we're actually a business run by people. Like we run our own manufacturing plant still. We make all of our own french fries. We started doing beef tallow because we thought it was a great thing to do. We also do avocado oil too as an option. And yeah, it's just been really great. We kind of had the idea, spent a lot of time working it out. We launched in 2024, last year in June, and we're about 400 grocery stores. We're about to launch nationwide this year with Sprouts Farmers Market, hopefully Whole Foods, some other larger partners. So yeah, things are really rocking and rolling. And I think for us, we as a frozen product have had the downside where it's hard to ship things and we don't want people to buy, you know, 10 bags of fries or pay $15 a bag because the same way we care about affordability with fast food, we care about that when it comes to our ingredient. We don't want to be this hyper niche, only get it at Erewhon, spend $15 for a bag of French fries. So we want to be a really delicious, high quality fry made with only real ingredients like potatoes, healthy fats, salt, and seasonings. And we want to be that option for families and people that can eat it 2, 3 days a week. And of course it's going to be a premium, but it's not because we're, you know, so much more expensive necessarily than what everyone else is doing. It's, we're just actually, it's the real cost of what it takes to make a real ingredient and a real product, which I know you know a lot about too. It's just so much of our food system and our pricing and where we are at today today is based off of sort of this like false narrative around what things cost, because these big companies have either found ways to sort of like play the game with subsidies and lobbying and get like real discounts on what they're doing that makes it kind of not really make sense what they're paying for stuff. Or on the other side, there's just these other external factors that do cost us, but not in dollars, but it's in environmental damage or it's in health damage. And it's like, We say this and I bet you'll probably agree. I think we maybe even talked about this on the phone, but healthcare, food is healthcare in a lot of ways. You're either paying for it now in a premium at the grocery store, or you're going to pay for it on the back end with your health and with doctor's bills later on. So we just feel like there's this huge opportunity and this huge movement happening, especially with people boycotting Kellogg's and really supporting all the stuff that's going on and just taking ownership over where they spend their money. So that's why we were just so excited to see the brands being involved with Organuary and all the people pushing this movement towards organ meat and higher nutrient density and better quality food and not using junk. So I just think that this grassroots effort is really gonna be something that can change and move things in the same way we, when we were building restaurants and doing the fast food thing, we thought we don't need to be replacing McDonald's and Chick-fil-A. We wanted to show there's truly a model of a better way to do things. I think we're in that first like wave right now where I think all these better-for-you brands are just showing these bigger companies like there actually is a better way to do this stuff and people are willing to pay for that. And I think if all of us just kind of like keep supporting the brands that feed us and nourish us and make us feel great, that, you know, we can keep working on this together and really change the food system one day at a time, which is exciting.
Yeah, super exciting. And just honoring you guys for going down that path because it is, it is A harder path, and it's and it's ironic too because really, and you guys mentioned this on your website, Jesse and Ben's dot com. You guys mentioned like it's three ingredients, you know, and it's like so in many ways you're simplifying the ingredient list, which is paving its own way as well because I think in most people's minds that's not possible. So can you talk a little bit about like well why are the other companies using so many ingredients and and how did you Kind of like what's different about your product? Uh, like, like, is there a difference in the process of what you're doing than them? Like, is it, are they putting those ingredients in their product because that's a way to offset the price? What's your thought around that?
