Real estate has always shaped where and how restaurants succeed, but according to Daniel Ceniceros, founder and CEO of Connect Media, the old playbook no longer applies. Speaking on Fast Casual Nation with hosts Paul Barron and Cherryh Cansler, Ceniceros — whose company recently acquired Networld Media Group, bringing Fast Casual and its sister brands under the Connect Media umbrella — argued that restaurant operators scouting locations need to look past the traditional anchors of grocery stores and big-box retail. Instead, he pointed to fast-growing “treasure hunting” retailers like Ross, TJ Maxx, and HomeGoods as an underappreciated signal of consumer traffic, noting their aggressive expansion plans and strong same-store growth make them a smarter bet than chasing the same real estate everyone else wants.

The conversation also tackled a trend reshaping secondary and tertiary markets: fast casual brands increasingly following rehabilitated housing stock into food deserts once dominated only by liquor stores, laundromats, and dry cleaners. Ceniceros described this as an opportunity tied to affordability, explaining that as apartment buildings get upgraded from C-class to B-class, the workforce moving in still needs breakfast, lunch, and dinner options nearby. He also confirmed what many developers have already noticed anecdotally — restaurant footprints are shrinking across the board, driven by rising minimum wages, labor shortages, and the growing role of delivery and robotic fulfillment, mirroring downsizing trends already underway at retailers like Best Buy and IKEA.

On lease negotiations, Ceniceros offered a notably candid perspective for a real estate executive: operators don’t need to sign the long-term leases they think they do. He described personally moving away from 10-year commitments toward three- and five-year terms, arguing that shorter leases preserve flexibility without sacrificing landlord goodwill, since owners are often more willing to accommodate shorter terms than operators assume. Beyond lease length, he encouraged restaurant brands to negotiate for more than just tenant improvement allowances — pushing landlords to explain their marketing plans and asking to be included in community activations, farmers markets, and other efforts that drive foot traffic to the property.

The discussion turned macro when the hosts asked Ceniceros to characterize the broader commercial real estate market. He described retail as having already absorbed its reckoning during the pre-pandemic mall collapse, which left the sector “underdemolished” but positioned it to now attract institutional capital seeking long-horizon returns rather than quick flips. Office space, by contrast, is still working through the fallout of incomplete return-to-office mandates, with refinancing at today’s higher interest rates forcing some owners to either inject fresh equity or hand properties back to lenders — a dynamic playing out from downtown Dallas to major stalled conversion projects in New York.

Ceniceros also addressed the ongoing search for new uses of vacant big-box and mall space, cautioning that residential conversions face real physical limitations — most notably, older retail buildings simply weren’t plumbed for housing. He sees more promise in ghost kitchens, food halls, and mixed-use ground-floor retail built into apartment and office lobbies, alongside continued growth in logistics and cold storage as delivery-driven demand reshapes what landlords need from their buildings.

For operators pitching landlords on a coveted A-location, Ceniceros emphasized that financial credit strength and genuine differentiation matter more than polish. Landlords aren’t just filling a vacancy, he explained — they’re curating a tenant mix, and a proposal that clearly articulates why a brand stands apart from what’s already leased nearby will outperform a generic pitch, regardless of how many national competitors are also in the running.

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Dave’s Hot Chicken is having a moment, and its marketing chief wants to make sure artificial intelligence doesn’t get in the way of it. On the latest episode of Fast Casual Nation, host Paul Barron sat down with Brandon Rhoten, Chief Marketing Officer of the Nashville-style hot chicken chain, for a wide-ranging conversation on where AI genuinely helps restaurant marketers and where it can quietly do damage. Cherryh Cansler was away covering another event, leaving Barron to hold down the show solo, but the conversation lost none of its urgency. Dave’s has grown from roughly 100 units in 2022 to well over 400 today, adding new locations at a pace of three to five a week, and Rhoten made clear that scale is exactly why the brand is being deliberate about which parts of AI it lets anywhere near its customers.

Rhoten’s read on the technology is refreshingly unglamorous: the real value, he argued, sits on the back end. Dave’s leans on a customer data platform to study retention and behavior, and uses AI-assisted analysis to help unpack financial performance, but Rhoten was blunt that forecasting still has limits. When AI has to reason beyond historical patterns, he said, it tends to wander into territory a marketer wouldn’t expect, which is why every recommendation the models produce gets a human gut check before it becomes a decision. That distinction, between AI as an analyst and AI as a decision-maker, ran through nearly everything else he said.

It matters more than ever, Rhoten explained, because younger diners are shopping differently. Gen Z shows little brand loyalty and will hop between chains on a whim, chasing novelty over familiarity. Dave’s response has been to lean into its seven levels of spice, from a mild “not hot” option to the fiery Reaper, and to keep experimenting with menu additions like its mozzarella stick launch, giving guests enough range to make the menu feel personal even though it’s compact. Rhoten sees that kind of product-led differentiation, rather than chasing every social trend, as the more durable way to win over a generation that isn’t buying loyalty for its own sake.

On content, Rhoten drew a hard line. Dave’s built its massive TikTok following almost entirely on user-generated video of customers reacting to the heat, and the brand intentionally does not produce AI-generated creative or influencer content of its own. He argued that consumers, even casual ones, have an instinctive sense for when something looks synthetic, and that brands leaning too hard into AI-generated food imagery are setting themselves up for a backlash similar to the fast food photo-versus-reality complaints of years past. Local franchisees are allowed to use AI for market analysis and planning, but Rhoten said Dave’s draws a firm boundary against AI-generated food footage or fabricated influencers reaching guests.

The conversation also touched on Rhoten’s own marketing pedigree, which added useful context to his caution. He spent six years building Wendy’s digital and social strategy starting in 2011, a stretch that included the brand’s era of sharp, irreverent social commentary. Rhoten described that shift as a calculated bet rooted in Wendy’s founding positioning as a step above the competition, not an attempt to be edgy for its own sake, and he sees a similar discipline required now: AI can accelerate a brand’s voice, but only if marketers stay anchored to what actually differentiates the brand rather than chasing whatever tactic is trending.

Zooming out, Rhoten framed the chicken category’s crowding, and the broader AI conversation, as two sides of the same challenge. With dozens of hot chicken brands competing for the same customers, he said the operators who survive will be the ones with strong unit economics, a distinct product and a clear identity, the same qualities that make a brand resistant to AI’s homogenizing pull. His advice to fellow marketers feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change was pointed: use AI to sharpen decisions, not to replace the judgment that comes from experience, because the brands that let a model set their direction risk ending up sounding like everyone else.

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Whatever happened to blockchain in restaurants? The costume party ended, the apes came off the menu boards, and the one company still winning refuses to say the word.

In March 2021, Taco Bell sold five pieces of taco-themed digital art as NFTs, and they were gone in about half an hour. McDonald’s minted a McRib NFT that November. Burger King hid digital collectibles in meal boxes, Applebee’s launched an NFT collection, and Chipotle started taking crypto at checkout. A Long Beach burger joint called Bored & Hungry built its entire brand around a cartoon ape. Every conference keynote said the same thing: loyalty was moving to the blockchain, and your regulars would soon be token holders.

It’s 2026. Time for the scoreboard.

The Graveyard

Bored & Hungry is worth a closer look before the bigger names, because it’s the purest artifact of the era. The founder paid real money for the rights to brand a burger stand with Bored Ape imagery, put it on the cups, the trays, and the signage, and opened to lines around the block in April 2022. Within a few months the crypto payment option quietly disappeared, and the coverage shifted from novelty piece to cautionary tale. A burger concept lives or dies on the burger, and no amount of ape equity changes what’s between the buns.

The program that counts is Starbucks Odyssey, because it was a serious product from the company with arguably the best loyalty program on the planet. Members completed interactive journeys and earned collectible stamps recorded on the Polygon blockchain, some of which traded for four figures on a secondary marketplace. It launched in beta in December 2022 and shut down in March 2024, about fifteen months later. Meta wound down its NFT features in under a year. Nike bought an NFT studio near the top of the market and later closed it down. When brands that sophisticated all reach the same conclusion inside two years, it stops being bad luck and starts being a verdict.

The autopsy is short. These were marketing campaigns wearing product costumes, and campaigns come with an end date baked in from day one. The rewards offered ownership without utility: a Starbucks regular wants her Gold status and her free refill, not a collectible she has to go explain to someone. A digital stamp asked guests to do homework, and the homework paid worse than the stars did. Resale markets attracted flippers instead of regulars, and the moment a reward has a price on a marketplace, you’ve invited a customer who has no relationship with your restaurant at all. On top of that, onboarding asked guests to set up a wallet, guard a seed phrase, and pay gas fees to claim what amounted to a coupon. Restaurant tech wins by removing steps. This added several and then charged for them.

