COO promoted to succeed concept founder Adam Eskin as brand looks to post-COVID expansion
Tracy Kim, who has been promoted to CEO of the Dig concept, says her role is to diversify the former urban lunch-focused brand to more suburban and urban residential locations and broaden the dayparts to more dinner occasions.
The New York City-based Dig promoted Kim, who joined the company 18 months ago as chief operating officer, to succeed Adam Eskin, who founded the brand as Dig Inn in 2011. Eskin will serve as executive chairman.
Dig has also expanded its board with the additions of Andy Pforzheimer, founder of the Bartaco and Barcelona brands, and Mark Crumpacker, who served as chief marketing officer at Chipotle Mexican Grill for nearly a decade.
Prior to Dig, Kim served in the consumer space with consumer package goods at General Mills and licensing at Weight Watchers. She moved to the technology space with the Shutterstock photo platform and served as CEO of Aaptiv, a mobile fitness app.
“The common theme between those organizations and Dig,” Kim explained in a phone interview Tuesday, “is I was hired in businesses that had found a product market fit, and I was to scale and grow those businesses.”
Eskin, in a statement Monday, called Kim “a brilliant, compassionate, high-integrity leader that knows what it takes to scale a business with a people-first approach. I’ve truly loved working with her over the last 18 months and look forward to supporting her in her new role.”
Dig on Monday opened its 31st restaurant in Stamford, Conn., providing customers with the brand’s its first stand-alone building, a 3,000-square-foot restaurant with 50 parking spaces.
Similar to a location that opened a month ago in Bridgewater, N.J., Kim said the Stamford restaurant was a departure for the urban-based Dig brand, which before the pandemic had focused on office workers as its primary audience.
“We've really been focusing on the diversification of the portfolio,” Kim explained, adding that the expansion included suburbs and urban residential locations.
“We still have office people who are coming in for lunch,” she said, “but the demographic is much wider. What we've seen with those Bridgewater and Stamford locations is we have families with one young kids; we have retired couples who are coming in for lunch every day; we have people like me — call it middle-aged families with teenage kids.”
The Stamford location also moved to a mixed service model, with customers ordering and the food being delivered to the table, she said.
Dig has recently started testing a family-oriented dinner offering in its Rye Ridge location in Westchester County and is offering a children’s meal for the first time, Kim said. The offerings have been expanded to Bridgewater, N.J., and the new Stamford location.
“We'll plan to extend that out to our urban residential locations,” Kim said. “It's a great value.”
Jessica Serrano, Dig’s vice president of marketing, said in a statement that the Big Dinner Box is priced around $40 and feeds a family of four. “Given what we’ve seen with food-industry pricing over the last 18 months, both in restaurants and grocery stores, we see the opportunity to feed a family at an incredible value, particularly given the quality of our food,” she said. “It would literally cost you more to shop and cook it yourself.”
Dig’s next opening is planned for May 1 in Washington, D.C., near the Georgetown University campus, Kim said. The brand expects two more openings by year’s end.
Kim said her new role is to use the brand’s assets. “Here at Dig,” she said, “we have a great team. We have a great product. We have great service. My new role is, honestly, to grow and scale this business and diversify our portfolio in terms of the neighborhoods we're in and diversifying our use cases.”
Dig in October 2021 announced its Series F raise of $65 million in a round supported by existing investors including EHI (the fund affiliated with Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group), Monogram Capital Partners, and Avalt, as well as new investors Kitchen Fund, Eminence Capital L.P., and Inherent Group.
Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected]
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