It's a great question. It's an interesting thing. It's one of those things that we're so close to it that we never think to explain this stuff, but it's like really interesting. So I really appreciate the question. It goes back to, in my mind, incentives. So these, these big companies, and the name, it's like Lamb Weston, Simplot, Ore-Ida, which is kind of owned by Kraft Heinz and produced by Simplot, Cavendish, McCain. There's basically 3 or 4 companies, like I said, that own the entire frozen manufacturing of french fries. And I don't think there's a grand conspiracy, but they all know what each other are doing and they kind of keep their pricing around the same and they all kind of do the same thing. And what they're trying to do is produce a commodity product at scale. And they're trying to basically buy tons and tons and tons, literally 2,000 pounds at a time, tons and tons of potatoes, produce them. They make a million pounds of fries in a day at one factory. And they'll spend $80, $100, $150 million on a factory and try to automate it and run these things at crazy, almost 24 hours a day. And because they're doing that, and some of them are also public companies, which I think is interesting too, which creates these incentives where They're not incentivized to slow things down. They're not incentivized to do things the right way. They're sort of incentivized to like keep their quarterly earnings or keep the game and keep things moving. And I think because of that, it's created this weird opportunity for a brand like ours because we're not doing anything particularly innovative other than just staying true to the process. And that we took this hand-cut, twice-fried Belgian-style fry the same way any great chef in the country is making their French fries. That's how we do it is basically our process. We've had to scale it up slightly just to make it so it's a little bit more continuous to work at a larger scale. But all of it goes back to like, how do we stay as true as possible to like this Belgian-style twice-fried fry, this house-cut style fry we think about it as? And because of that, we're doing things that we're like, we're just taking more time in the process. There's certain parts of it that we're going a little bit slower than the big guys, and we're not stripping things out. The big thing that they're doing a lot of the times is they're trying to strip out the nature of these ingredients really. And by doing that, you strip it out. It gives you a blank canvas so you can make the same consistent product all over the time. So like, for example, you'll notice in almost every bag of like commodity big potato french fries, most of them have dextrose or some type of sugar in it. And it's because sugar is sort of the enemy of making french fries. 'Cause if you get sugar into the potatoes, which happens naturally if they get too cold, there's a lot of things that can happen. But like, if you're making fries at home, You wanna be thinking about the starch content and the sugar content. Same thing. If sugar gets in your potatoes, when you go to fry them, they turn too dark, they get brown. And that browning is like not appealing. If we're a customer, we get a bag of fries, there's these really dark bits in there. We're like, ugh, this is gross. I don't want that. So the big guys, they basically find a way to cook out the sugar and then add it back in later. So, right? So like they're basically cooking out the sugar, the part that's naturally occurring in this fry, and they're re-adding it back in. They think they're smarter than nature. They're adding this thing in later on. And there's like, there's I think a 19-step process they're using when they're making their fries. And in that they're basically stripping out so many different things and trying to add them back in at different points. And the other crazy thing is they're using these really industrially highly processed seed oils because that's how they built their business. That's been something that's been a part of it for at least the last 40 or 50 years. And I think that the other thing that is sort of common sense and I think obvious when you think about it for just a moment is the frozen potato industry was built around the fast food industry in the United States, which is why we got this weird insight from both sides in that McDonald's has been using a third party. Lamb Weston and Simplot actually both make french fries for McDonald's. And those 2 companies kind of grew up at the same time as McDonald's. When McDonald's in the '40s and '50s and '60s was growing a ton, Lamb Weston and Simplot were also scaling up their production to be able to support that growth. So when they were trying to You know, scale up. I think they must have been the '70s or '80s at this point. They in the '90s made that switch to seed oils from the—
And they were using tallow before that, right? At McDonald's.
Yeah. Which, yeah, which we can talk to, which I think is interesting. But when McDonald's made that change in 1990, that just basically set in stone that the big guys are going to be using seed oils until McDonald's makes a change because McDonald's is a huge customer and an anchor customer for these guys and kind of holds 'em keeps them honest across each other and they really beat them up on price. And these things are cheap because they are highly processed and they're using these subsidy-driven commodity crops that are produced at really large scale. And then they're using deodorizers and bleaches and this really chemical process to make this oil. So I think when you factor that in with all the stuff they're doing with the potatoes, You just get this thing that just tastes and looks and feels different. And I grew up on them, right? Like in the '90s, like I ate frozen fries, but I never thought of it as the same thing as a French fry from a restaurant. I was just like, oh, these are frozen fries. Like the oven fries was kind of like the way I thought about it. And I think it's funny that we're just trying to basically say, hey, we're not trying to make oven fries or like frozen fries like the big guys are. We're trying to make real house-cut fries that just happen to be frozen because it's a better delivery mechanism for you. And what's great is like freezing is the best preservative because we don't need to add anything. It goes back to that point. All we need are potatoes, cut 'em, blanch 'em. Yeah. High quality fat to, to fry them in. If there's a seasoning, we throw that seasoning on and, and that's it. And we just kind of try to keep that process and we're willing to sacrifice it being the most cost effective, perfectly efficient system to stay true to the quality of the ingredients of what we're trying to do. But it's always a fine line. We know everyone's wallets are hurting a little bit right now and we know that everything's expensive. So we're trying to always find that balance. And I think a big question we get a lot is like, why aren't you using organic potatoes? Wow. And that's a great question. I would love to use organic potatoes, but they're mostly grown in the Pacific Northwest as far as possible from where we are on the East Coast. They're more expensive because they're organic and they're grown differently and the yields are different. And they're They are, the shipping across the country is really expensive and not that sustainable to be trucking stuff as far as possible. So when you factor all that in, it's looking at that balance where it's like, when I look at the growers that we're using for a non-GMO potato and the benefits of going to organic, and then the cost difference between an $8 or $9 bag on the shelf to like a $12 or $13 bag.
