BB-INT019 — Wesley Cho

Thanks for hopping on, Wesley. I know lunch is precious real estate — appreciate you giving me some of it.

Oh, no, this is great, I'm eating at my desk anyway, so you're just — you're the entertainment. [laughs] Honestly, talking about tacos while eating a taco is kind of the dream, so, off we go.

Let me start wide. When you think about lunch on a workday, what are you actually trying to get done?

So — okay, I'll be honest with you, I used to be a person who "explored" at lunch. Air quotes. I'd wander, I'd try the new poke place, I'd, you know, treat it like a little field trip. And then I took this job, and my calendar started looking like a game of Tetris that's about to end badly, and all of that romance just — evaporated. Now the job of lunch is: I've got a forty-five minute gap between an ops standup and a carrier call, I need to eat something that doesn't make me sad, and I need to be back in my chair before the call, ideally with a couple of minutes to not be chewing on camera. That's it. That's the whole spec. Feed me, don't wreck my afternoon, and — this is the part people forget — don't make it a compromise. I don't want the "well, it was fast" lunch. I've had enough sad-desk lunches to last a lifetime.

How did BorderBlend first come onto your radar?

Okay, so this is a bit of a story. Bear with me. There's a guy on my team, Priyank, who is — he's one of those people who's constitutionally incapable of eating a bad meal, he just won't do it, he'll walk fifteen minutes for the right sandwich. And one day he comes back from lunch and he's got this — he's practically vibrating, and he goes, "Wes, there's a truck, there's a taco truck by the loading side of the building, you have to." And I said the thing I always say, which is "I'll get to it," which means never. And then like a week later I'm walking back from the bank, and I literally just — I smelled it before I saw it. Smoke. Proper smoke. And I thought, huh, that's not a normal food-truck smell, that's a barbecue smell. So I got in the line kind of against my own better judgment, because a line at 12:45 is a genuine gamble when your day is Tetris — and I got the brisket. And, yeah. That was the end of my exploring era. [laughs] Priyank has never let me forget that he found it first.

So the brisket did the work.

The brisket did all the work. And look, I want to be careful here because I don't want to oversell it like some — but it's real. It's actually smoked. You can taste that somebody stood next to a smoker at six in the morning and cared about it. It's not a sauce doing an impression of barbecue. And here's the thing that got me: the alternative for that flavour, the sit-down version, is a forty-minute lunch and a bill I'd feel a little guilty about. This is six minutes and it's — it's not a step down. That's the whole magic trick. It's fast and it's genuinely good, and normally you only get to pick one of those. So it just quietly became the default. I didn't sit down and decide "Wesley, you are now a brisket-taco man." It just kind of — happened to me. And I put the salsa verde on it, which I'm told is a whole thing with the regulars, and — yeah, they're right. It's a whole thing. I'd riot if it disappeared.

You mentioned the line being a gamble. Walk me through that.

Yeah, so this is where the honeymoon meets reality. There are really two anxieties, and they're different. The first one is: is the truck even there. Because it's a truck, right, it has feelings, it has a schedule I don't have access to, and some days I go down and the spot is just — empty. Bare curb. And that is genuinely the worst outcome, worse than a long line, because now I've burned ten minutes of my forty-five, I've got nothing, and I'm standing there like a man who's been stood up. And then I have to go improvise, which is the exact thing I was trying to not do. The second anxiety is the line itself. If I round the corner and there's twenty people, that line could eat my whole window. And I've done the math on this more times than a grown adult should. Like I'll be at the back going, okay, roughly a person a minute, I've got a call at one-fifteen — do I stay or do I bail. It's a stupid amount of cognitive load for a taco. [laughs] But that's the reliability thing. The food's never been the problem. The not-knowing is the problem.

So if you could know something before you walked down —

Is it open, where exactly is it today, and how long is the line. Those three. Honestly if my phone just told me those three things every morning I'd never have a bad lunch again in my life. Everything else — loyalty points, brand story, whatever — that's all garnish. Those three facts are the meal.

There's an app. Have you tried it?

I did! I did, and — okay, so, you'd think I of all people would love the app, right, I run operations, I'm the guy who's supposed to be into systems and dashboards. And I downloaded it specifically for order-ahead, because order-ahead is — that's the fantasy. I tap it from my desk, I stroll down at the exact right moment, there's a little bag with my name on it, I don't stand in anything, I look like a man who has his life together. That's the dream. And the app just kind of... didn't get me there. I couldn't tell if the truck near me was actually open or just, like, listed as existing. The menu on the app didn't match the board — I remember I'd mentally committed to something on the walk down and got there and it wasn't even a thing that day. And the big one: there was no proper "your order's ready, come get it" moment. So even if I'd ordered ahead I'd have been standing there anyway, not knowing, which defeats the entire — that's the whole point of the exercise. So I quietly gave up and went back to just walking up and taking my chances. Which, for a guy whose actual job is removing uncertainty from logistics, is a little embarrassing to admit. The app added uncertainty. That's the opposite of what I needed from it.

If order-ahead genuinely worked — reliably — what changes for you?

