Challenge:
This fast-growing restaurant brand struggled to manually manage its data needs across 100+ locations. 

Solution:
Domo helps the company easily collect, transform, visualize, and share data across business departments and restaurants. 

Impact:
Torchy’s now uses data to improve the diner experience, inform its real estate strategy, and optimize workforce scheduling. 

Torchy’s Tacos makes data a key ingredient to success with Domo.

Since 2006, Torchy’s Tacos has grown from a single food truck to more than 100 locations across 14 states. With a passion for fresh ingredients and innovative flavors, their founder says they’re serious about one thing and one thing only- their food. But thanks to Domo, data comes a close second. 

“As great as it is for me, it’s incredibly powerful for our restaurant operators to see where they are at with their guests, sales, and employees. That’s where it makes a difference.”

Insights without the wait.

Before Domo, Torchy’s struggled with a data collection and reporting process that might make sense when running a single food truck, but not a taco empire. The finance team would have to manually collect data across disparate data sources, build reports one by one in Excel, and then send reports out to each store operator. With more than 100 stores to track, the finance team spent all its time on reporting, with limited time left over for analysis. 

“Domo lets us pull together all our data instead of looking at separate resources,” said Ryan Moore, CFO at Torchy’s. “We can automatically gather and share sales information, customer sentiment, labor costs, and more. The great part is that it now allows me to see parts of the business that I couldn’t see as quickly before.” 

Using Domo’s drag-and-drop Magic ETL, Torchy’s can quickly and easily pull data from all its data sources, process and transform it, and then visualize it with dynamic dashboards. By reducing the need to leverage developers every time they want to add a data set or run a new analysis, the finance team and store operators are able to significantly reduce their time to insight.  

“We no longer have to focus on trying to find or manipulate data,” said Bruce Harris, Director of Financial Applications at Torchy’s.

Optimizing operations.

Torchy’s uses Domo to improve its employee utilization and real estate strategy, which helps the company deliver a better dining experience.  

“Domo lets us do an in-depth analysis on our sales mix to understand what we’re selling and where so we can make strategic decisions about pricing and menu mix,” Moore said. “It also helps us look at our buildings to understand the right square footage for our needs to help us control our real estate costs.” 

The company uses data collected from its time-tracking system to compare it against store sales for each location so it can see the impact of staffing on revenue not just by the day, but by 15-minute increments. This helps individual store operators determine when they need to staff up for busy periods to reduce wait times or if they should extend their hours during the summer to generate more sales. 

The company also leverages IoT sensor data to not only ensure food is delivered quickly to the right table, but to understand how customers move through each store and where they sit. Using this data, store managers can optimize delivery times in each restaurant, while the real estate team can use heat maps to better identify potential store layouts that may perform better.  

“We now better understand how we should position patios, the bar, restaurant seating, pick-up locations, drive-thru windows and the rest of the restaurant layout,” Moore said. “The heat maps are really informative in seeing how each factor impacts the business.” 

Connecting with customer feedback.

In addition to sales data and employee utilization, Torchy’s uses Domo to be more effective when tracking customer sentiment. At each store, customers can scan a QR code to leave feedback on delivery speed, food quality, and more. This data is automatically collected in Domo, making it simple for store managers to see feedback for their individual stores, while enabling corporate leaders to understand customer sentiment as a whole. 

Similarly, each store automatically collects all its online reviews from sites like Yelp and Google to understand what customers are sharing with each other. Store managers can see their overall customer rating, and then dive into each individual comment for specific feedback.  

“We can now easily compare different review sites by normalizing that data in Domo. And then behind all that data, we have the ability to drill down to lower-rated reviews to see exactly what the customers are saying so we know what to focus on,” Harris said. 

“Managers have always had access to this data; they just had to spend hours going to different websites to gather it all,” Moore said.

Thanks to Domo, data is now at the heart of how Torchy’s operates its business. Not only is data more accessible to corporate leaders at headquarters, but it’s an essential tool for individual store managers. 

“Our ability to provide data to each store operator is a 10 out of 10,” said Moore.