QSR & Restaurant · A Happy Cog vertical

The digital growth problem in restaurant isn’t one thing. We built the tools to solve all of it.

Most agencies can run your paid search. Most dev shops can build you an app. Very few can design an ordering experience customers actually want to use, build it on top of the POS you already run, connect it to your media program, and then tell you how last Tuesday’s campaign drove Wednesday’s same-store sales. That’s the program we build for multi-location restaurant and QSR brands, with AI working through every step.

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Brands we’ve worked with

Design, development, and marketing across QSR, fast casual, and multi-unit operators.

The problems we solve

A short list of hard problems. We’ve spent years building the tools to solve them.

Three patterns show up across nearly every multi-location brand we work with. Not one of them is solved by a single tool, an off-the-shelf app, or a media budget alone, so we built across all three.

The disconnected digital experience

Your brand experience ends at the front door. The digital one should be just as good.

A generic white-label ordering app with your logo on it isn’t a digital experience. It’s a conversion tax. The brands pulling ahead on online sales have ordering flows that load fast, feel like the brand, and connect to their loyalty, POS, and marketing stack. We solve this two ways: with design that makes the experience unmistakably yours, and with Happy Food, our proprietary ordering platform, which runs on top of the POS systems you already use, routes funds correctly across franchise entities, and integrates with the loyalty, delivery, and marketing tools your team already depends on. AI sits in the architecture, personalizing customer journeys and surfacing the right offer at the right moment, so ordering feels built for each guest rather than processed for all of them.

The aggregator margin problem

You’re paying DoorDash to own your customers. There’s a better model.

Every order through a third-party aggregator is a customer you don’t own. No email address, no purchase history, no path to loyalty, and usually 20 to 30 percent of revenue gone before it reaches you. The brands winning those customers back to direct ordering do two things: they build a direct experience worth returning to, and they run paid media designed to drive direct conversion. We do both. Our media team has run AI-optimized bid and budget programs since 2013, with real-time adjustments, cross-channel attribution, and audience targeting that sharpens the longer it runs. Our design and development teams build the experience those campaigns land on.

The national-to-local attribution problem

Your ad fund is working. Can you prove it to 200 franchisees?

The franchisee alignment problem in QSR usually isn’t about spend. It’s about visibility. National campaigns don’t automatically produce location-level proof, and without it the ad fund looks like overhead to operators who can’t see the connection to their own comp sales. We build the measurement infrastructure that closes that loop: GA4 implementations with location-level tracking, attribution models tied to foot traffic and same-store sales, and dashboards that give corporate and franchisees the same real-time view. AI works in this layer too, flagging anomalies and surfacing which locations underperform relative to spend, so monthly reporting turns into a live operating signal.

The Happy Food platform

We built Happy Food because the same problem kept coming back.

We kept getting hired by multi-location brands to fix the same handful of problems: disconnected online ordering, generic apps with no real brand expression, ordering systems that broke the moment franchising created multiple legal entities, and integrations that had to be rebuilt from scratch for every brand. After building close variations of the same thing more than once, we took what we’d proven in production, pulled the common architecture into a reusable platform, and named it Happy Food. Today it’s the foundation we build new engagements on.

Happy Food is modular — 18 discrete components we mix and match per brand — and franchise-native from the start. It ships with live integrations to more than 40 platforms across POS, payments, delivery, loyalty, marketing, and business operations. AI is built into the platform itself: chatbot ordering, personalized promotions, predictive offer logic, and automated journey triggers that use purchase history to bring guests back before they drift to a competitor.

Built for franchise complexity

Multi-entity fund routing through Stripe Connect. Every franchisee is their own connected account, every transaction settles correctly, and adding locations is a configuration change rather than an engineering project.

40+ live integrations, ready on day one

Square, Toast, Olo, Stripe Terminal, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Thanx, Klaviyo, Braze, and Restaurant365. Each one is production-tested engineering a new client inherits instead of rebuilds.

AI in the stack, not in a slide

OpenAI integration is native to Happy Food. Chatbot-driven ordering, personalized loyalty offers, and intelligent upsell logic, running in production today rather than sitting on a roadmap.

40+ live integrations · organized by category

POS & Ordering

Payments

Connect

Terminal

Delivery

Loyalty & Marketing

Business Systems

Design

An ordering experience customers remember starts with design, not a template.

Most online ordering looks the same because most of it is the same white-label software with a logo dropped on top. Your dining room doesn’t look like everyone else’s. Your app and your web ordering shouldn’t either. Our designers build ordering experiences that carry your brand the whole way through, from the first tap to the confirmation screen, on top of the Happy Food platform, so the craft on the surface is matched by real engineering underneath.