Strip it down to one sentence: nobody ever answered the guest’s only real question, which is what do I get, and how fast? No table in America has ever told a server that dinner was great but asked whether the loyalty punch card was composable.

The Survivor

Two ideas from that era refused to die anyway. Card processing takes 3 to 4 percent of every restaurant transaction in America, and new payment rails can undercut that. And an independent restaurant can never build a loyalty network alone, but a shared currency spent across many restaurants could get there. Blackbird, founded by Eater and Resy co-founder Ben Leventhal, built a company on both ideas and had the discipline never to lead with the technology underneath them.

From the guest’s side, Blackbird looks like any polished consumer app. Check in at a participating restaurant, earn a currency called $FLY, spend it on meals. No wallet ceremony, no gas fee popup, nothing that looks like crypto at all. Under the floorboards, $FLY is a token, memberships run on NFTs, and since early 2025 the whole system runs on Blackbird’s own purpose-built network called Flynet. The 2021 class of Web3 restaurant programs would have led every press release with that paragraph. Blackbird buries it three menus deep, and the homepage sells dinner.

For a restaurant doing $3 million a year in card volume, the gap between 4 percent and 2 percent works out to roughly sixty thousand dollars, close to a manager’s salary recovered from the interchange machine. That’s the least glamorous pitch in fintech and one of the most persuasive, because operators feel that line item on the statement every single month.

The network is the more interesting strategic bet. Chains have loyalty programs because chains have scale; a single neighborhood restaurant can’t fund a points system that moves the needle on its own. A shared currency across a thousand independents changes that math. Earn at the wine bar on Friday, spend it at the ramen shop on Tuesday, and every restaurant in the network gets a little stronger every time another one gets busy. That’s a real answer to a coordination problem independents have never solved on their own, and it takes some kind of shared, portable ledger to make it work. Whether that ledger had to be a blockchain is a fair question, and one worth sitting with rather than answering too quickly.

Investors have made their read clear. Blackbird has raised roughly $85 million across three rounds, including a $50 million Series B in 2025 led by Spark Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Amex Ventures all participating. Amex owns Resy, Leventhal’s last company, so that last name on the cap table isn’t a coincidence.

The network now covers more than 1,000 restaurants across New York, San Francisco, Charleston, and, as of late 2025, Los Angeles, with a fifty-plus-restaurant beachhead across Santa Monica and Venice. The 2026 refresh of Blackbird Club raised the earn multipliers in every tier, including 10X on coffee. A company sweetening its rates across the board is a company playing offense, not one propping up a program on life support. Whether the model travels past coastal food cities is the open question worth watching; Charleston was the first real test outside New York and San Francisco, and it has to work in a market like Kansas City to become an industry story instead of a coastal one.

The Lesson for Restaurant Tech Brands

A fair skeptic will point out, as TechCrunch did when the Series B news broke, that Punchh, Toast, and Lightspeed all run loyalty on conventional databases, and no guest anywhere is demanding on-chain verification of a free appetizer. It’s possible Blackbird wins on network design and fee structure alone, and the blockchain is just how they chose to build the plumbing underneath it. From the operator’s chair, that’s the whole point: you shouldn’t have to care either way.

The machinery of Web3 held up fine the entire time. What collapsed was the story wrapped around it, because that story led with the technology and asked the customer to care about it, and customers have never once cared about machinery. Blackbird’s smartest move wasn’t the token design or the custom network. It was narrative discipline: sell dinner, sell the fee savings, sell the busy Tuesday night, and let the chain stay a footnote in the terms of service. A homepage that leads with architecture is marketing to its own engineers, not to the guest deciding where to eat tonight.

Positioning, at its core, is deciding which of your true stories goes first. The technology that survives in this industry is the technology that stops introducing itself.

Paul Molinari is Founder and Principal Consultant of Popcorn GTM, a fractional CMO and brand strategy consultancy for restaurant technology and hospitality. He hosts Modern Solutions for Modern Restaurants. paul@popcorngtm.com | 781-733-0592

Marketing help? Visit: https://popcorngtm.com

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Artificial intelligence is having a moment in restaurant back offices, but according to Bonchon CEO Suzie Tsai, the technology only works when a brand is honest about where it’s falling short first. Speaking on Fast Casual Nation with hosts Paul Barron and Cherryh Cansler, Tsai revisited a comment that made waves earlier this year: her own admission that Bonchon’s tech stack “sucks.” Rather than walking it back, she doubled down. AI, she said, isn’t a strategy in itself, it’s a tool, and pouring it into fragmented data or inconsistent processes just makes the chaos move faster. For an operator running a fast-growing, Dallas-based Korean fried chicken brand, that kind of candor has become the starting point for a more deliberate technology rebuild.

That rebuild is happening in phases rather than through a single sweeping platform. Tsai said Bonchon has steered clear of all-in-one AI solutions, opting instead for tools that solve specific, narrow problems while the organization gets its underlying data and processes in order. One area already paying off is supply chain, where a two-person team leans on a forecasting platform to track inventory across a sprawling and uneven network of distribution centers. What used to be a manual slog of pulling reports into spreadsheets is now a daily dashboard that flags shortages before they happen, a shift Tsai said has measurably reduced product outages. A similar logic applies to real estate, where an AI-enhanced site-selection tool helps narrow down locations before the team ever visits in person.

On the marketing side, Tsai said Bonchon has resisted the trend toward AI-generated imagery, preferring to show its food as it actually looks rather than polish it into something unrecognizable. Instead, the brand’s AI use has centered on media planning, helping a small marketing team localize spend across very different markets rather than relying on one-size-fits-all campaigns. Bonchon reported an 18% year-over-year jump in digital sales, momentum Tsai credited in part to more precise ad targeting as media costs continue to climb industry-wide.

Data privacy came up as a genuine concern rather than an afterthought. Tsai said the leadership team took a course on AI fundamentals before adopting any tools, and the company now runs on an enterprise version of Microsoft Copilot specifically because it keeps company data contained rather than feeding it into a public model. That caution extends to guest-facing technology, too. Bonchon has leaned into kiosk ordering, which Tsai said now drives higher average checks and gives guests an easier way to navigate Korean menu items with unfamiliar spellings and pronunciations, all without replacing the cashiers and servers whose jobs have simply shifted toward hospitality.

Looking ahead, Tsai pointed to customer connection as the next frontier, particularly given how much of Bonchon’s volume now moves through third-party delivery. She described early-stage work with a newly invested company exploring how AI might restore some of the direct guest relationship that gets lost when an order is handed off to a third-party app, using that first transaction as a bridge to build loyalty without repeat reliance on delivery marketplaces. Whatever tools Bonchon adopts next, Tsai was clear that the bar remains the same: technology exists to serve the guest experience, not the other way around, and no one has ever walked out of a restaurant raving about the AI.

The conversation closed with news relevant to the broader industry. Fast Casual Nation announced its 2026 Restaurant AI Awards, with nominations open now through mid-September across categories including AI drive-thru and voice ordering, kitchen automation, demand forecasting, personalization and loyalty AI, and marketing and content AI. Finalists will be announced October 1, with winners revealed later this year. Operators and vendors can submit nominations at saver.fm.

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On the latest episode of Fast Casual Nation, host Cherryh Cansler dug into two forces reshaping how restaurants attract both customers and employees: the explosive rise of custom, non-alcoholic beverages and the growing demand for faster access to earned wages. The episode opened with Kelly O’Rourke, Director of Marketing at FiiZ Drinks, the Utah-born dirty soda chain that has grown to roughly 75 open locations, about half of them still in its home state, with another 200 units sold and awaiting opening, the vast majority outside Utah. That expansion push includes new stores in Texas and Oklahoma, a planned move into the Southeast, and FiiZ’s first-ever California location before year’s end. O’Rourke credited Gen Z’s embrace of non-alcoholic drinking culture, paired with social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, for turning what was once a regional novelty into a fast-growing national category.

O’Rourke pushed back on the idea that dirty soda is a passing fad, arguing that beverage brands can keep evolving in ways single-product concepts can’t. FiiZ, she said, isn’t just soda: the menu spans custom waters, lemonades, energy drinks and frozen beverages, positioning the brand for guests who want customization without the sugar-heavy soda base. She was notably upbeat about rising competition from both dedicated rivals like Swig and national chains such as Sonic and Taco Bell wading into the category, framing it as validation that dirty soda has real staying power rather than a threat. On differentiation, O’Rourke pointed to FiiZ’s lobby-driven, community-focused store model as a contrast to more drive-through-centric competitors, along with a broader snack lineup, including pretzel bites and “FiiZ Puffs,” that she expects to keep expanding in 2027.

