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>> Why piloting tech in one, five, twenty, then 100 stores is critical to scale
>> How Blaze Pizza manages tech across franchisees of varying sizes
>> The role of AI in refining speed of service and off-premise convenience
>> Why collaboration—not control—is key to successful tech rollouts
>> Which restaurant metrics matter most to determine ROI
Chris Demery, CTO of Blaze Pizza, brings over 30 years of experience in tech leadership across Domino’s, P.F. Chang’s, and now Blaze. He champions practical, scalable solutions that align with guest needs and franchise goals—delivering real value, not just new features.
Conor Sheridan is the founder and CEO of Nory, an agentic AI restaurant management system alongside being the co-founder of Mad Egg. Conor blends hands-on restaurant experience with a passion for tech-driven efficiency and profitability in hospitality.
Enjoyed the episode? Read our blog for more stories and insights from hospitality leaders.
Curious about how Nory helps brands run smarter, more profitable operations?
Speak to our team to learn more.
You need to be in the restaurant with the operators, experiencing what you thought they were gonna do with your technology versus what they actually do with your technology. The things that we implement have to be good for the brand as a whole, not just, you know, a five restaurant franchisee. I want to make sure the guest experience is great and I want to manage the middle of the PL for my restaurant providers. That's what makes being a technology person in the restaurant industry so fun. Never at a lack of work.
Welcome back to What's Cooking, the show where we get under the hood of how modern hospitality brands actually scale, the systems, the setbacks, and the stuff that nobody puts in the press release. Today we're talking to someone who's been in the trenches of tech transformation long before it became a buzzword. Chris Demery is the chief technology officer at Blaze Pizza, one of the fastest growing pizza concepts in the US with hundreds of locations.
Chris led digital and operational innovation across some of the biggest names in hospitalion retail, like Domino's and PF Chang's and now Blaze. But what makes Chris different isn't just his experience, it's how ruthlessly practical he is about using tech to solve real problems and not just create new ones. In this episode, we get into the messy middle of implementing systems across a franchise model, devising what not to automate and the silent killers of efficiency.
most operators and brands overlook. So if you're wrestling with complexity, legacy systems, or challenging operating model, or you're just trying to scale smarter, then this episode is for you. Let's get into it.
Well Chris, great to have you on What's Cooking. Thanks for thanks for joining us today and excited for our conversation.
thank you for inviting me. Pleasure to be here.
Awesome. I think I mentioned just a few minutes ago you're the first CTO we've had this season. So really excited for our listeners to hear your unique perspective on how to build a really successful restaurant business at scale and what you need to do around managing technological change, deployment, adoption, and obviously ultimate success. So super excited for today. But maybe just to kick us off, would you be okay to give the listeners an introduction into your background and how you became to be
The CTO of Blaze Beater?
Sure. I was prior military, and once I got out of the military, I went to work for NCR, retail out of Atlanta. And that's where I got my introduction into the restaurant industry itself with Domino's Pizza, starting out. I had the pleasure of helping build out the Domino's Pizza infrastructure. From then I went on to Bloomin' Brands, which is Outback Carabas, Bonefish.
Also CKE, PF Chang's, and finally Blaze Pizza is CTO. So I have been from quick service to fine dining, casual dining, and back to fast casual. So that's sort of my repertoire from a restaurant industry perspective.
Yes, you've seen a lot of different shapes and sizes, no doubt, during during that time. You've led huge transformation product projects from a technical perspective across brands like Domino's, PF Chanks, now Blaze Pizza, obviously being the CTO and being in charge of the use and deployment of technology. technology is so crucial to the industry today, but it's still a challenging part of the business and a challenging part to get right.
What are the common things or pitfalls that you've seen during the different deployments you've had of different change projects? What are the common pitfalls that you have seen, for example?
What I've seen across various peers and other organizations are not taking into account the the difference between restaurants or franchisees, particularly in the franchise world. what I learned at Domino's Pizza was I probably really didn't have the right technology solution until I was in at least a hundred locations.
Because while every brand is supposed to operate at each of their locations exactly the same from a standards perspective, they very rarely do that. So as I've rolled out new technology solutions, what I found is you need you need to be in the restaurant with the operators, experiencing what you thought they were going to do with your technology versus what they actually do with your technology. And I think a lot of
Technologists, CTOs, VPs of IT, they believe that people are going to use the technology the way you thought they were going to. And in reality, what they're trying to do is run a business. So we're in the restaurant business. We're not in the technology business. So that's that's one of the most important things I could tell any other CIO or CTO or somebody in charge of IT. Work with the operators first.
Really nice, yeah. Even from our perspective, being a vendor, you see that too, right? It's not the main thing. The main thing is the guest experience and the and and what you deliver on the in the restaurant versus the technology. So the reverse of that, like pulling on the thread of work closely with the operators. What have you done in Blaze, for example? Any kind of nuggets of best practices you could give on how to deploy change from a technical perspective successfully?
Well, we at at Blaze, we have something called the Blaze Franchise Advisory Committee. And we also had one at Domino's. we also had one at CKE. And I leverage that group of franchise advisors. And I I lean into those that those franchisees that are more technical and they understand some of the technology in order to get their buy in for any new innovation I'm putting into a location.
And what I mean by that is typically I would pilot a new technology that sports operations or marketing at a corporate restaurant if we have them. But then I would immediately move into a pilot with a franchisee to get to gain their buy-in associated with the solution we're piloting. And so that's that's one of the key things I do across every brand that has franchisees. It's a little different if you're all corporate.
at Bloomin' Brands we were ninety-nine percent corporate. Here at Blaze we're a hundred percent franchise. so I think you have to kind of change your behavior as you move within organizations, but leverage your franchisees to support your innovation. That would be number one.
