Channel Management Across Online and In-Store

Brian Anderson, Director of Technology of Modern Restaurant Concepts, shared the recipe for success behind two distinct healthy fast casual concepts, Modern Market and Lemonade Restaurant Group. Channels include web, mobile web, app, catering, and delivery and recently added Google food ordering, an integration that Google built with Olo, and is in the process of adding a cloud kitchen.

The biggest lesson learned: “Get a centralized and standardized management solution and tech stack in place to make it easy to troubleshoot the system if you run into issues,” Anderson explains. 

Modern Market’s standardized network includes robust Wi-Fi and firewalls. Primary internet connections are a minimum 300 megabit per location with auto-fail over to backup. “We really beefed up the pipes coming into the store to support all that above store traffic,” he explains. “It created better visibility into what’s happening in the firewalls with like real-time alerting, auto failover and failback.”

“The number two item lesson learned was integrate your tablets as soon as you can. We rolled out with every service imaginable initially with tablets non-integrated into our POS,” Anderson says. “… When we were able to make the decisions to start integrating those orders directly into the POS, we started seeing the benefits immediately.”

Modern Market uses Olo as its aggregator and Grubhub direct to POS. Lemonade, which merged with Modern Market in February 2019, is using an aggregator that pulls in all the orders and then injects them into the POS, but all the orders are coming through the same aggregation platform. 

“So no winner on that yet, they both seem to have their pluses and minuses,” Anderson says. “Maybe next year I can come back and talk about if we’ve gone all-in on one of those solutions.”