Looking ahead, O’Rourke previewed a limited-time partnership with candy brand Hi-Chew, built around summer-inspired frozen drinks, and confirmed energy drinks are a major 2027 priority, with the brand leaning toward developing its own private-label line rather than continuing to lean on outside brands. She also discussed FiiZ’s new partnership with agency Proof, brought on to help a lean 15-person corporate team scale its marketing and social strategy as the brand prepares for accelerated national growth. Throughout, O’Rourke tied FiiZ’s opportunity back to value-conscious, health-aware Gen Z consumers who want an experience, not just the cheapest soda on the block, even as the brand leans into value pricing and combo deals amid tighter consumer spending.

The conversation then shifted to the workforce side of the restaurant business with Tal Clark, CEO of Instant, a fintech platform providing earned wage access, tip payouts and virtual paycards to nearly 200,000 restaurant employees across roughly 600 clients, including Bloomin’ Brands, Lazy Dog and an in-progress rollout with Buffalo Wild Wings and Inspire Brands. Clark walked through findings from Instant’s newly released 2026 State of Hourly Restaurant Workers Study, conducted with the Center for Generational Kinetics: 75% of hourly restaurant workers live paycheck to paycheck, a figure that climbs to 83% once managers are excluded, and 61% reported skipping meals to make ends meet.

Clark explained how Instant’s platform works in practice, letting employees access roughly half of their gross earned wages, about 75 to 80% of net pay, on a daily basis after clocking out, with no cost to the employer. He noted workers tap into the option about four times a week on average, using it for essentials like gas and groceries rather than discretionary spending. On the tipped side, Instant’s tip-pooling software integrates directly with point-of-sale systems to automate payouts, eliminating the need for restaurants to keep cash on hand for tipped staff. Clark said earned wage access is quickly becoming a baseline expectation rather than a perk, citing survey data showing 81% of workers believe on-demand pay should be a standard benefit, a shift he sees accelerating retention pressure across an already tight restaurant labor market.

Together, the two conversations underscored a common thread for restaurant operators: Gen Z and millennial consumers, and increasingly Gen Z employees, are driving demand for personalization, speed and financial flexibility in equal measure. Whether it’s a build-your-own dirty soda or same-day access to tips already earned, both guests pointed to the same underlying shift, a workforce and customer base that expects businesses to meet them on their own terms, in real time. For restaurant leaders, the episode offered a reminder that innovation isn’t confined to the menu; it extends just as urgently to how teams are paid, retained and supported behind the counter.

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A $20 delivery order at a healthy 15% margin should net you $3. After a standard 25% platform commission, you’re left with 50 cents. That’s an 83% haircut on your profit, before packaging, before refunds, before anything else.

So why do smart operators still treat that commission like a marketing expense? Because that’s the story the platforms have told for a decade. This week’s episode calls it out with a framework I’m calling the Delivery Tax Stack: three layers, three different questions about where your money actually goes.

Layer one is the commission itself, 15% to 30% headline, 35% to 45% once packaging, processing, and forced promos stack on top. Restaurants run 4% to 9% net margins nationally. Do that math.

Layer two is the one that should stop you. New York City just settled with the major platforms, raising the fee cap from 23% to 43%, and for the first time, it’s itemized. One of the four line items: 5%, capped, explicitly labeled “basic marketing and platform visibility.” Not implied value anymore. A named, billed fee. Expect it to spread past New York.

Layer three is what you’re actually getting for it, and the acquisition value is real. Delivery apps drive genuine discovery. The problem is almost nobody measures it. Most operators can’t tell you their acquisition cost by channel, so they’re paying layer one, absorbing layer two, and hoping layer three is worth it.

The full episode breaks down exactly what DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub charge right now, what the FTC’s new proposed rule means for how these fees get disclosed, and what multi-unit groups and independents should each do differently starting this week.

Listen to the full breakdown here, then go pull your own delivery statements. That number, the one specific to your restaurant, is the only one that matters.

Keep building modern solutions for modern restaurants.

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Pinky Cole Hayes has never been shy about the messy middle of building a business, and she brought that same candor to a recent episode of Fast Casual Nation with hosts Paul Barron and Cherryh Cansler. The Slutty Vegan founder and CEO walked listeners through a origin story that started far from the restaurant industry, as a television producer on shows like Judge Karen’s Court, The Jerry Springer Show and The Maury Show. A friend’s sublease offer for a Jamaican restaurant in New York pulled her into hospitality for the first time, and after a devastating grease fire wiped out that venture, she eventually landed in Atlanta, where a late-night idea born from her lifelong vegan diet and a producer’s instinct for what grabs attention became Slutty Vegan.

The conversation didn’t shy away from the brand’s most difficult chapter. Cole Hayes described accumulating roughly $20 million in debt as rapid expansion outpaced discipline, and detailed how she used an assignment for the benefit of creditors, an out-of-court restructuring tool, to regain control of her company just 43 days after ceremonially losing it. She bought the business back under the name Ain’t Nobody Coming to See You Otis LLC and has been open about the experience as a teaching moment for other founders, pointing to precedent-setting brands like Pepsi and KFC that also weathered financial collapse before becoming household names.

What emerged from that restructuring is what Cole Hayes calls Slutty Vegan 2.0, a leaner, franchise-driven version of the company built around experienced operators rather than raw brand enthusiasm. She explained that her earlier struggles stemmed partly from partnering with people who loved the concept but lacked operational expertise, and that her current franchise strategy prioritizes vetting operators who understand margins and local marketing. New franchise agreements have landed in Atlanta, Florida, Washington D.C., Detroit, Cleveland and Columbus, with a goal of reaching roughly 50 locations within two years.

A distinctive piece of that franchise model is what Cole Hayes calls a “menu bible,” which allows franchisees to retain three core signature items while customizing the rest of their offerings to match local demand and cut underperforming products. She also discussed her approach to growth capital, noting that Slutty Vegan is currently self-funded through franchise and royalty revenue rather than outside investment, a byproduct of infrastructure and systems she built during the company’s first iteration. Acquiring smaller vegan concepts that have strong menus but limited brand reach is another avenue she’s pursuing to expand without traditional fundraising.

Technology and personal branding both came up as growth levers. Cole Hayes credited AI tools with allowing her to run a smaller, more nimble team than she needed during the company’s earlier, larger corporate structure, describing the efficiency gains as equivalent to several additional hires. She also spoke candidly about balancing her personal brand, amplified by her presence on The Real Housewives of Atlanta and an upcoming show about Slutty Vegan’s story, with the discipline of keeping her primary focus on the restaurant brand itself rather than her own celebrity.

The episode closed on a broader lesson about knowing the value of what you’ve built. Referencing documentaries on companies like Coca-Cola, Cole Hayes urged fellow entrepreneurs not to undervalue their businesses even during difficult stretches, framing her own comeback as proof that founders who understand their worth and stay adaptable can recover from significant setbacks. For restaurant and hospitality professionals navigating their own growth challenges, her account offers a candid look at how franchising discipline, operator selection and financial restructuring can reshape a brand’s trajectory without losing its identity.

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Mendocino Farms has spent two decades proving that sandwiches and salads can be a destination category, not just a lunchtime commodity, and its recent conversation with Fast Casual Nation hosts Paul Barron and Cherryh Cansler showed exactly why. Chief Marketing Officer Alicia Mowder joined the show as the fast-casual chain marked a significant milestone: its 100th restaurant, which opened in Santa Barbara at 3851 State Street on Tuesday, June 30. The Southern California-born brand, founded by Mario Del Pero and Ellen Chen-Del Pero in Los Angeles in 2005, has grown from a single sandwich shop into a chef-driven concept that competes at the premium end of an increasingly crowded “sandwich wars” landscape, one that spans everything from national chicken-sandwich chains to deli-style sub players.

Mowder, who joined Mendocino Farms roughly nine months ago after stints at Panera and Circle K, described the brand’s differentiation strategy as rooted in treating every sandwich and salad as a culinary experience rather than a commodity transaction. That means layering in significantly more unique ingredients per item than typical competitors, rotating seasonal offerings like a peach goat cheese salad guests wait all year for, and pairing high-quality food with hospitality touches such as front-of-house staff who walk guests through menu options. The approach has allowed the brand to hold pricing power even as consumers pull back elsewhere; Mowder noted that guests are willing to pay more for a sandwich that feels worth it, rather than chasing the lowest price point on the menu.