It's a big difference.
It's just like, how many, yeah, how many people can we touch and how much impact can we have? And our goal is really to make so every freezer in the country has a seed oil-free fry in it instead of a seed oil fry in it. And for us to do that, we need to be conscious of trying to thread this needle of maintaining the taste and the quality and the premiumness on that side, but not trying to go so far in the direction of being a premium price point to as much as we can control it. And, you know, we've thought of other solutions there. Like maybe we do have like one SKU of like an organic French potato with regenerative tallow or something like that that could be this like hero, hyper amazing thing that's going to be more expensive if people want to pay up for it. But like the bulk of what we do, we're trying to focus on, you know, the 80-90% best things we can do while keeping the price relatively competitive with the big guys. And I think one thing we've just always tried to be as a business, Ben and I, is like, we're not afraid to take on harder challenges. Like, if people were doing— like, the advice we got was like, oh, go find a co-manufacturer to make your french fries. But we would have had to make sacrifices to the process. Yeah. So we said, you know what, we're going to figure out how to build a 6,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and start making them ourselves. And I think that's the kind of stuff that we just, through kind of trial by fire and opening a restaurant during COVID and doing these things, is that we've learned that sometimes the harder the thing is, it actually makes it the bigger the opportunity, because once you figure it out, it's going to be that much harder for someone else to copy. And it's going to be a little bit of headache and brain damage up front, but If it's gonna give you a better product at a better price and it's gonna help us meet this mission of replacing these fries in every freezer to something that's better for people and that tastes better too, we think it's worth it and we're down to figure it out.
Yeah. Wow. So are you guys able to source your potatoes though from small farms at all, or do you have to get it from the— are, are you kind of, are you, what's your touchpoint with your sourcing for the potatoes? Like, cuz I, I know Sometimes it may not have the USDA organic, but doesn't mean it's not quality, right?
Yeah. So what we have found from a quality perspective, from a taste perspective, is that russet potatoes generally we found perform the best, most consistently gives a really high quality French fry. And almost all of the russet growing in the country, and this is not to say there's always outliers, but the vast majority of where it's being grown is in Idaho. So we basically had to start there and say, okay, how do we find growers in Idaho that can meet our specifications for what we want with the potato? We want to make sure it was a non-GMO potato. We want to make sure that there was like some consistency and quality and kind of traceability back to the farmers where it's coming from. And we have to also make sure that we can meet the scale of what we need. Because I think that the challenge that's always out there for any CPG brand, especially ones that want to grow quickly, is that if we put a claim on our packaging, It needs to be ironclad, right? Like we can't have a pack of things if we like, let's say for example, we want to use regenerative grass-fed beef tallow, which would be awesome. As you know, and maybe a lot of the people listening probably know, there's not a big supply of that in the United States right now. Like we're kind of all building the supply chain as we go. And if we have an opportunity to launch with Costco or Target or these big people in the next year, there probably isn't a US based supply chain of regenerative tallow available at any price, even if we wanted to pay a super stupid premium to get it. So it wouldn't make sense for us to go out right now and to make our kind of core SKU that we want people to try and eat using regenerative tallow with a regenerative certification, because we're going to run into an issue 6 months from now or 8 months from now. And that's what we basically ran into with potatoes too. It's like we need to make sure that whatever supply we have can grow with us. And then be able to hopefully have some of these smaller operations grow alongside us that we can help grow. So we found we're learning a lot about regenerative growing of potatoes, which is a little challenging because the whole regenerative movement, one of the big pieces of that is no-till, which is great, right? Animals get involved in the process and they're kind of COVID cropping. You're having animals go around, they're helping regenerate the soil. This is amazing. The issue is that potatoes are grown underground. So how do you harvest without tilling? Is an issue that we've been trying to figure out. And I think that's also where some of these certifications—
You have to hire a lot of hogs, right?
