Business duo open first Waldorf Smoothie King
They hope to grow into major chain owners
From the basketball court to the food court, business partners Ryan Whitfield and Shawn Pullam keep pushing to be the best.
The two teamed up in high school on the hardwood — one a shooting guard, the other a point guard — and they’ve been playing off each other ever since. For them, it’s been one venture after another since graduating from Crossland High School in Prince George’s County in 1995.
Last Sunday, they opened the first Smoothie King in Waldorf, Pullam’s adopted hometown since 2003, at 2785 Crain Highway. It’s their third since opening the Upper Marlboro-Largo location in June and taking over a Silver Spring location in July.
“It was real simple: health is very important,” Pullam said. “We like to be healthy. We work out. We promote health. It was a great thing for us to do [Smoothie King]. It’s not like work; this is our lifestyle. This was a perfect franchise for us.”
“It all started from us being teenagers, and being very competitive in basketball and other sports,” Whitfield said of their longtime association.
“From that point on, we had that competitive edge,” Pullam added. “That carried over into business. We want to be the best. We’re trying to have the most stores.”
Pullam said they’re already looking to expand even as they were still putting the finishing touches on the Waldorf store during an interview last week. Staff training was on tap the next day.
“We have a couple of locations we’re looking at in the Maryland area,” Pullam said. “However, if opportunity presents itself outside of Mar yland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, we’ll be interested in looking at it.”
“We haven’t even opened up and I’m already thinking about the next store,” he added with a laugh.
The employee team will be made up of quite a few high school students for the late day shifts and weekends, but not all high schoolers — or college students, for that matter — can make it onto the team. The two entrepreneurs require a 3.0 grade point average of their student workers.
“If you were to meet all our team members, the average GPA is like 3.4,” Pullam said. “We try to create this circle, this environment of being the best at everything. It’s almost like an AP class. My son’s in AP English, right, so that’s the highest English class at that grade.”
“You need a 3.0 just to work here. We want to see report cards,” Whitfield added. “We’re the transition between ending high school and going on to what you want to do in life, whether it be college or whether it be this.”
Pullam said they also look for a desire to succeed and will make exceptions for the right people with an entrepreneurial spirit.
“If we see that desire or that passion, we make them our projects, too,” he said. “We put them through the pipeline. If they turn around 2.6 [GPA] into a 3.2 or 3.0 the next semester, it’s a great feeling to watch that.”
Smoothie King is a New Orleans-based franchise founded in 1973 by Steve Kuhnau, “whose mission was to help others achieve better health in a tasty way,” according to a company news release.
“Smoothie King’s whole concept is ‘smoothies with a purpose,’” Whitfield said. “It fits with whatever a person’s lifestyle is.”
The smoothie menu is broken out into four categories: Fitness Blends, Slim Blends, Wellness Blends and Take a Break Blends.
“Fitness Blends: they cater to people who want to work out, put on muscle and need more calories,” Whitfield said. “If you needed less calories but want a meal replacement, you’d pick from one of the Slim Blends. If you want more vegetables, the ones we use are carrots and kale, we have [Wellness Blend] smoothies based around that. If you just want a healthy snack, we have smoothies for that (Take a Break Blends).”
He said any of the blends that have the raw, unprocessed turbinado sugar added can have that removed to reduce calories by about 100, depending on the size. There are also additives for boosting protein and energy, as well as something called “Diet Down,” which aims to “curb your appetite for hours,” Whitfield said. The “Herbal Immune” additive is geared toward helping boost the body’s immune system.
“We’re putting things to help you stay healthy in your smoothies, without changing the taste of the smoothie,” Whitfield said.
While the menu doesn’t include sandwiches or any other solid foods, the store does sell lines of snack chips, energy bars and protein powders. The latter are proprietary and come in four different types depending on lifestyle, including the vegan “Sun Warrior.”
“The vegan protein [powder] is made of hemp, cranberries and peas,” Whitfield said. “I pretty much switch all my smoothies to it because I don’t even eat meat. I try to make sure I get that in all my smoothies.”
The two entrepreneurs may have to add “Pure Recharge” — a longterm energy booster additive — to their future smoothies if they want to realize their vision.
“One venture after another venture — you just keep learning from each venture,” Pullam said. “It’s been in process for the last two years, but we finally opened our first [Smoothie King] door June 26 of this year. Now, this is our third location. We’re looking for more locations. We’ve got to try to be the biggest.”