That guest-first philosophy extends into how Mowder structures her own role, which uniquely spans both marketing and guest experience. Rather than relying solely on public reviews, which tend to capture only the extremes of very good or very bad visits, Mendocino Farms sends a detailed post-transaction survey to guests that digs into the “why” behind their ratings. That feedback loop has surfaced specific, hard-to-quantify touchpoints, like a host who helps first-time guests navigate the menu, that the brand has since reinforced through training because guests consistently identify them as meaningful, even when the impact would be difficult to justify through a labor-cost model alone.

On growth, Mowder detailed a company-owned expansion strategy that has pushed the brand well beyond its West Coast roots. In the past year, Mendocino Farms has expanded into four new metropolitan markets: Chicago, Denver, Austin, and Scottsdale, with continued growth planned as the brand closes out the year. She also addressed the chain’s transition to private equity ownership, noting that founders Mario Del Pero and Ellen Chen-Del Pero remain shareholders and stay involved via the board, while majority ownership now belongs to TPG, and that CEO Kevin Miles has driven the bulk of the brand’s growth while preserving its non-cookie-cutter store design philosophy and ingredient sourcing standards.

The conversation also turned to catering and technology, two areas where Mendocino Farms has taken a deliberately measured approach. Catering remains a strong daypart for the brand, though Mowder said the team is now more focused on driving frequency, particularly as return-to-office trends create new demand, than on catering’s overall share of sales. On tech, she was candid that Mendocino Farms has resisted the industry-wide push toward kiosks, AI drive-thru ordering, and robotics, arguing that human-led hospitality remains central to the guest experience even for off-premise orders, though the brand has rolled out a new app and back-of-house data tools to support that human touch rather than replace it.

The episode’s second half pivoted to a broader industry conversation with Casey Hilder of Loop AI, who broke down how artificial intelligence is being applied across restaurant operations, finance, and marketing, from consolidating fragmented dashboards into a single view to protecting sensitive operator data from being absorbed into public AI models. Together, the two conversations painted a picture of a fast-casual sector at an inflection point: brands like Mendocino Farms winning by doubling down on craft and hospitality even as they scale, while operators across the industry weigh how much of that scaling can responsibly be handed off to AI-driven tools.

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Roughly three out of four restaurants worldwide now hand guests a QR code instead of a printed menu, yet the technology that won the adoption war has largely lost the affection war. In a blind survey of 850 diners conducted by Toast, only a small fraction named the QR code their favorite way to view a menu, while a large majority said they still prefer something they can hold in their hands. The gap between how often a tool is used and how much guests actually like it points to what Paul Molinari, host of Modern Solutions for Modern Restaurants, calls a “toll booth” dynamic: people scan because the code is there, not because they want to. That distinction matters more than it might seem, because it reframes the QR code menu debate from a technology question into a brand experience question.

The QR code menu’s origin story helps explain the disconnect. It emerged in 2020 as a pandemic workaround, a way to hand guests a menu without physically handing them one, and it succeeded at that narrow job. But when dining rooms reopened, many operators quietly kept the QR code in place, less because guests asked for it and more because the printing invoices had disappeared. That shift from emergency measure to permanent default happened largely without brand research or guest input, and the data that has accumulated since suggests the shortcut deserves closer scrutiny.

The case for QR codes is nonetheless real. Printing costs are a recurring expense, with professionally printed menus running several dollars per copy and most restaurants reprinting multiple times a year to keep pricing accurate; digital menus eliminate that cycle entirely and let operators 86 an item instantly rather than relying on a server’s memory or a handwritten note. Digital menus also generate first-party data, including scan counts, peak times, and item-level engagement, that a paper menu simply cannot produce. And Square has reported that restaurants using QR code payments saw a 15% increase in table turnover, a meaningful throughput gain for high-volume, fast-casual, and quick-service concepts where the service model was never built around tableside storytelling in the first place.

The case for the human server, however, carries its own weight, and much of it shows up directly on the guest-satisfaction side of the ledger. Survey research from Technomic found that a majority of diners dislike having to pull out a phone the moment they sit down, that QR menus are often described as hard to read and browse, and that a substantial share of respondents say the format makes the dining experience worse overall. Notably, this discomfort is not generational: paper menus were preferred by strong majorities of Gen Z, millennial, and boomer respondents alike, undercutting the common assumption that younger, phone-native diners simply don’t mind the format.

Beyond sentiment, the financial case for tableside service is significant. Personalized suggestive selling has been shown to lift average checks by 10 to 15%, a figure that dwarfs the few thousand dollars a mid-size restaurant might save annually on printing. A server functions as a zero-acquisition-cost sales channel standing at the exact moment of purchase decision, something no QR code sticker can replicate. There is also a loyalty dimension: every human touch point removed from the dining experience is arguably a withdrawal from a guest’s emotional connection to the brand, particularly in full-service and fine dining settings where the menu often functions as a piece of brand storytelling rather than a simple price list.

The practical takeaway is not to pick a side but to assign the right job to each tool. QR codes work well as a logistics tool for transactional, high-volume settings like a slammed patio or quick bar reorder, especially around payment, where the turnover benefit is strongest. Human service remains the brand tool, best deployed at the first menu presentation, when describing specials, and during pairing recommendations, the moments most likely to influence a guest’s decision to return. Notably, placement research has found that when a server verbally directs guests to the QR code, scan rates rise significantly, suggesting the technology performs best when it supports the server rather than replaces them. The operators best positioned for the years ahead are likely those who let technology handle logistics so their staff remain free to handle meaning.

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When Mike Smith and Donna Varner sit in the same building, the temptation to cross-pollinate menus is apparently real. On a recent episode of Fast Casual Nation, the chief brand officers of Moe’s Southwest Grill and Schlotzsky’s traded good-natured jabs about queso-topped sandwiches and pretzel collaborations, but underneath the banter was a serious conversation about how GoTo Foods, the seven-brand platform behind Moe’s, Schlotzsky’s, McAlister’s Deli, Auntie Anne’s, Cinnabon, Carvel and Jamba, is trying to prove that shared infrastructure can coexist with distinct brand identity. Smith described his fellow CBOs as an informal board of directors, a built-in sounding board of peers who can stress-test new product ideas without any incentive to simply agree.

That collaborative structure was central to Schlotzsky’s recent repositioning. Varner explained that after extensive consumer research, the brand discovered two-thirds of people already referred to it informally as “Schlotzsky’s Deli,” so rather than fight decades of shifting identities, the team leaned into what customers already believed to be true. The research effort, she noted, was made possible by GoTo Foods’ internal insights team combined with outside vendors, a resource smaller standalone chains would struggle to access on their own.

Both executives pointed to real estate and prototype design as areas where the platform model pays off. Schlotzsky’s has moved toward a roughly 2,100-square-foot “entry-level” format that skips the drive-thru in favor of self-order kiosks and a more flexible grab-and-go layout, betting that digital and delivery growth make the traditional drive-thru lane less essential in every market. Moe’s, meanwhile, operates around 550 restaurants concentrated in the East and Southeast, with an ideal footprint near 2,200 square feet, though Smith said the chain can shrink to 1,800 square feet in the right space. Drive-thru adoption at Moe’s remains limited, fewer than 20 locations, plus another dozen with app-order pickup windows, largely because the brand’s build-your-own burritos and bowls, which Smith said typically carry 11 to 13 ingredients, don’t translate well to a speaker-box transaction.

Digital ordering has become the connective tissue across the portfolio. Smith said more than a third of Moe’s business now comes through digital channels, and both brands are using aggregated dashboards that pull in first-party app data alongside third-party delivery feedback from services like Uber Eats and DoorDash. GoTo Foods has rolled out a shared “next-gen” loyalty platform across its brands, though each concept still maintains its own points system for now. Varner said the company is inching toward a unified customer data platform that would let brands share more information without merging loyalty currencies outright.

Artificial intelligence entered the conversation as an emerging but still cautious tool rather than a wholesale operational shift. Both executives described early-stage use cases: competitive and social-review monitoring dashboards, predictive suggestive-selling features built into the loyalty platform, and internal experiments with inventory calculation. Smith was direct about the guardrails, saying the brands avoid open-source AI tools where proprietary data could be exposed, and Varner echoed that GoTo Foods is “cautious but still looking forward,” particularly as the company explores AI-assisted media buying to make marketing spend more precise at the store level.

The bigger philosophical takeaway from both guests was about restraint. Smith argued that any efficiency AI creates should be redirected toward customer service and staff interaction rather than simply cut for cost savings, warning against a future where restaurants “do less with less people.” Varner’s closing lesson centered on humility, crediting cross-functional collaboration inside GoTo Foods for surfacing ideas from unexpected corners of the business. Between the two, the message for restaurant operators eyeing multi-brand platforms was consistent: shared systems can accelerate growth, but protecting what makes each brand distinct still requires deliberate, ongoing attention.