Maybe. Yeah, they'd probably be eating the potatoes as they go though. I don't even know.
Yeah, totally.
We should get truffle hogs maybe. But the interesting thing is just the certifications, for good reason, try to be a catch-all, but then they don't actually catch everything and it becomes sort of like a hindrance to other people. that are trying to do the right thing and they can get something 90% of the way there, which is so much better. But then you don't get credit because you don't have the badge and then people don't want to pay a premium because they don't really understand at the touchpoint, which is why it's awesome to have this stuff where you can have these conversations in a longer form and really educate people about what's going on. But going back to your original question, we're basically working out of Idaho with some packers who work consistently with the same 3, 4 handful of farms.
Nice.
And that's how we're basically making sure we have a steady supply that can grow with us. And at the same time, we're starting to work with some university programs and other growers in different parts the country to see where the opportunities lie in terms of getting organic potatoes or regenerative potatoes or helping farms transition from a conventional supply to a slightly better version of that supply. So I think for us, like, we have this mantra internally around, as we get bigger, we want to get better. And we don't want to sacrifice being able to grow and make an impact. So we want to make sure that whatever decisions we're making right now can grow with us. But as we're getting bigger and we have the ability to contract or pay in advance and do all these other things that allow you to get a little bit more creative on how you build out your supply chain, our commitment is like, yeah, we're gonna invest in that. We're not gonna try to be playing the game to get as cheap as possible on the shelf to be cheaper than Ore-Ida. Like, they have a $150 million factory. There's a reason why, like, it's not gonna happen with that. Yeah. But we can maintain our price point or drop it slightly or get into other retailers while improving the quality and increasing our level of depth and vertical integration on supply chain. And, you know, it all comes down to our ability to just continue to make the product that tastes really good and it maintains our standards around what's important to us. And we know that we can just upgrade those and improve them over time. We've learned the hard way from food trucks and restaurants, you can't offer something great and then take it away, right? It's better to like do what you can right now and then improve over time. And that's what we're committed to is just every day, how do we get 1% better? How do we improve our supply chain? How do we improve our quality? How do we improve our factory? And then of course, how do we improve the way that we tell our story and share the— spread the word about our brand so we get credit from the people that do care? Because we know there are just so many people out there that are passionate about this stuff and they want to be a part of the solution. And it's great. It's like part of the solution is like eating delicious food. You know, you can just like eat stuff that tastes really good and support brands that you trust and the people that you trust. And that seems to me like the way that we're all going to change and really shape the food system going forward, which is exciting.
Yeah, way to go. Yeah, and it takes time, and I— and hopefully people watching really understand that. It's like, you know, sometimes it's not about looking for perfection, it's looking for the people like yourselves who are actually like striving towards the bigger mission and taking it one step at a time, but, uh, always maintaining clear focus on the intention of that mission. I would say everyone in Organuary fits that bill.
It's interesting. It's almost like you're like a shareholder as an early buyer of some of these brands, right? It's like when they have this transparency and they're telling their story and bringing you along on the journey, it's like, I feel great. There's tons of brands that I consistently buy week over week and I'm like, I give myself a little pat on the back. So like, I'm helping their velocity, I'm helping them grow, I'm helping them get better. And it just feels good. You know, it's like, okay, that like extra dollar or $1.50 over their competitor on the shelf, that's an investment not only in my health, But my investment in building the food system I want to exist for my family 10, 20 years from now. And I think it's really great to see more and more people, I think, are starting to get that mindset too. This is not a cost or a speeding ticket. This is an investment in like the world I want to live in and the body I want to have and the health I want to have for my family.
