Challenge: As one of the fastest-growing franchises in the US, Freddy’s needed to maximize the billions of rows of data at its disposal.

Solution: Freddy’s uses Domo to monitor its operations across more than 500 restaurants.

Impact: The company uses data to optimize its menu mix, monitor KPIs, choose store locations, and improve its loyalty program.

Freddy’s Builds a Data-Driven Fast-Food Empire with Domo.

As one of the fastest-growing franchises in the US, Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers satisfies the cravings of millions of hungry guests at more than 500 locations across the country. To power its growth, Freddy’s relies on Domo for insights into its menu mix, guest preferences, real estate strategy, and more.

“Over the past nine years, Domo has contributed greatly to our growth strategies,” said Sean Thompson, vice president (VP) of IT at Freddy’s. “I don’t think we would have reached the scale we’re at—or be on our trajectory for continued growth—if it weren’t for the data.”

Freddy’s uses Domo across the organization to capture billions of rows of data across thousands of data sets each day, providing a single source of truth for its corporate employees and restaurant general managers.

“At Freddy’s, everyone uses Domo. From general managers to everyone in the support center all the way up to the board of directors, everyone is looking at the same dashboards and singing from the same sheet of music,” Thompson said. “Finance loves it for accounting and as a system of record. Marketing loves how it can show their impact. Restaurant operators love how it shows their performance across metrics like food safety, speed of service, and Voice of Guest. And IT loves it because Domo is so low maintenance.”

“We can report all day what happened, but Domo helps us present data in a way where it’s actionable everywhere from the store level all the way up to the board,” said Alaa Haidar, senior business intelligence analyst at Freddy’s.

Using data to optimize operations

Freddy’s is always adjusting with its menu mix to meet changing guest demands. Using Domo, Freddy’s can model its menu lineup to determine which items are bestsellers or are the most popular add-ons with a specific item, allowing the company to create more impactful promotions and limited-time offers.

“We use data to understand how all our menu items impact each other, and to ensure everything is priced accordingly so our franchises hit all their profitability metrics,” Thompson said.

Freddy’s uses guest loyalty data to better understand which benefits its diners redeem most so that the company can offer more valuable rewards that inspire repeat visits. “We want to make sure we offer the right amount of points, and that we are sending messages at the right time. We use Domo to understand when people are clicking, which is critical to driving loyalty program usage,” Thompson said.

“By leveraging our user data, we’re able to understand what guests do, what they like, what they don’t like, and which stores they stopped visiting after a new Freddy’s location opens. That helps our development team understand our cannibalization between stores so they can make future decisions about where to open new locations,” said Haidar.

To improve operations across franchises, Freddy’s recently launched a benchmarking dashboard that allows restaurants to compare their performance with other locations. As a result, managers can now identify new opportunities at their own restaurants while helping regional managers identify locations that need additional support.

“As one example, we can measure speed of service and not just tell stores what their times are, but where they can find areas for improvement, such as at the drive-through at lunchtime or in a specific part of the kitchen. We make the data very actionable,” said Haidar.

“Our benchmarking tool has made a massive difference. It lets you see very quickly how you’re performing across KPIs. We use this tool at the individual restaurant level all the way up to the C-suite and board of directors,” Thompson said.

Doing more with Domo’s consumption-based pricing

Thanks to Domo’s consumption-based pricing model, Freddy’s can unlock the full value of Domo. “By switching to the consumption model, we’re able to use the full toolset that we didn’t have access to before. Having the availability of everything lets us use more of the data science piece to grow our team even further. It was a no-brainer for us,” Thompson said.

As the company experiments with data science, Freddy’s can now get more answers from its data than ever before so that the restaurant chain can better serve its guests.