Evolving a National Brand with Bento Sushi’s Dave Jones

In this Snippets episode, Leon Goren speaks with Dave Jones, President and CEO of Bento Sushi, about the evolution of one of Canada’s most recognizable food brands. Dave reflects on Bento’s growth from a single storefront in Toronto to a North American leader, with operations spanning retail, franchise, and large-scale manufacturing.

Dave shares how the business has adapted over time, including the shift from in-store preparation to a growing delivery and manufacturing model, and what it takes to scale in a highly competitive market. He speaks candidly about the importance of protecting the core business, staying close to customers, and avoiding complacency as organizations scale. Drawing on firsthand experience, he highlights how even successful companies can be caught off guard when focus shifts too heavily toward growth. 

Tune in for a grounded conversation on maintaining a resilient business in a competitive market. 

Transcript

Special thanks to Aird & Berlis for helping us bring you today's PEO Leadership snippet podcast.

Welcome to our snippets podcast. I'm Leon Goren, CEO of PEO Leadership and Innovators Alliance, North America's premier peer-to-peer network and leadership advisory firm.
Today, I'm very excited to welcome Dave Jones, President and CEO of Bento Sushi, and a member of one of our larger corporate peer-to-peer advisory boards.

Bento started in 1996 around the corner from where I grew up and live in Toronto. It started as a small takeout shop offering sushi, bento boxes, and ready-to-eat foods. I remember visiting that tiny shop many times, whether for a takeout dinner or picking up some big sushi party trays. The sushi was absolutely amazing.

And since then, they've grown to become Canada's largest sushi company, with an increasing presence in the United States and an acquisition as one of the world's largest sushi companies outside of Japan. It's an amazing Canadian success story that continues to shine, and Dave has been instrumental to their growth and success, having been with the company for over 17 years.

Dave, thanks for taking some time to spend with us today.

Well, appreciate you having me, Leon. Thank you so much.

So I thought we'd kick it off. Maybe tell us a little about you, Dave, your family, your passion, your interests, and what it looks like running Bento today.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, on the family side, I've been married to my wife and partner, and a huge part of the reason that I've been successful, Lauren, for over 17 years. I've got four children. My eldest, 17, I've got an 11-year-old daughter, an 8-year-old son, and we had a little surprise baby three years ago, along with a golden retriever, just to round things out.
I divide my try to divide my time equally where possible between Bento and family. Work-life balance, I think, is hugely important, and I think success in one is highly linked to success in the other. I'm relatively simple. I spend a lot of my time facilitating activities for my kids. I coach soccer and rugby with the kids. We've got a little spot up north in the summer, so I like to do some boating and barefooting and skiing, and just like to get outside.

On the Bento side, it's an amazing story, as you alluded to. I've been very fortunate to be around the business for 17 years and came up with well, when I joined, both founders were still involved in the business. I was fortunate enough to mentor and spend most of my career with Glenn Brown, who was the operational side of the business. And when he moved on, I was appointed by the board into the leadership role. And so my primary role today is really steering the business, keeping in touch with our roots and what made us successful while really navigating a hyper-competitive landscape and aggressively expanding into the US.

It's funny, our viewers can't see us, but I got to tell you. So Dave has no gray hair. He's got four kids. He's got a young and the guy's on a plane all the time. And you look pretty good, Dave. I don't know. And you're pretty relaxed. There's some fish behind you.

Yeah, yeah, some new branding. I'd like to say I had a hand in that, but I got a solid team.
No, I listen, I think appreciate that. The beard comes in pretty gray. I'm a big proponent of overall wellness and healthy, trying to have a relatively healthy lifestyle as it ties to mental health and just doing these things. I think we know more now than we ever had how linked all these things are, and I just think it's important. Plus, I got an 8-year-old son who's going to try to kick Dad's butt at one point, so I need to be able to keep up with him and make sure he knows who's in charge.

Yeah. So I was going to ask you the other question. I mean, you've been in retail for so long, and we have so many members that are not on the retail, but the suppliers to retail, which actually you guys are that's primarily your business as well. That landscape has changed just so dramatically. You're one of the few Canadian success stories that has just been growing and expanding so quickly. I mean, what's the magical formula, and how have you been adapting? What changes have you really seen here?

Bento really started in the one-day kind of hyper-fresh, as what you would expect in the traditional sushi market. And so the bulk of our business for many years was in what we would call the onsite or the kiosk stores, mostly in grocery, but we do food service, airports, colleges. But typically, this is where you would have a chef that would go into a store or a location, and they would cook rice, and they would produce sushi fresh every single day.

Over the years, I think what we've seen is it's still a core part of our business, but consumers are more informed now than they ever have been. So the key for us has been making sure that while we stick close to the core expectations, the California rolls, the spring rolls, the salmon combos, because those are the staples that will drive the business, we have to be the leader on innovation. So that's a huge part of what we do, being on-trend and just being top of mind, not just from an end-user, consumer standpoint, but also this is what keeps us relevant with our customers and as a barrier to entry.

Food safety, I mean, it's a bit cliché, but it's the most important thing that we can do. And that ties not just to how we make product, but our supply chain as well. And so we need to continue to innovate, to buy better, just ensure that we are executing to the highest standard. And as consumers get more educated, it actually helps the business because people are more inclined to trust grocery sushi.