Oh, everything, and — and here's the part that I think matters for them, actually, more than just me: it changes the group thing. Because it's not always just me. Couple times a week I'm the guy who stands up in the standup and goes "I'm doing a taco run, text me your orders," and suddenly I'm the human order-aggregation system for two or three people. And you'd think I'd be good at that, given the job, but no — I'm standing at the window going "okay, one no salsa, one — wait, who's the plant-based one, is that Dana or — " I mean not you, but you get it. [laughs] It's chaos. If I could load a group order on my phone, four items, hit go, and pick up one bag with four labelled things in it — that's a completely different product. That's me walking them three or four paying customers, cheerfully, several times a week, instead of doing it once and quietly resenting it. And a happy Wesley brings the team. A frustrated Wesley starts saying "let's just order pizza," and nobody wants that. Least of all me.

When you pick up for the team, how does the money side work?

Ugh. Okay, so that's the other little papercut. Right now I pay, I get — if I'm lucky — a receipt that's already fading before I'm back at my desk, one of those thermal ones that turns into a blank grey square by the time finance wants it. And these team lunches, a lot of them are legitimately expensable — it's a working session, we're heads-down, I'm feeding the room so we don't lose an hour. So I should be expensing it, but the friction of it lands on me at month-end when I'm trying to reconstruct which faded grey square was which. What I actually want is dead simple: an itemised receipt, emailed to me, ideally where I can throw a project code or a cost centre on it. That's it. It sounds tiny. It is not tiny when you do it, I don't know, thirty, forty times a quarter and then have to explain each one to a finance system that trusts nobody.

Let's talk about staying in touch. Would you sign up for a newsletter, or alerts?

So my honest instinct is no, because my inbox is a warzone and I unsubscribe from things for sport. But — but — there's a version I'd actually want, and I've thought about this, weirdly. Three things. Number one, and this is the big one: "the truck is here today." Just — a little heads-up in the morning that my truck is open, where it's parked, till when. That's not marketing to me, that's operational intel, I'd read it every single day. Number two: specials, but only real ones. Like "brisket's back after yesterday's sellout" or "there's a combo today." Actionable stuff. Not "meet the team," not a recipe, not the brand's origin story — I'll be honest with you, I do not care where the brand went to school. And number three, honestly, catering — like if they'll do a proper spread for a team offsite, tell me that's a thing and tell me how to book it. Those three, I'm opening every time. Anything past that and I'm gone, unsubscribe, no hard feelings.

Say more about that "truck is here today" alert — why's that the one?

Because it fixes my number-one failure for basically zero cost to them. Remember, my worst day is walking down and it's not there — the empty curb, the stood-up feeling. If they just ping me at eleven-thirty, "truck's on Hornby till two, brisket in stock," I've now planned my whole midday around one little notification. That's enormous value to me and it costs them, what, a push notification. And — this is the bit I really believe — I'd want them to send the bad news too. "Not out today." Because that's just as useful. Then I make other plans at my desk in the warm instead of finding out on a cold corner. And honestly? Telling me the bad news early is how they'd earn my trust on the good news. That's — I'd respect that a lot.

You brought up a time it wasn't there. Can you tell me about that?

Yeah. [laughs, a little rueful] Okay, so, there was this one Thursday. And it was a bad Thursday already — we'd had a shipment go sideways, everyone was frayed, and I'd been kind of holding onto lunch as my little reward. Like, "you get through the eleven o'clock and then you get the brisket." That was the deal I'd made with myself. And I go down, and — nothing. Empty spot. And I know it's just a taco, I know, it's not a real problem, nobody died. But I stood there for a second longer than made sense, and I was genuinely — deflated. Like, it hit harder than it should have because I'd been counting on it. That's the thing I don't think a brand always clocks: when you become somebody's default, you're not just selling them lunch, you've kind of taken on their expectation. And when the curb's empty, you've let down a guy who was quietly relying on you. I ended up with a mediocre wrap from the place downstairs and I was grumpy about it well into the afternoon. Over a taco. But that's — that's exactly the point, isn't it. I wouldn't have been grumpy if I didn't care.

That's a really honest way to put it. Last one — if the app and the ordering all worked the way you're describing, where does BorderBlend land for you?

Then it stops being "the truck I roll the dice on" and it just becomes — part of the plumbing of my week. Like, load-bearing. I don't think about my transit card, I don't think about my coffee routine, they just work and they hold the day up. That's the tier they'd move into. And honestly that's a better place to be than being my "favourite," because favourites are a mood — I could fall in love with a ramen place next month. But the thing that quietly runs your workday, that you build around? You don't drop that. You'd have to really work to lose me at that point. And they've — look, they earned the habit fair and square. The food's good, they got me. Everything I've complained about today is just friction sitting on top of a thing that already works. Take the friction off and I'm theirs for a very long time.

Thanks so much for your time, Wesley.

Anytime, genuinely. This was more fun than the carrier call I've got in — [checks phone] oh, eight minutes. See, that's a well-timed lunch. Okay. Go feed someone. Cheers.

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