Yeah, I love that. We don't have a lot more time, but let's just talk about the tallow piece. Uh, and, and what you notice even between the avocado oil and the tallow. And I actually haven't tasted your product yet, so maybe you can talk about the taste difference too. And, and obviously you did a deep dive with McDonald's and tallow, the history of tallow with fries. So maybe in part that as well.
Yeah. And I, Paul, I think I've went on some tangents here, so I probably ate up some of our time, but, um, yeah, I mean, so the interesting thing is for Many people have seen little clips about this on social media, but McDonald's started in the '50s. McDonald's brothers started the first one. Ray Kroc comes in, starts franchising it in Illinois, and it sort of spread all over the country like wildfire. I think the one thing people don't give McDonald's a lot of credit for is that it was an incredible company for the first 30, 40 years of the business, probably the first 30 years, I'd say, where they built out, I think, 1,500 restaurants, 1,000 restaurants, more than that. still using tallow, still being maniacal about their supply chain. They built the standards around ground beef in the United States. There wasn't an 80/20 ground beef before McDonald's. Right. They specced out a specific way they wanted their ground beef to arrive. They created that. So there's a lot of good things that came out of it. Unfortunately, that standardization just kind of kept going to like optimize, optimize, optimize, which also led to factory farming, a lot of the terrible things that have come out today. But One point of focus for McDonald's early on when they started out was that they did all their French fries in beef tallow and their golden fries, their golden spuds, was something they were probably most famous for on their menu. They were really fast, they had great service, they had incredible fries, and the burgers and stuff were pretty good too.
Oh yeah, the flavor on the fries, if anything, was what people most went to McDonald's for.
Yep. Yeah, so the golden arches and golden fries, right? Yeah, that was like their thing.
And then that changed in 1990. I think that's when they
switched Yeah, in 1990, in the background on that, what I've heard, and I've read this really awesome book called Behind the Arches, which goes in this really big deep dive into McDonald's, which is great. At least the first half of the book is amazing. And the second half—
I've read that book. That's a great book.
That's awesome. But the main cliff notes of the story is in 1990, I think late '80s, there was a prominent politician or businessman, I think it was, who died of a heart attack, or his father died of a heart attack. I think it was Philip Sakhanov or something like that. Probably should know that. But basically they blamed, you know, saturated fats for this heart attack that happened and went in this really big lobbying effort to demonize saturated fat without a lot of research, without a lot of like stuff. It was just, they had this thesis and I think we all know like research is something that is great when it works, but it also can be biased, it can be wrong. There can be competing studies that are both showing different things. So basically they, they got this conclusion that saturated fats were the enemy And spent millions of dollars building out this campaign to basically demonize this. And when that happened, it created this public sentiment and outcry. And at the time, McDonald's made the change because public sentiment changed. I think if you really got behind the boardroom, I'm sure there was the public sentiment part and that they could cut their costs by 80, 90% by switching over the conventional oils. I'm sure that helped. to. But lo and behold, people were sort of like demanding it at the time and there was a big cost savings. They made this change. But,
and yet they still used like meat flavor because I think they recognized that that's really what was attracting people to their fries.
Yeah. It's amazing. That's a great point. I mean, today there's 19 ingredients in McDonald's French fry. In there, there is a dairy additive and a wheat additive, and those 2 together are supposed to be mimicking the flavor of beef tallow, like the distinct flavor of McDonald's fry.
So McDonald's, they're not, they're not gluten-free then the fries?
No, fries are not gluten-free and they have dairy in there. It's an additive that they make specifically for them.
I didn't know. I don't eat there anymore, but I was like, I didn't know that. That's insane.
Yeah. It's, and I, I didn't like believe it and I was looking at their website and found it myself and went and asked and it's crazy. Yeah. It's, it really is a wild thing. You would think it's a French fry. How could it be not be gluten-free? It's just potatoes, oil, and salt. Well, lo and behold, there's 19 ingredients in McDonald's fry. So The original recipe.
