Pita, bowl, or salad? Chicken, falafel, or spicy lamb meatball?
Frequent customers will easily recognize those choices as part of the menu at CAVA, the fast-growing, fast-casual Mediterranean chain with a location just a shuttle ride away from AU’s main campus—among hundreds across the country.
But the multi-billion dollar company’s origins and evolution hold no shortage of lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs, Kogod Dean David Marchick noted in welcoming CAVA CEO and co-founder Brett Schulman to the Veloric Center for Entrepreneurship on February 14.
“We’re going to hear a crazy story about entrepreneurship: Success, a lot of failure, but resilience. It’s a great story,” Marchick said in an enticing preamble to a discussion held as part of the Alan Meltzer CEO Speaker Series.
The story of CAVA actually began nearly two decades ago, about 15 miles from the AU campus. In a non-descript Rockville, Maryland shopping center, a single full-service restaurant called CAVA Mezze proved to be the starting point for what would, one day, turn into a major corporation.
The original restaurant was built on the passion of sharing beloved Mediterranean recipes for the three founders and childhood friends: Ike Grigoropoulos, Chef Dimitri Moshovitis, and Ted Xenohristos.
The three men ran into many challenges early on, from hurdles in getting a lease to hiccups in securing financing and complying with regulatory requirements. At one point, Schulman recalled, the group raised capital for their initial restaurant by selling off a Jeep won in a church raffle.
Schulman himself wasn’t involved at this point; he was working on Wall Street in the mid-2000s, and feeling unfulfilled.