Ordering experiences that look like you, not like software

We design the entire flow around your brand: menus that show your food the way you’d plate it, motion and interaction that feel considered, and a visual system that reads as yours the moment it loads. No cookie-cutter template, no generic app with your colors swapped in.

Checkouts built to convert

Checkout is where online orders are won or lost. We redesign the path from cart to confirmation to cut the friction that makes people abandon: fewer steps, clearer pricing, saved payment and one-tap reorder, and a flow that works as well under a thumb on a phone as it does on a laptop. Then we measure it against real order data and keep tuning.

Interactive tools that make ordering worth doing

Some orders deserve more than a dropdown. We design and build interactive product builders that let a customer construct the perfect cookie cake, dial in a latte exactly the way they like it, or stack a taco the way they’d say it out loud at the counter. These configurators raise average order value, give people a reason to order direct instead of through an aggregator, and they’re fun to use.

Design that ships and keeps moving

Because the design lives on Happy Food, updating it isn’t a project. Push a seasonal menu, test a new checkout layout, or roll a limited-time item to select locations over the air, without waiting on an app store review or a full redevelopment cycle.

Performance marketing

A great experience doesn’t fill seats on its own. The media program does that.

Building a great ordering experience doesn’t drive traffic to it. The brands growing same-store sales and direct order volume run tightly structured paid media that ties national spend to location-level outcomes. Our media team has run these programs for multi-location QSR and fast casual brands: geo-targeted search and programmatic tied to DMA-level traffic data, CTV that reports on store visits instead of impressions, and “order direct” paid search built to win customers back from aggregators.

The AI here is real, and it’s been running since 2013. Our proprietary machine-learning optimization works across every channel we manage, making bid and budget adjustments as often as every 30 minutes. It calibrates platform-native automation against actual business signals rather than platform defaults. Thirteen years of production data makes it sharper than anything a competitor standing up AI today can match.

Paid Search & Social

Campaigns built for multi-location brands: national brand terms, local intent queries, and “order direct” conversion flows, structured to report at the location level, with AI-driven bidding across every keyword.

Programmatic & CTV

Geo-targeted display and CTV through Yahoo DSP and Simpli.fi, structured around in-market behavior and DMA-level traffic data. Foot traffic attribution. Real outcomes, not reach metrics.

SEO, AEO & GEO

Location page SEO at scale, near-me search optimization, and visibility in AI surfaces like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Your next customer may ask an AI assistant where to eat before they open a browser.

Analytics & Attribution

GA4 and GTM implementations that connect the ordering platform, the media program, and same-store sales data in one view. AI anomaly detection surfaces issues before they show up in the monthly report. No black boxes. Your CFO and your franchisees see the same numbers.

AI in production, not in a pitch

We’ve been running AI in paid media since 2013. The rest of our practice caught up.

When the industry started talking about AI as a marketing differentiator, our paid media team had already been running it in production for over a decade. That’s not a positioning claim. It’s the date we integrated machine learning into bid and budget management. Today AI runs through every discipline we practice.

In development, our engineering team uses AI to reason through features before building them, run self-testing agents, and make architectural decisions from prototype comparisons rather than assumptions. In media, our proprietary optimization adjusts bids and budgets in real time. In design, it helps us test and refine ordering flows against real behavior. In Happy Food, AI powers personalized journeys, chatbot ordering, and predictive offers. The People First part of this is deliberate. Our clients aren’t hiring an AI vendor. They’re hiring a senior, opinionated team that uses AI to do more, faster, with better judgment. The human expertise is the difference. AI is the multiplier.

2013

AI in paid media

The year we integrated machine learning into bid and budget management.

30 min

Optimization cadence

How often our system reacts to live auction behavior across every channel.

Black boxes

Every decision our system makes is visible. Clients see what we see.

One team

Designers who know the media program. Developers who know the ordering flow. One team.

When your design, development, and media teams are the same team, the problems that fall between them stop falling. The campaign lands on an ordering flow the same people designed and built. The analytics measuring that campaign were implemented by the people running it. The AI in Happy Food connects to the AI in the media program, so the audience signals that sharpen your targeting also improve your loyalty triggers, and the purchase data from your ordering platform feeds back into your audience strategy.

This is how we work. It matches how the economics of restaurant marketing actually behave.

Start a conversation

Running a multi-location restaurant brand? We’d like to hear what you’re solving for.

Maybe you’re rethinking your ordering platform, rebuilding your paid media program, trying to close the attribution gap between national spend and your franchisees’ registers, or working out where AI fits in your digital stack. Start with a 30-minute conversation.

Book a 30-minute chat

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