restaurant-marketing
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Arby's Built a Fast-Food Empire by Refusing to Act Like a Burger Chain
For 62 years, Arby's has made a business of being the odd hat in fast food. Its real product is not roast beef alone - it is a permission slip to order something stranger than another burger.
Abhinav Kapur
He spent his nights doing food deliveries and his days reading equity research. Then he built the software his mother-in-law never had - so every restaurant could remember its regulars.
Bikky
Bikky is a customer data platform built exclusively for large, multi-unit restaurant brands. It unifies data from point-of-sale systems, online ordering, payments, and loyalty programs into a single guest view, letting operators measure how every marketing, menu, and operational decision affects guest behavior, frequency, and lifetime value. Founded in 2017 and based in New York City, Bikky serves brands like Bojangles, Dave's Hot Chicken, MOD Pizza, and Robeks across thousands of locations.
Sauce
Sauce is a Miami-based restaurant technology company that helps independent restaurants and small chains build a profitable direct online ordering and delivery business. Instead of surrendering 30% commissions and customer data to marketplaces like DoorDash and Uber Eats, restaurants use Sauce to take branded direct orders and fulfill them through a managed, commission-free courier network charged at a flat per-order fee. The platform bundles online ordering, managed delivery, live order support, local SEO, and AI-driven marketing and retention into a single system aimed at turning delivery from a cost center into a margin driver.
Blizzfull
Blizzfull is a Glendale, California restaurant technology company that bundles online ordering, POS, self-service kiosks, kitchen screens, branded websites and apps, marketing, and loyalty into one AI-powered platform. Founded in 2012 by web developers Adam Dougherty and Zach Zurn, it charges restaurants a flat monthly fee and takes 0% commission on direct orders, positioning itself against third-party delivery apps that take up to 30%. Blizzfull's pitch is that independent restaurants should own their customers, their data, and their revenue, and it says it powers more than 1,000 restaurants nationwide.
MustHaveMenus
MustHaveMenus is a Bend, Oregon software company that gives restaurants, bars, hotels, and hospitality groups an all-in-one platform to design, print, and publish menus across print, web, QR codes, and digital signage. Founded by serial entrepreneur Jim Williams, it started as a simple menu-design tool and grew into a menu operations system with the world's largest library of restaurant design templates - 15,000-plus and counting - used by tens of thousands of businesses worldwide.
Jim Williams
Jim Williams is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of MustHaveMenus, a Bend, Oregon-based platform serving 10,000+ restaurants, hotels, and food service businesses with cloud-based menu design, digital signage, and menu management tools. Before MustHaveMenus, he sold email-marketing startup MarketHome to ClickAction for $15 million in 1999, co-founded church-tech platform Sharefaith (acquired by Ministry Brands in 2018), and made an early angel investment in HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb in 2019). An English major who started his first business at age 11, Williams embodies the accidental founder: perpetually optimistic, deeply curious about design, and committed to building software that solves genuinely unglamorous problems.
Adam Dougherty
Adam Dougherty is the co-founder and CEO of Blizzfull, a Glendale, California restaurant-technology company that builds branded websites and online ordering tools so restaurants keep their customers instead of renting them from third-party apps. A USC film-school graduate who crossed over from Hollywood into software engineering, Dougherty channels a self-described obsession with aesthetics into ordering software, an industry not known for good looks. He and co-founder Zach Zurn started Blizzfull around 2011-2012 after struggling to order office lunch, and in 2023 retooled the platform around AI for menu descriptions, marketing suggestions, and one-click website generation.
Snackpass
Snackpass is a restaurant technology company that builds an all-in-one marketing and point-of-sale platform for quick-service restaurants. It pairs hardware - registers, self-serve kiosks, kitchen display systems and pickup screens - with software for online ordering, loyalty, SMS marketing, analytics and AI. Founded by Yale students in 2017 as a social food-ordering app, it grew into a full operating system for takeout, serving thousands of restaurant operators and tens of millions of guests.