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On June 17, the National Restaurant Association did something almost nobody would have predicted five years ago: it sent Congress a letter asking lawmakers to protect THC drinks. This is the same trade group that built its reputation lobbying on tip credits, swipe fees, and OSHA rules, not cannabis policy. But that is exactly what happened, and it signals that hemp-derived THC beverages have moved from a regulatory gray area into a mainstream revenue line that operators are no longer willing to lose without a fight. The letter asks for a two-year delay on a federal ban set to wipe out what the association estimates is a $1.6 billion market opportunity for restaurants. Understanding why requires looking at three things: the clock, the money, and the gap.

Start with the clock, because this is fundamentally a deadline story. The 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp by defining it as any cannabis plant containing less than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC. That definition named only one molecule, leaving room for delta-8, THCA, HHC, and a dozen other compounds that could deliver a high without technically violating the law. That gap became known as the hemp loophole, and it quietly built a multibillion-dollar industry of gas station vapes, gummies, and eventually beverages, legal nationwide even in states where cannabis itself remained illegal. Then, last November, legislation ending a government shutdown closed that loophole by redefining hemp using total THC rather than just delta-9, and capping any container at roughly four-tenths of a milligram of THC. A standard low-dose hemp beverage on shelves today runs between two and a half and ten milligrams, so the new federal limit does not trim the category. It eliminates it. That rule takes effect November 12, 2026, which is why the National Restaurant Association is not asking for the ban to disappear. It is asking for two years and a real regulatory framework covering age verification, quality testing, dosing disclosure, and labeling standards, the same baseline protections that already govern alcohol.

The money explains why operators are racing the clock. Full-service restaurant margins fell from 4 percent in 2019 to 2.8 percent in 2024, and 42 percent of operators did not turn a profit at all last year. Operators do not add a product to the menu because it is trendy; they add it because the math works, and for THC beverages, the math works unusually well. The National Restaurant Association’s own research backs this up: 5 percent of restaurants that serve alcohol are already pouring hemp THC drinks, and 26 percent of all restaurants say they would offer them if a clear framework existed. That is not a niche experiment. That is a quarter of the industry raising its hand.

Two states show what that framework can look like. Minnesota built an on-premise system allowing hemp THC drinks to be served legally in bars and restaurants, even on tap, since mid-2024. The category is now worth roughly $200 million in the state, supported by close to 4,000 registered retailers. Massachusetts approved consumption lounge regulations last December, creating three license types: supplemental licenses for existing dispensaries, hospitality licenses for standalone venues including restaurants, and event organizer licenses for one-off gatherings. But the real opportunity for most operators is not the lounge model. It is the can sitting in the cooler next to the seltzer. Low-dose THC beverages behave like a normal drink order, the same ritual and social occasion as a cocktail, which makes them an appealing option for younger diners who are drinking less alcohol but still want to order something at the bar.

That demand exposes the gap, and it is the part of this story that has nothing to do with cannabis policy and everything to do with technology. The cannabis industry already has a mature compliance stack built for age verification, purchase limits, and reporting. Restaurant point-of-sale systems do not. There is no built-in milligram tracker, no age-gate flag separate from an alcohol check, no compliance reporting module for a product that behaves like alcohol but is not legally alcohol. The liability question is just as unsettled. Dram shop laws exist in most states and give insurers a known framework for handling an over-served guest. No equivalent exists yet for THC: no settled case law, no standard underwriting model, no agreed definition of over-service for a product that does not hit the same way alcohol does. That points to three opportunities for restaurant technology: point-of-sale and menu systems that track and report THC sales inside the workflow staff already use, compliance tools that can adapt as state and federal rules keep shifting, and insurance products built specifically for restaurants serving THC beverages before lawsuits force the issue.

None of this depends on the restaurant industry winning the federal fight. It depends on someone building the infrastructure for the world the National Restaurant Association is describing in its letter: a regulated, professionalized, low-dose THC category that behaves like the alcohol business it sits next to. The clock is real, with five months until the November 12 deadline regardless of what Congress does. The money is real, with a quarter of the industry already asking for a path forward. And the gap is real, because the technology and liability infrastructure have not caught up to either fact yet. Operators should watch how Congress responds to the NRA’s letter before building a beverage program around a product that may not exist in its current form by Thanksgiving. Restaurant technology companies, on the other hand, do not need to wait for the lounges to become a story. The story is already happening at the bar, in a can, next to the seltzer. Whoever builds the unglamorous infrastructure first, the age gate, the milligram tracker, the compliance report, will own a category before most of the industry realizes it needs one.

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On a recent episode of Fast Casual Nation, hosts Paul Barron and Cherryh Cansler sat down with Jason Kidd, Chief Operating Officer of Chipotle Mexican Grill, for a conversation that any restaurant operator would want to bookmark. The backdrop couldn’t be more fitting — Fast Casual just dominated Yelp’s fastest-growing brands list, with seven of the top spots going to concepts in the category. The discussion quickly zeroed in on the industry’s most pressing challenge: how do you win over Gen Z and younger millennials, keep them coming back, and do it in a way that doesn’t compromise what makes your brand great in the first place?

Kidd was clear from the start that value is not a synonym for cheap. With 4,100 locations and a chicken burrito still running around $10 in most markets, Chipotle leans hard into what Kidd calls the full value equation — high-quality ingredients, abundant portions, deep customization options, and real consistency across every visit. “Value is more than price,” he said. “It’s the ability to customize, it’s high-quality food, and this generation is probably more intentional with where and how they spend their money than anybody else.” The return of the Honey Chicken LTO — Chipotle’s best-selling limited-time protein ever — and the rollout of new sauces like the Cilantro Lime and Adobo Ranch are part of a deliberate strategy to keep innovation flowing without drifting from the brand’s core identity.

On the operations side, Kidd spoke candidly about two things restaurant professionals obsess over: throughput and order accuracy. Chipotle uses a system called SPUT — Specific Pickup Time — to manage digital order flow so the pickup shelf never becomes a bottleneck, even during the lunch rush. Accuracy on the digital make line, he emphasized, is not just a metric — it is the guest experience for anyone who orders ahead. “You don’t have the opportunity to have an interaction with the folks on the line,” Kidd noted. “That order is your experience.” The brand is actively investing in technology to close the accuracy gap further, and Kidd teased a coming digital-line innovation that he said he’s genuinely excited about.

Back of house is getting a serious upgrade as well. Chipotle is rolling out what Kidd calls a high-efficiency equipment package — including a dual-sided clamshell plancha, a new rice cooker, and a dual-vat fryer — to nearly 2,000 restaurants by end of year, nearly half the chain. The goal is tighter cook-time consistency, faster training ramp-ups, and less operational variability. Separately, the brand has deployed an AI-powered hiring chatbot called Ava Cado, built in partnership with Paradox, which has already cut the average time from application to hire from 12 days down to four, while pushing application completion rates from 50 percent to 80 percent. That kind of efficiency, Kidd pointed out, gives restaurant managers their time back — and that time goes straight into coaching their teams and serving guests.

The conversation also touched on culture and hospitality, two areas where Kidd believes Chipotle has serious runway. The brand’s all-manager conference this past March was themed around “Real Hospitality” — a deliberate signal that great food alone is not enough. Two significant hires underscore the commitment: Chief Digital Officer Arley Sands, who came from Hyatt and brings deep loyalty and guest-experience thinking, and Chief Brand Officer Fernando Machado, whose résumé includes stints at Unilever and Burger King. Kidd also praised a small but telling detail that Paul Barron flagged from his own restaurant visits — the way Chipotle’s cashier or expo proactively steps out to greet digital pickup guests by name, immediately dissolving the awkward “did I cut in line?” moment that plagues so many fast casual pickup experiences.

What makes this episode worth a listen for any operator is the throughline running beneath every topic Kidd addressed: consistency is a competitive advantage, not just an operational checkbox. Whether it’s portion sizes, cook times, digital accuracy, or the warmth of a greeting at the pickup counter, the brands winning the next-generation diner are the ones who make the experience feel reliable and personal every single time. As Barron and Cansler noted in their post-interview discussion, the future of fast casual may look very different — more app-driven, more sensory, more tech-integrated — but the fundamentals Kidd outlined are the foundation that makes any of that future actually work.

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On a recent episode of Fast Casual Nation, hosts Paul Barron and Cherryh Cansler sat down with two guests who are quietly rewriting the rules of the modern restaurant experience. Jodi Boyce, CMO of Teriyaki Madness, and John Smolen, SVP of Sales and Customer Support at Atmosphere TV, brought sharp perspectives on where fast casual is heading — and why the brands paying attention to both the plate and the environment are the ones pulling ahead.

