Shaking Up The Fast Food Market

Shake Shack CEO Randy Garutti explains why the Gulf region is so important to the cult burger chain and how new technology is changing the way it operates.

- Robert Anderson

When Randy Garutti first stepped foot in Dubai the landscape was far different from the one seen today.

As he recalls, the Burj Khalifa was still under construction and he stood on what was to become the skyscraper’s iconic fountains, while the setting of our interview – Shake Shack’s Jumeirah Beach Residence outlet – was still just sand.

At that time too the company was in a construction phase of its own. Shake Shack had only just opened its second location on New York’s Upper West Side when Kuwaiti retail giant Mohammed Alshaya approached it for a meeting in 2009 to discuss opening outlets in the Middle East.

“We never dreamed we’d have a big company to begin with and we certainly never dreamed we’d be in the Middle East. But when Mohammed came, and we came to see the business that Aishaya had built, we were blown away and astounded,” he recalls.

The years since then have seen both Shake Shack and Dubai grow at blistering pace and Garutti has been there every step of the way – moving on from his role as director of operations at Shack founder Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group to become the brand’s chief operating officer in 2007 and CEO at the end of 2011.

From its humble beginnings as an ethical food cart selling hot dogs in New York’s Madison Square Park in 2001, the company expanded its menu to burgers and milkshakes and developed a cult following that drew huge lines of hungry patrons to its New York outlets.

In the process – and through a focus on responsibly sourced ingredients and social media friendly branding – Shake Shack was credited with reinventing the burger for the modern era and drew significant interest from outside its home New York market, where it listed on the stock exchange in a $105m IPO in 2015.