And, and let's just highlight again, Jesse and Ben's has 3 ingredients, everyone.
3 ingredients. Exactly. And the original McDonald's French fry, the, the original McDonald's French fry was potatoes, beef tallow, whatever they're frying it, tallow-based frying oil and sea salt. Yeah. And that's what we do for our fries. And then we mimic that exact same thing with avocado oil, being that we wanted to have an option that was for people that don't eat meat or they, they don't really understand what tallow is or don't know about it. So We have the tallow SKU, which is tallow and sea salt. We've got a classic sea salt fry, which is avocado oil, potatoes, and sea salt. That's it. And then we have a rosemary and garlic version that is the same as the classic sea salt with avocado oil, potatoes, and salt, but we use dried rosemary and garlic powder. So it's all real ingredients. There's nothing you can't pronounce. All the big guys on their fries, you see things like sodium bicarbonate and dextrose, like we talked about, and a bunch of things you can't pronounce and don't know what they are. And in our mind, it's like a real French fry uses real ingredients that you know exactly what they are, and you can mimic the process at home. The benefit for eating our French fries is that you don't have to spend 3 hours making a house-cut fry from scratch. I've done it in my house just to kind of test it out. It'll take you hours, you know, if you really want to do it the right way. Yeah. So the idea is like, we want to make that twice-fried Belgian-style house-cut fry for you and have all of it done through that first fry. We freeze it. time capsule it, basically get it there for you, and then you just have to pop it in the oven, the air fryer if you're feeling really ambitious and you want something delicious. You could even fry it in like tallow or something at home if you want to get crazy, and they're amazing. But, and the other fun note about all this stuff too is we actually use the exact same base fry that we sell for Jesse Ben's at our restaurant in DC still today at Swizzler. Like, we make a wholesale version of our fries and sell them to Swizzler, and those are the exact same restaurant. They've won awards for the best french fries in Washington, DC. It's like that exact French fry is the fry that you're buying at home and making in your oven or air fryer using only simple ingredients, potatoes, healthy fats, salt. That's it. And that's what you're getting every single time. And I think the last part of your question was some of the benefits of tallow. One is just the flavor is amazing, right? Like you get that umami, that like savoriness that comes out of it, which is really delicious. But there's also just all these great nutrients and I think that's something that the same way it was demonized back in like 1990 around then, and they just made the switch that saturated fats are the enemy, as many things do, the pendulum has swung the opposite way. And so many people are realizing that actually red meat is like basically like the building block that civilization was built on. There's so many nutrients that are in there. And I think similar to organ meat, you get these like micronutrients and these other parts of it that you're not necessarily getting when you're eating a lot of other things on your plate. Like, you know, ground beef is amazing, steaks are amazing, but really when you get into like the fats, the, you know, you get some of these like fat soluble micronutrients in the tallow or you're getting into organ meats, that's when you're really getting some of these other things that we've been supplementing other ways because we switched to a very like far factory farmed chicken white meat diet in the United States. Yeah. Like I think this movement back towards red meat especially, but things like healthier fats like a tallow, Um, it goes a long way to just like really giving your body some of the stuff that it needs.
Well, Dr. Bill Schindler of Eat Like a Human, uh, he says there's 3 things that changed, uh, and enabled us to even have this conversation, which is our Homo sapiens bodies, uh, got 3 things: fat, organs, and, uh, blood. So there you go. Fat, organs, blood. Yeah. Very nutrient dense. Uh, okay. Quick, quickfire questions real quick. What dip do you like? the most with your French fries? I always go dip or no dip.
They don't need any dip. They taste amazing. But I'd say at our house, the 2 things I'm most commonly dipping on are ketchup. I love the idea of the Primal Kitchen, like ketchup, the unsweetened one, but like organic Heinz ketchup is so damn good. It just reminds me of my childhood. So that's my, my go-to. I also love the Primal Kitchen burger sauce they came out with recently. So a lot of times we'll make like regenerative grass-fed beef burgers without a bun at home with like some Grillo's pickles, some onion, and some Jesse and Ben's tallow fries. And I'll have that burger sauce and squirt some on the burger and some on the side for the fries. That's probably my favorite. It's really good.