Teriyaki Madness is in full growth mode. With 211 locations across 41 states and a trajectory to hit 250 by year’s end and 500 within two to three years, the brand is proving that the bowl format is no passing trend. Boyce was careful to push back on the “anti-burger” framing, arguing it’s less about consumers rejecting burgers and more about a broader shift toward food that makes people feel good after they eat it. Naturally grilled and glazed proteins, generous portions, high-quality ingredients, and food that travels and reheats well have made Teriyaki Madness a go-to not just for lunch but for weekly meal planning. In a high-inflation environment where diners are increasingly selective about where they spend, the brand’s value proposition — big portions, real ingredients, craveable flavor — is resonating across millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z alike.

The “crave trigger” conversation got particularly interesting. Boyce explained that Teriyaki Madness is naturally built around sweet, salty, and spicy flavor profiles — exactly the combination that today’s younger consumers are chasing. The spicy chicken teriyaki, their most loyal fans’ top pick, functions almost like a gateway: customers come in for the classic, discover the spicy version, and they’re hooked. That stickiness, combined with full customizability and the ability to dial protein up or down to personal preference, is what separates the brand from fast food competitors like Panda Express. As Boyce put it, once guests actually taste the food, the comparison doesn’t hold up.

With over 80% of orders going out the door — up from a 70/30 split pre-pandemic — the in-store experience might seem like a secondary concern. But Boyce made clear it’s anything but. That 20% dining in still represents a meaningful guest base, and the brand believes the pendulum may be swinging back. Enter Atmosphere TV. Smolen traced the company’s origin to a simple observation: no one had ever built a TV service specifically designed for bars and restaurants — environments where the sound might be off, conversations are happening, and eyes drift to the screen between bites. Atmosphere now serves 60,000 businesses with 30-plus curated channels, and their flagship offering, Chive TV — described by Boyce as “TikTok before TikTok was a thing” — runs in every Teriyaki Madness location. The effect is immediate: customers waiting on made-to-order food stay engaged, look up from their phones, and occasionally laugh together, turning what could be friction into an asset.

Beyond entertainment, Smolen highlighted a business intelligence dimension that operators often overlook. Every three to five minutes, Atmosphere breaks for a content window that brands can use for their own messaging — catering promotions, new menu items, local events — delivered to the most captive and qualified audience possible: someone already eating your food. Internal data suggests these in-store content breaks are driving 14 to 19% reductions in customer attrition from key revenue streams like catering. For multi-unit operators, the platform also provides remote visibility into what’s playing across every location, ensuring brand consistency without requiring a physical walk-through.

The episode closed on a forward-looking note, with both guests touching on AI, consistency, and the evolving expectations of a dining generation that demands trust as much as taste. Boyce emphasized that reliability — knowing you’ll get the same quality bowl every single visit — is foundational for brands trying to earn loyalty from consumers who are more discerning than ever about where their dollars go. Smolen, meanwhile, pointed to AI-generated video as an imminent inflection point, suggesting the line between produced and synthetic content is nearly gone at the editorial level and will soon blur at scale. For restaurant professionals watching these trends converge, the message from this episode was clear: the brands winning right now are the ones treating the full guest experience — from the bowl to the screen to the vibe in the room — as a single, intentional product.

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McDonald’s has unveiled a sweeping new strategy called McDonald’s Next, announced at their worldwide convention in Las Vegas. The four-pillar plan covers menu innovation, consumer engagement, restaurant technology, and people development. With 40,000 locations and 69 million customers served daily, McDonald’s isn’t just updating its own playbook — it’s resetting expectations for the entire restaurant industry.

On the menu side, the chain is going upmarket with hand-breaded chicken already in testing in Chicago, a new half-pound Big Arch burger aimed squarely at competitors like Five Guys, and a slate of new beverages including dirty sodas and energy drinks. The consumer strategy leans into influencer marketing, with social media creators invited to the convention itself — a clear acknowledgment that attention is now the currency that drives brand relevance.

The most significant announcement, however, is Arch IQ — described as an AI-based operating system for McDonald’s restaurants. Unlike a single AI feature, Arch IQ is designed to run across kitchen operations, ordering, and staffing as a unified intelligence layer. It includes a voice AI component nicknamed Archie, developed in partnership with Google and currently piloting in a handful of locations.

Arch IQ represents a meaningful evolution from McDonald’s previous AI efforts, which ended in high-profile failure. Between 2019 and 2024, the company acquired AI firms Dynamic Yield and Apprente, partnered with IBM to build an automated drive-thru order taker, and ultimately pulled the plug when the system consistently got orders wrong. The key difference this time is that Arch IQ is framed as crew-facing and operationally focused — designed to reduce cognitive load and free up human time — rather than replacing customer-facing interactions with a robot voice.

The hospitality angle may be the most underrated element of the entire announcement. CEO Chris Kempczinski made clear that automation and human connection are not opposites — they’re partners. The more McDonald’s automates routine tasks, the more valuable genuine human hospitality becomes. This reframing has direct implications for how restaurant technology companies should be positioning their products: not as people replacements, but as tools that unlock people to do what technology cannot.

For anyone building, selling, or operating in the restaurant technology space, McDonald’s Next functions as both a case study and a forcing function. If Arch IQ succeeds, McDonald’s may license and expand it into a platform available to other brands — making them a direct competitor to existing QSR tech vendors. More broadly, when McDonald’s raises the floor on AI operations, personalization, and hospitality, every operator at every level gets measured against that new standard. As Kempczinski put it plainly: in a world where every restaurant is a swipe away, there is no such thing as second place.

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The conversation around plant-based dining has evolved well beyond tofu and salads — and on this episode of Fast Casual Nation, host Paul Barron sits down with two operators who are proof of that. Chris Treloar, CEO of PLNT Burger, and Trace Miller, founder of Konala Protein Bowls, represent two distinct but complementary visions of what health-forward fast casual looks like in practice. Between them, they’ve built brands that put flavor first and let the nutritional payoff speak for itself — a philosophy that may be more strategically sound than any trend-chasing alternative.

PLNT Burger, which launched in 2019 out of Silver Spring, Maryland, has grown to 12 locations, 10 of which operate within Whole Foods through the retailer’s Friends program. Treloar, who came to the brand two years ago after a career at La Madeleine, is candid about the business model’s strength: those small-footprint locations — some under 100 square feet — are generating anywhere from $600,000 to $1 million in annual revenue. “We probably still lead their sales per square foot metric,” he notes. The brand uses Beyond Meat for its burgers and Tindle for its chicken, with the B.I. burger consistently ranking as the top seller. For Treloar, the goal isn’t to convert — it’s to remove the barrier entirely. The food tastes so close to what diners already love that the plant-based angle becomes almost incidental.

Konala, now three years old with four open locations and several more slated to open this year, operates on a different but equally deliberate model. Miller, who spent 15 years in the meal prep space before launching the brand, built Konala around a simple premise: make healthy eating as convenient and delicious as a drive-thru run to McDonald’s. His locations are freestanding — including two Carl’s Jr. conversions — with drive-throughs at every unit. Average ticket fulfillment is under three minutes. The average bowl delivers 46 grams of protein and 654 calories, with all macronutrients listed on the menu and integrated into MyFitnessPal. Roughly 60% of Konala’s customer base is moms and families, not fitness enthusiasts — a demographic that Miller sees as the brand’s real growth engine. “We have moms send us videos of kids in the back asking for Konala over McDonald’s,” he says.

Both operators agree that the consumer is changing faster than the industry is moving to meet them. The rise of apps like Yuka — which lets users scan barcodes for instant health ratings — and the integration of AI into meal planning are accelerating nutritional literacy in ways that would have seemed far-fetched a decade ago. Barron notes that his own 12-year-old recently asked whether Yuka had a restaurant menu version, a moment that underscores just how early this education is now taking root. Miller believes micronutrients and fiber are the next wave after macros, and that the GLP-1 trend reinforces rather than threatens their model — customers eating less still need to maximize what those calories deliver. Treloar echoes the sentiment, pointing to a broader cultural shift post-COVID where diners are scrutinizing ingredients the way previous generations simply never did.

On the question of whether traditional fast food faces an existential threat, both guests push back on the binary framing. The more likely future, Treloar suggests, is acquisition — large QSR brands absorbing healthier concepts rather than overhauling their core menus, much the way Coke and Pepsi have expanded into adjacent beverage categories. Miller frames it as an access problem above all else: people aren’t choosing the drive-thru at a legacy fast food chain because they prefer it, they’re choosing it because nothing else is convenient enough or close enough. “No one plans to eat at McDonald’s,” he says. “You’re tired, you’re hungry, and you see the golden arches.” The solution isn’t to shame that behavior — it’s to make the better option just as frictionless.

