Sandwich Meng

Ex-CA building sandwich co's 🥪 in Calgary. Posting about business, AI, and whatever's on my mind.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

Ex-CA. Left accounting to build sandwich companies in Calgary 🥪

Traveling the world changed how I see everything, and it's why I took the leap.

Here I'll share:

The real side of running food businesses

The numbers behind them (once a CA…)

Using AI to run lean

Lessons from the road

Building in public. Follow along 👇

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

Nobody tells you that growing a food business means your job title changes by the hour.

Kitchen with the team.
Sales.
Sandwich delivery driver.
Taste tester for new sweets that haven't launched yet.

Ex-CA, growing sandwich companies in Calgary.

What's the strangest job title your work has handed you? 🥪

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@garyvee Food is about as analog as it gets. AI can speed up the back office, but someone still has to make the sandwich and get it to the customer on time.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@NRNonline Claiming a ChatGPT profile is going to be the new version of fixing your Google hours. The useful part is seeing how people actually describe what they want before they find you.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@BevNET RTD up 20% while total sales slip 1% says a lot about where the growth actually is. Convenience formats keep pulling ahead even when the core category goes flat.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

The skill that transferred best from public accounting to sandwiches isn't spreadsheets.

It's being comfortable asking "does this number actually make sense?" out loud.

Every price. Every invoice. Every recipe. 🥪

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@Codie_Sanchez Number 1 shows up fast in food. A prep spec or portion size is hard to hold someone to when you can't comfortably correct them, and that cost lands quietly in the numbers.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@RestaurantsCA That gap between 26% expecting sales growth and 21% expecting profit gains is the whole story. More volume can't fix a margin problem when overhead climbs faster than the average ticket.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

Unpopular opinion: one week of delivering your own sandwiches teaches you more about the business than a month of reading its financials.

I say that as an Ex-CA.

The numbers tell you what happened.
The deliveries tell you why.

Agree or disagree? 🥪

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

Ex-CA habit: food cost analysis used to take me a full day. Now it's about 10 minutes.

The real change is that I can rerun it every time an invoice changes, not once a month.

Costing used to be a chore. Now it's a habit. 🥪

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

By 2029 any retail food service shop not deploying this process will struggle. Less human bottlenecks for order taking = reduced labor and completed ticket times) Five self kiosks = increased ordering speed. At a food court lunch rush, the kitchen line usually breaks before the customer orders. I wonder if this setup has been stress tested to handle the max order rush?

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@Codie_Sanchez The third one compounds. In wholesale food, the supplier who shows up exactly when promised tends to keep the account long after a cheaper one comes pitching.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@NRNonline Extended hours selling more food is the key detail. Later hours only pay off when each extra ticket covers the added labour, and food is what gets it there.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@QSRmagazine Ex-CA favourite line in there: a steady 28.5 to 29.5% COGS beats a lower but jumpy one, because you can actually forecast cash flow off it. Predictable is underrated.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@NextMoveSteve Thanks Steve, appreciate it!

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@DanielFrageri Great one to add. A first order shows the marketing worked, the second one shows the food did.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

It took me 37 years to realize...

- a safe career on paper and the right career are two different things
- leaving public accounting didn't waste the CA, every sandwich still runs on the same math
- in food, a great product can't save numbers nobody checks
- AI can do the food-cost checks, it still can't make the sandwich
- the unglamorous jobs (compressors, plumbing, deliveries) are the actual job

Ex-CA, growing sandwich companies in Calgary 🥪

What took you way too long to learn?

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@NRNonline Trading a free large for a photo of a real order is cheap research. Seeing what actually arrives tells them more than a survey would.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@eternaclarity Exactly. A sold-out day can still hide a thin margin, which is why the per-item cost check matters more than the till total.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

One weird thing about going from public accounting to sandwiches:

As a CA, a wrong number meant a revised report.

In food, a wrong number can mean selling plenty of sandwiches and still losing money on every one.

Same math. Very different stakes. 🥪

Ex-CA, now growing sandwich companies in Calgary.

Anyone else switch careers and find the old skills mattered more, not less?

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

@eternaclarity Ha, agreed. One busy shift probably has more real material than all those months of planning.

[Sandwich Meng @SandwichMeng]

Nobody talks about the content you spend eight months thinking about instead of filming.

That was me.
Finally started.

Ex-CA, 37, growing sandwich companies in Calgary.
Marketing, sales, sandwich deliveries, and time in the kitchen with the team.

Plenty to document.
I just needed to start.