Nice. Any plans to do duck fat?
Actually, yeah, we have samples of duck fat sitting in our freezer and we need to find time to test them. And then we're designing a bag just in case. So it is something on the roadmap. If anyone's listening to this and you're like, hell yeah, duck fat, send me a, a DM, an email. We'd love to know what people think about that because we think it could be cool. We also think it could be crazy. It's not something other people are doing. So we're open-minded and we, we wanna do stuff that's fun.
I, I vote for duck fat. I think duck fat and potatoes were like, are like peanut butter and jelly. Like they just go together. But I love it. Yeah, I would definitely vote for that. So how do we get you to do an ancestral fry with Pluck? I think that would be an amazing, amazing—
I love the idea. I think that's amazing. I mean, I've thought of like, I could totally see a world where, you know, not mutually exclusive, but like we could do an organic potato with the regenerative tallow. Maybe you add in that, yeah, that Pluck seasoning and then like partner with Force of Nature where it's like you can add in a bag of these ancestral fries onto like a direct-to-consumer order and like throw it in with your regenerative meat. Or find a way to kind of like do that. You know, of course it might be a way to do like an LTO with a retailer to make it available for people too. But I love the idea. We actually, the reason I even came across you guys, like I of course knew about Pluck and I've eaten it before, but I like hadn't thought of it in a while. And then someone tagged us in our first like maybe month and a half being in market with like, here's the hack. And they were taking fries outta the oven, tallow fries and sprinkling Pluck on top. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, oh my God, that is an incredible idea.
So good.
So we need, yeah, we need to workshop this and get it, get it going. Maybe there's like a little bag of Pluck that goes in the bag with our fries that you can like do it and then shake it on after the fact. Or maybe there's a way to season it during the process.
I don't know. Oh, we could totally— we have the little bag. We could totally do that. That's a great— that's a really good idea.
Like the mustard, honey, and the pizza. We do the Pluck seasoning in the, in the bag for the ancestral hookup. I like the idea.
Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah, yeah. We'll talk offline about that. That's like, that's doable tomorrow. Like, that's how realistic We already have the bag, and it's probably a perfect size for your for your amount of fries per your bag. Oh, that's so smart! It's funny. I always think of things that they have to already have it on there, but that's a great add. You it's better to put it on after because then then you're maximizing the flavor and the nutrition.
Yeah, because we found too a lot of times when you season things and then freeze them, you lose some of the flavor. So sometimes you need to like overseason before you freeze it so that when you cook it, you can get all the flavor you want in the final bite. It's kind of this weird thing like. There's companies that make food for airlines, but when you're up in the air at altitude, like your, your navel and nasal passages clog. So I need to put more salt in it than you'd eat it. Like if you ate it on the ground, you'd be like, holy crap, this is so salty. I can't eat it. But up in the air it's the right amount of salt. So there's like this weird thing with freezing and reheating that you need to like account for. But I think the downside is like people don't wanna like get a little packet of rosemary and garlic and sprinkle it on after, but something like Pluck that's unique that you can't necessarily get all the time, or you might not be like, oh shit, I ran out, I can't just go to the store and grab it necessarily. I think that's a great idea where it gives you a little idea, man.
Well, we'll talk about it. And so appreciative of you guys being with Ergannuary. Jess and Ben's— jesseandbens.com, everyone. Uh, all the links will be, be, uh, below. And, uh, and make sure to do all the tasks for Ergannuary because you can win Jesse and Ben's products. So, uh, thank you again, Jesse, for everything you're doing.
Yeah, we don't, we don't ship a lot of fries, but we will ship them directly to you if you win because we are very excited to be a part of this. So we'll find a way with dry ice and all the fun stuff.
Awesome. Well, thank you again, and thank you also for giving up your, a little bit of your vacation. And please continue, take care, and, uh, we'll talk, we'll talk at another time.
Oh man, sounds good.
All right.