Looking toward 2030, both operators see the trajectory continuing in the same direction, not reversing. Consumers will be more educated, more AI-assisted in their dietary choices, and more demanding of transparency from restaurant brands at every price point. Miller draws the parallel to how attitudes toward cigarettes shifted over generations — once the information is widely available and culturally absorbed, behavior follows. Treloar agrees, pointing to how his own adult children now actively track protein intake and seek out the PLNT Burger menu with a sense of intention that simply didn’t exist in earlier generations. The operators who will win, both suggest, are those who treat good taste and nutritional integrity not as competing priorities, but as the same commitment — because that’s exactly what the next generation of diners expects them to be.

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When Pokeworks opened its first location in New York City in 2015, most people on the mainland had never heard of poke. A decade later, the brand has grown to 85 locations across 22 states, with a presence in Canada and Taiwan — and it did so almost entirely without private equity. On a recent episode of Fast Casual Nation, hosts Paul Barron and Cherryh Cansler sat down with co-founder and Head of Development Peter Yang to unpack what it really takes to scale a fast casual brand the right way: methodically, unit-economics first, and with a healthy respect for what a viral moment can — and can’t — do for you.

That viral moment came early. Just a couple of months after opening, a video of Pokeworks exploded on social media, drawing hundreds of people into the store daily. For a brand still figuring out its own operations, it was both a gift and a stress test. “We were building the plane while flying it,” Yang said. Rather than treat the attention as a shortcut, the Pokeworks team leaned into operational discipline — making sure every guest in that long line felt like the only guest in the restaurant. That pressure, Yang noted, ultimately paved the way toward a thoughtful franchising model, where today roughly 90% of locations are franchisee-operated while the brand retains a 10% corporate store footprint to maintain standards and stay close to the product.

One of the more nuanced parts of the conversation centered on how Pokeworks approaches site selection — and why psychographics deserve as much weight as demographics. Using platforms like Calibrate and Placer AI, and increasingly building proprietary AI tools in-house, the team correlates sales performance across 80-plus data points to identify which customer segments drive the strongest results. The top-performing psychographic profile they’ve identified is what the Mosaic segmentation calls “aspiring young professionals” — health-conscious, well-traveled, higher-income individuals with an average age of around 36. “Demographics tells you the who,” Yang explained, “but psychographics tells you the why.” That insight is helping Pokeworks find B+ sites that perform like A locations — a critical edge in a real estate market that remains intensely competitive.

The brand’s physical footprint has evolved accordingly. Today, Pokeworks targets roughly 1,000 to 1,500 square feet of inline space — smaller, leaner, and optimized for the 80% of customers who take their orders to go. Being a hoodless concept has been a major differentiator, unlocking real estate options unavailable to most restaurant brands. Three of Pokeworks’ New York City locations occupy spaces where traditional venting simply wasn’t an option. As remote work reshapes foot traffic patterns, the brand has also pivoted away from its original central business district focus toward suburban hubs, where it’s seeing some of its strongest performance — a trend Barron and Cansler noted is playing out across the fast casual segment at large.

Financially, the picture is encouraging. Pokeworks posted its highest Q1 performance since its 2015 founding, with average unit volumes rising for three consecutive years to approximately $1.1 million, and top-performing stores approaching $3 million. Yang was clear that chasing unit count is not the strategy — protecting unit economics is. The brand is growing at roughly 10% annually and is targeting the 100-location milestone by 2027. That kind of measured growth is increasingly rare in an industry where private equity timelines often push brands to scale faster than their operations can support. “We’re founder-led and funded,” Yang said — a statement that drew genuine admiration from both hosts, who see PE-driven leadership transitions as one of the primary ways fast casual brands lose their identity.

Perhaps the most resonant thread running through the conversation was the idea that viral visibility is an opportunity, not a strategy. Pokeworks didn’t build 85 locations because of a TikTok moment — it built them because the team used that moment to stress-test operations, tighten franchisee support, refine site selection, and let a genuinely cravable product speak for itself. As Barron noted toward the end of the episode, the brands that endure in fast casual are the ones that make every guest feel like the only guest — and that, more than any algorithm, is what Pokeworks has quietly gotten very good at.

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Fast Casual Italian Is Having Its Moment — And Piada Is Leading the Charge

When Paul Barron and Cherryh Cansler sat down with Matt Harding, Chief Culinary Officer of The Piada Group, on a recent episode of Fast Casual Nation, the conversation quickly moved past the usual industry talking points. Piada — founded in 2010 and backed by L Catterton for nearly 13 years — is quietly building a case for being the brand that finally cracks the fast casual Italian code. With 29 consecutive quarters of positive same-store sales growth and a national expansion now in early capital-raise discussions, the brand is moving with purpose. Harding, a seasoned operator with decades of full-service experience, made it clear from the outset that this is not a concept built in a college dorm. It is a chef-driven, hospitality-first organization that has been battle-tested from day one.

What separates Piada from the long list of Italian fast casual concepts that have come and gone — Vapiano, Pasta Mania, Johnny Carino’s among them — comes down to execution and authenticity. Harding described a kitchen culture where pasta is cooked to order in a sauté pan, piada dough is made from just four ingredients and toasted fresh, and nothing hits the menu unless it clears what he calls the “kick butt” test. “If you can’t tell what you’re eating,” Harding said, “it doesn’t make it to the menu.” That standard has held even as the brand expanded into tier-two and tier-three markets like Tyler, Texas and Akron, Ohio — places where a concept built on genuine Italian street food might not seem like an obvious fit, yet where Piada has consistently thrived.

Pricing and value were central themes throughout the episode. Harding was candid about the pressure operators face, acknowledging significant inflation in beef costs and the broader consumer sensitivity around spending. But rather than passing those costs directly to guests, Piada has focused internally — tightening logistics, backhauling, renegotiating contracts, and building restaurants designed to be timeless rather than trendy. His analogy was memorable: a restaurant is like a fruit tree, and if you strip all the fruit off to cover your costs, you slow the tree’s growth. The goal, he emphasized, is to protect the guest’s price-value equation at all costs, because a lost guest is nearly impossible to win back.

The brand’s growth strategy is measured and deliberate. Currently strong in the Ohio Valley, the Carolinas, and Texas — where a new San Antonio location has been pushing volume hard — Piada is eyeing the Southeast next, with Florida and the Virginia-Maryland corridor on the radar. Harding also pointed to non-traditional formats like airport locations, including Dallas Fort Worth, as a frontier worth exploring carefully. The franchise conversation is in early stages, with the West Coast flagged as a potential market where that model might make sense. The consistent thread, however, is that growth will not outpace talent. Harding returned repeatedly to the idea that the next generation of internal leadership is as critical to the brand’s future as any real estate decision.

The episode also featured a Gen Z Corner segment with Johnson and Wales student Isabella, who offered a grounded, unfiltered perspective from the consumer cohort every fast casual brand is chasing. Price ranked highest for her at an eight out of ten, with food quality and speed both landing at seven. Chipotle and Raising Cane’s still dominate her peer group, but she singled out Cava as the brand most likely to challenge that hierarchy — citing its Mediterranean bowl format, strong portion reputation, and sharp marketing to younger consumers. The segment reinforced what Harding had argued from the operator side: value is the lens through which every decision gets made, and brands that lose sight of that will feel it eventually.

For restaurant professionals listening, the Piada story carries a broader lesson. The fast casual segment is crowded, price-fatigued, and increasingly skeptical of brands that overpromise. What Harding described is a return to fundamentals — genuine hospitality, chef-driven quality, and a disciplined refusal to cut corners where guests will notice. As Paul Barron noted in closing, the brands that survive the current climate will be the ones that deliver something memorable, even if it costs five or ten percent more. Piada, it seems, has understood that from the beginning.

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Picture two candidates sitting across from a hiring manager. Same age, similar backgrounds. One spent their formative years in retail. The other spent three summers waiting tables. Paul Molinari would take the restaurant person every single time — and in this episode of Modern Solutions for Modern Restaurants, he explains exactly why. The argument is simple: the restaurant industry is one of the greatest workforce development programs ever built, and almost nobody in it gets credit for that. Not from the outside world, and honestly, not even from the operators running the restaurants themselves.

The skills built on a restaurant floor aren’t soft. They’re survival skills. Teamwork in a kitchen or dining room is among the most interdependent team dynamics that exists — every role connects to every other role, and workers learn when to lead, when to follow, and when to step in, sometimes all within a single service. Composure under pressure isn’t developed in a training module; it’s built in an actual dinner rush. And communication? A server who gets an order wrong doesn’t always get a second chance with that table. The standard is clarity, every time, with every transaction. That discipline, when it becomes habit, is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable.

