Fast casual restaurant leader Corner Bakery Cafe recently completed a system-wide update to its catering platform, with all cafes shifting from in-house managed software, to MONKEY, a top cloud platform for takeout, delivery, and catering.
“Catering is key to our business strategy, which is why the move to MONKEY was so necessary,” says Frank Paci, CEO of Corner Bakery Cafe. “We outgrew our previous systems and we needed a more modern, cloud-based platform that could scale, be inline with our operational requirements, and serve our customers in a digital world. We needed to better connect our operations to our customers.”
With a growing network of over 8,000 restaurants in North America, MONKEY centralizes web and mobile ordering, allowing all cafe locations to access real time transaction data to expedite in-store and phone ordering, billing, payments, customer insights, production and delivery.
“We already had a substantial catering business that made up 25-30% of our sales revenue, so moving all our catering operations into the cloud was like working with a moving freight train,” says Paul Hicks, SVP Operations Services & Brand Development for Corner Bakery Cafe. “It was critical for us to maintain continuity of service for all our locations throughout the implementation for all our stores and franchise partners. Nobody understood the nature of the challenge more than the team at MonkeyMedia Software.”
In addition to handling the order process and production management, MONKEY provided Corner Bakery Cafe key integrations with in-house systems.
“Moving to MONKEY is a big leap forward in terms of gaining quicker visibility of our catering data that we need to share with our stakeholders,” says Minh Le, SVP of Technology for Corner Bakery Cafe. “In addition to having the industry’s top cloud solution for catering, Monkey Group brings the strategy and culture of catering success through training and support from The Catering Institute. This holistic approach to off-premise showed us this was the right solution and partner for Corner Bakery Cafe.”
Following an initial pilot in August 2017, Corner Bakery Cafe brought 20-30 locations online weekly with MONKEY, through the end of the year, culminating in system-wide training.
“Corner Bakery brought key elements to this process—dedicated leadership, a differentiated menu, and full awareness of what was happening in the marketplace and at all their locations,” says Erle Dardick, CEO of Monkey Group and founder of MonkeyMedia Software, The Catering Institute and Catering Insights. “Their catering sales were humming, and by investing in the right technology platform to optimize their catering operations, Corner Bakery is now the gold standard for catering operations for multi-unit restaurants in our industry.”
“This project was very special for our organization,” says Mo Asgari, President of Monkey Group and MonkeyMedia Software. “There are few brands in the world that are as sophisticated at restaurant catering as Corner Bakery Cafe. I am proud that MONKEY was selected by this world-class organization for supporting the next generation of their off premise service channels, and we’re all very pleased with the success of their rollout and implementation.”
