Grounded

In this episode of Grounded, Lauren Mitchell sits down with Billy Loesch to explore the mindset, risk tolerance, and systems required to scale a modern food brand. Billy shares his journey from Wall Street to founding Baya Bar in 2016, and how he grew the concept from a single Brooklyn location to 41 locations with more in development.
 Billy Loesch is the Founder and CEO of Baya Bar, one of the fastest-growing smoothie and açaí concepts in the U.S., featured in Entrepreneur Magazine’s Franchise 500.
🔑 5 Key Takeaways
  1. Billy’s early entrepreneurial mindset showed up long before Baya Bar, from selling trinkets as a kid to viewing every opportunity through a risk-and-reward lens.
  2. Wall Street taught him relentless sales discipline and negotiation—skills he later applied directly to franchising, leasing, and brand growth.
  3. Scaling required unlearning the “do it yourself” mentality and replacing it with trust, delegation, and repeatable systems.
  4. Baya Bar’s customer experience is highly intentional, from bowl design and music playlists to loyalty technology and ingredient sourcing.
  5. One of the biggest blind spots in food & beverage today is bad leases—unsustainable rent can sink even great concepts before they hit their stride.
💬 Quote of the Episode
“Entrepreneurs are not made, they’re born.”
 — Billy Loesch, Founder & CEO, Baya Bar
🔗 Connect with the Guest(s)
Book Recommendation: Traction by Gino Wickman - Get a Grip on Your Business
Podcast Recommendation: The Game
 

🎧 Ways to Tune In
Transistor: https://www.groundedonthepod.com/
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Creators and Guests

Host
Lauren Mitchell
Lauren Mitchell is the Director of National Accounts and Custom Distribution at Produce Alliance, LLC. She is a dedicated fresh produce spend & spec maximizer for multi-unit national restaurant chains & groups. She gets to know your brand and infuses your expectation for quality, consistency and transparency to create more reliability in your produce category.

What is Grounded?

Join us as we engage with top tier producers in the foodservice industry to hear their perspective from all links throughout the supply chain. Here, we discuss brand development, company culture, global supply chain strategy, culinary innovation and leadership from folks who founded, operate or manage multi-unit restaurant chains. Each show is tailored around the guest to dig deep into their unique journey and how it shapes their current procurement strategy in order to aggregate the best insights toward the future of foodservice.