Then there’s the skill that gets overlooked most: customer empathy. Restaurant workers deal with customers in every possible state of mind — handling requests, solving complaints, maintaining a welcoming disposition under difficult circumstances. What develops from that is an emotional intelligence that most workplaces never try to cultivate. As Molinari puts it, suite executives pay consultants thousands of dollars to try to develop that skill. Restaurant workers built it by Tuesday of their first week.

Here’s something operators rarely say out loud: your managers are technology operators. They’re running POS systems that function as the operational hub of the entire business, using labor scheduling tools that pull from sales forecasting data, tracking food cost variance, and making real-time decisions based on live data. That’s not receptionist-level tech fluency — that’s operational analytics and multi-system fluency under pressure. With 51% of operators planning to invest in workforce management software, the complexity of that environment is only going up. The managers coming through your organization are data-fluent and systems-literate. They just may not be using that language to describe themselves.

Research from the National Restaurant Association found that 87% of operators prioritize the ability to build team culture and morale when hiring managers, followed by guest experience at 84% and financial acumen at 75%. The restaurant environment, by design and by necessity, develops exactly those capabilities in the people who work inside it. McDonald’s calls itself America’s best first job. Chipotle offers college credit for on-the-job training. These aren’t PR plays — they’re organizations that looked at what they actually build in people and decided to own it publicly. Operators of every size can do the same. You don’t need a press release. You just need a posture.

The stigma attached to restaurant work has never been accurate and has always been unfair — the idea that it’s a fallback, a filler, a stepping stone for people who haven’t figured things out yet. The reality, backed by research and the lived experience of millions, is that a restaurant is one of the most demanding and most effective professional development environments that exists. Operators built that environment. They set the standards, coach the team, push people through the rush, and debrief when service ends. That is not nothing. That is everything. Say it louder: we make people better.

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Fast Casual Nation host Paul Barron sat down with co-host Cherryh Cansler and special guest Stacey Kane, Fractional CMO for Emerging Brands, to unpack three of the biggest conversations heating up the restaurant industry right now — artificial intelligence at the customer interface, the explosive growth of craft beverages, and what a potential Jersey Mike’s IPO could mean for the sector.

The episode opened with a deep dive into Starbucks’ ChatGPT integration, a tool designed around the idea that drink orders begin with a feeling. Users can tag Starbucks within ChatGPT, describe their mood or dietary goals, and receive a personalized menu recommendation. Cansler tested it firsthand, noting the experience was “decent” but not necessarily something she’d return to regularly. Kane offered a more strategic read: the real opportunity isn’t novelty, it’s utility. As functional beverages — think protein boosts, GLP-1-friendly options, and macro-conscious customization — continue their rise, AI that can navigate complex personal requirements and dietary goals could evolve into something genuinely useful for guests, not just a fun gimmick.

The conversation quickly shifted to drive-thru AI, where the stakes feel considerably higher. Dairy Queen, in partnership with technology company Presto, is now integrating AI order-taking bots reporting roughly 90% order accuracy — a figure the group noted actually exceeds typical human performance in the lane. Taco Bell, White Castle, Checkers, Carl’s Jr., and Hardee’s are also moving in this direction. For restaurant operators, the implications go beyond labor savings: AI-powered drive-thrus could meaningfully improve throughput, reduce food waste, and eliminate the costly ripple effects of a single incorrect order during peak hours. The panelists agreed the technology is still early, but momentum is clearly building on the QSR side, with fast casual brands like Chipotle and Panera likely to follow given their existing drive-thru infrastructure.

On the beverage front, McDonald’s entry into the craft soda and energy drink space drew plenty of analysis. The chain is rolling out a mango pineapple refresher and a Red Bull Dragon Berry Energizer — offerings previously tested under the CosMc's concept — at price points landing below Starbucks, Dutch Brothers, and Sonic. Kane, who works closely with beverage brands including Ziggies, wasn’t losing sleep over it. Her perspective: a rising tide lifts all ships. McDonald’s enormous media budget will bring more consumer attention to the dirty soda and craft beverage category overall, and brands already built around customization, quality, and experience are well-positioned to hold their ground. “Our product is better, we have more offerings, and it’s way more customizable,” she said flatly. Barron noted the trend is now bleeding well beyond QSR — casual dining menus, breakfast chains, and fast casual concepts are all experimenting with dirty sodas and functional drinks, signaling this is no longer a niche category.

The episode’s final business segment tackled the buzz around a potential Jersey Mike’s IPO. The chain has quietly filed an S-1, with a reported valuation target of $12 billion — a figure that would rank it among the top ten largest restaurant companies in the United States. The panel was openly skeptical. Kane and Barron both flagged that the brand recently invested $150 million into franchise modernization, and that a $12 billion valuation would require an enormous amount of investor confidence in a sub-segment — fast casual subs — that isn’t exactly setting records. “I would not jump into this IPO,” Barron said, adding that many restaurant IPOs open hot only to retrace sharply. Jersey Mike’s, currently in a quiet period, declined comment — standard procedure ahead of a public offering — but the group agreed the PR machine is very much already running.

Throughout the episode, Kane and Cansler brought the kind of grounded, practitioner-level perspective that restaurant operators actually need: not hype, but honest assessments of where AI is genuinely useful, which beverage trends have staying power, and how to read the financial signals coming out of the industry’s biggest moves. New episodes of Fast Casual Nation drop regularly, and industry professionals can connect with Cherryh Cansler at connect.media and Stacey Kane on LinkedIn.

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Walk into almost any Wendy’s, AMC Theater, or major QSR chain and you’ll find it: the Freestyle machine, glowing in the corner, a line of customers pecking at the touchscreen to concoct some wild cherry-vanilla-Sprite hybrid. It looks like a novelty. It is not. On a recent episode of Modern Solutions for Modern Restaurants, host Paul Molinari sat down with Angela Diffly of Coca-Cola and Anthony Bonitatibus of Freestyle to make exactly that argument — that what most operators treat as a flashy beverage perk is actually one of the more powerful connected platforms sitting anywhere in the restaurant tech stack.

The API integrations alone tell you something. Freestyle can talk to your POS, your loyalty platform, your back-of-house systems, your digital ordering apps. Wendy’s has already built it into their first-party mobile experience, so the 200-plus drink combinations available on the machine are accessible before a customer ever walks through the door. More importantly, every interaction generates data — not just “people like Cherry Coke” data, but granular preference signals that operators can tie to individual customer records. Diffly put it plainly: you don’t just know someone loves Diet Coke, you know they love it with cherry and a splash of lime. That’s a different kind of customer intelligence than most restaurant brands are sitting on right now.

There’s an operational story here too, and it’s one that gets less airtime than it deserves. Freestyle’s micro-dosing technology — which Bonitatibus mentioned was originally inspired by the medical industry, which was a genuine surprise — replaces the bulky bag-in-box syrup systems that have dominated restaurant back-of-houses forever. Those boxes are heavy, they take up room, and not every crew member can lift them. Freestyle cartridges are compact and swappable by anyone. For operators paying premium rent per square foot, that’s not a footnote. That’s a real argument.

Speed is another one. The conventional wisdom in food and beverage is that bringing a new product to market takes 12 to 18 months — sourcing ingredients, testing, production, distribution, all of it. Freestyle collapses that to about three months, and in some cases much less, because the “new” ingredients are already in the machine. You build a recipe, design the creative, push it through the content system, and it shows up on thousands of dispensers overnight. AMC has figured this out better than almost anyone. Their Wicked promotion featured character-specific drink combinations with custom on-screen creative — timed, naturally, to one of the biggest theatrical releases of the year. It sounds simple. Most operators aren’t doing anything close to it.

Molinari, to his credit, forced the AI question — he joked he had a quota to hit — and the answer was more substantive than the usual hand-waving. Freestyle ran an AI-driven component of Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign that took user-submitted descriptions of a friend and generated a personalized, one-of-a-kind beverage recipe in response. Internally, they’re building toward a tool that lets account teams generate custom recipes algorithmically, cutting out the R&D bottleneck. Neither of these is a moonshot. Both are live or close to it.

The throughline of the whole conversation was actually pretty simple: most operators are underusing what they already have. The data is there. The integrations exist. The platform is designed to do more than dispense soda. Diffly and Bonitatibus will be at the Coca-Cola booth at the NRA Show in Chicago this May if you want to press them on any of it — and both are reachable on LinkedIn if May feels too far away.

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