For a lot of years, there was a stigma around, "Oh, it's grocery sushi, and maybe it's not fresh, and I don't know where it's made." And I think the reality is that our systems and controls are best in class. The training that we do and everything that we're required to execute a national program and grow the business, it insists that we are executing to the absolute highest standard. And so.

Are you still one of the things I remember always was going in, and you'd have the chef behind the counter, and it was your employees making this is that still primarily the business, or is it that part diminished?

It's a big chunk of the business. So we've got about 700 locations across Canada and the US where, yes, we have a chef. Many of them are franchisees now. They're business owners, but they effectively are they're a bento person, not a grocery person or whomever. And yeah, that's still a huge part of our business.

The shift now to hyper-fresh delivery and supply chain, the move to in Canada, we're seeing a big move in terms of a shift to sort of what they would call sort of the discount banners and where they have a lighter labor model in the store. They may not have a full, what we would call HMR, home meal replacement category. Those locations are becoming more and more prevalent.

And as a result, our commissary business or our delivery business has grown exponentially over the last four to five years. We've grown immensely in the US. We're the approved supplier now for both Costco and Trader Joe's. That product is all delivered in. It's fresh. We make it daily, but those stores, they either don't have the space or they don't have the setup to have a chef in the store. And so we deliver in, but it's the quicker-growing part of our business. The reality is.

That's a huge transformation because that's you getting into the production. You're in the manufacturing business, essentially.

We've moved away from these smaller supplemental commissary spaces into large-scale manufacturing. We've got five locations in the US now, our largest just outside of Los Angeles, where we're producing 60,000, 65,000 packs of sushi a day. It's evolved, and that's where we're seeing that's where we're seeing the growth.

Grocery, particularly in Canada, it's pretty saturated. I mean, there is obviously new locations being built, but the white space for us is really within servicing these locations that don't have the sushi bars in them and where we can drop off a product that is merchandised with their other ready-to-eat, ready-to-heat consumables. And so that's where Bento will be investing the bulk of our CapEx and strategic energy moving forward.
How many employees do you guys have now?

So we've got about 1,100 employees right now across Canada and the US, but we've also got nearly 550 franchisees. So we're very quietly one of the largest franchise companies in Canada as well. It's a big monster these days.

Yeah, it's very different. Like I said, I've known it in the early days, and I knew it through Glenn in the early days too. It's a totally different monster now in terms of what you guys have built.

Yeah. Yeah, we've all had to kind of pivot and bring in manufacturing experts and really sort of realign the business and the trajectory. And you have to all of a sudden, you're just into things that you didn't do previously, like approvals, like the food safety and quality compliance requirement for dealing with any of these large national partners is very complex, particularly on the manufacturing side. And so it just requires us to just have a very different focus and level of expertise as the business pivots.

I mean, you've been there 17 years. You've seen this growth. And if you hindsight now, so you sort of look back, and I'm thinking about some of the members that are sort of growing their businesses today, is there one or two things that stick in your head that, "Okay, I would have maybe done this differently with my people and my growth," or, "I would have had my capital done earlier." Are there one or two things that you would have done differently and that have been some big lessons learned?

There's lots of them. As I look back, I think one of the biggest things for me in reflection, really understanding how competitive the landscape is. I think for a long time I don't want to use the word complacent, but we were very fortunate in the Canadian business to only have a few regional competitors, and we were able to sort of do a few things to ensure that we had a significant barrier to entry that stopped anybody from displacing us.
And the reality is that any of the US players, the geography in Canada and servicing the store networks is really complicated. And so at times, we just maybe took for granted a little bit how aggressively some of the other competitors were targeting our business. We had a couple of setbacks in Canada, losing some business a couple of years ago.
And as I reflect back on it now, I just think while we were hyper-focused at growth and moving forward, we need to make sure that there's absolutely no disruption in servicing our existing customers, if that makes sense. You just feel like maybe we took our eye off the ball a little bit, and we thought, "You know what? This is good. We've had this business for a long time. They're happy. Sales are good." And we got blindsided. And to me, if you ever get blindsided, it means you've missed something significantly. And so that's probably the single biggest piece is, yes, growing the business is critical, but protecting the business at all costs.

That's relevant to every single business. We're so focused on the growth side all the time, and you've got all your customers and clients, and you sort of forget about them sometimes, and it's crazy.

For us, it wasn't so much forgetting about them. I think it was just making sure that every customer feels like they're the only customer, right? The partners. I mean, that was the bread and butter.

And I mean, that was you mentioned Glenn, but I mean, that was what he was so good at was, right? When he was in the room with the customers, he made it seem like it was the only customer Bento had, really. And there's an absolute art to that. And we just learned the lesson. As you grow, you just need to make sure you really stay close to what got you there and who did.

Well, thanks for sharing, Dave. That's awesome. So glad you were able to come on and join us today and share some of those insights.

If you're interested in our live webcast, The Way Forward Live, and/or any other snippets, please take a moment and visit us at PEO-Leadership.com. You'll find on our site various recorded webcasts, which include guests such as Morgan Housel, Professor Janice Stein, Harvard's Rosabeth Kanter, and the list goes on. Thank you all for joining us today, and we look forward to seeing you again shortly. Thanks again, Dave.

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