Really nice, yeah. great to have the advisory committee. And then obviously you can build like an enablement pack or strategy for the rest of the the franchisees. at Blaze you've got like pockets or or not pockets, packs of one to three or twenty plus franchisees comes in come in different shapes and sizes. Some are like more bid market or or larger entities with their own internal IT teams, and some are obviously
independence, maybe owner operators. How do you balance that? Be able to manage or kind of support really fundamentally different size businesses within the organisation itself?
Yeah, the the the trick in this type of organization, I hate to call it a trick, but it's something I've learned over time, is that I have a team, it's not the first call for any IT issue, but we are involved in every IT issue that happens within a restaurant, whether it's from a one restaurant operator or a general manager or a twenty-five restaurant team that has their own IT team.
And what I do is I I call my team the glue that holds it all together. So we've trained them to, you know, sometimes you're just talking to an operator, and sometimes you're talking to an IT person from an organization. And so they have to, my team has to be able to change the context of what they're explaining. And it's a a skill that develops over time.
fortunately I have very low turnover, but we're we're really the glue that holds everything together because sometimes we're talking to a franchisee, sometimes we're talking to an IT person, sometimes we're talking to a general manager. It's not the same in all organizations, but I think it's critical that you you train your team to respect all of those roles because they're all equally important.
Yeah, of course. Moving towards maybe the decision that decisions that drive change. So at an organization at your scale today, or even at PFs or at Domino's, what drives what is the ultimate driver of making a a tech transformation? Like it's obviously a challenging thing to do. What would be a driver there to really make the business want to make a change across hundreds of venues?
I think the primary thing that I've learned and been successful at is it has to support the the business need of either improving sales or driving profitability. Those are I don't think anybody can argue with either one of those objectives. But anytime somebody requests new technology be introduced into a into a restaurant.
you have to provide a very sound return on investment. It's sometimes difficult to piece that out, but it's a combination of good negotiating with a third party vendor, commitments to third party vendors, and helping a franchise owner operator manage the middle of their PL. very few technology innovations are free.
In fact, I don't know of any that are free. But so when I go in and look at a new piece of technology, I have to look at surrounding technology in order to say, can I reduce cost in another area in order to pay for this new better thing that will support operations or support the guest experience? So the first thing I tell all our my franchisees, new or old, is that my job is to protect the middle of their PL so that.
While also driving traffic and profitability.
Nice, I really like that. It's great for alignment. Obviously there can be when you have franchisees and and and and the corporate owned, sometimes it can getting that alignment can be tricky, right? Because as you mentioned, ideas can come bottom up. What one group of franchisees want could be different than an another group. And you think around the drivers of change and what technology to adopt, where do the ideas or where do
Suggestions come from? Is it typically from the franchise advisory council, from HQ, from yourself? What's that process look like?
I think it's always a blended mix of where it comes from. You have to keep your ear to the ground, if you will, to to identify some of these opportunities. For instance, one of the things we're working on now is with third-party or off-premises orders, there's some platform issues associated with Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, and other platforms where because they're just different platforms, the
The discounts that they offer their guests do not flow correctly into other systems. So you have to listen for subtle things like that in order to identify an opportunity to save a franchisee or a restaurant owner some money. And so sometimes it comes just from listening to their problems. Sometimes it comes from a great idea, and sometimes it comes from marketing their operations that says, hey, we have this idea.
And so as a technology person in a restaurant company, it's all around improving guest experience, driving traffic. So you have to listen for those things and say, I think I know how we can innovate around that idea and provide a solution that will work for everyone. So it's it's not as easy as I just do whatever my boss says or whatever the franchise council says.
The things that we implement have to be good for the brand as a whole, not just, you know, a five restaurant franchisee or just for corporate.
Yeah, of course, right. And I'd imagine as an extension to that, you need quite a few proof points. So you mentioned you pile it in a corporate store to see the maybe the usability or the ROI. Then you bring it to a franchisee store to ensure that you can see similar levels of of impact. do you typically do that during a like a multi quarter process to prove out like a playbook or an OI that you can then bring to the rest of the franchisees and say, Hey, look, we know this can help the middle of the PL or
help drive traffic and then ultimately hopefully get broader adoption across the group.
You know, the the trick with technology is you have to build out the you almost have to build out the whole solution before you can go into one restaurant. But typically we build about 80 or we build or buy about 80 to 90 percent of a solution, put it in one restaurant, then five, then we try to get to 15 to 20. as I mentioned earlier, you don't really know the full solution until you're probably in a hundred locations or what you're gonna have to change about the solution you've proposed.
I've just learned that through experience. but we have a pretty standard model of you know, one, five, twenty, a hundred. there are some situations where you might achieve a much quicker win if the data's obvious. You know, that it's if if it if it cuts a dollar off every you know twenty dollar order, that's a little bit more obvious than.
Does a new point of sale work correctly in all scenarios? but typically we we follow the model of one, five, twenty, and a hundred.
Nice. You mentioned build versus buy and obviously that becomes much more pertinent at the scale that you're at now. What drives that decision f for you internally around which is the best route to take?
I think the number one priority is there are a lot of generic solutions that are commercial off the shelf, whether it's HR, payroll, financial accounting, data warehouse, etc. I would never build one of those. now back when I was with Domino's Pizza, we there weren't a lot of commercial off-the-shelf things. and
We wanted a competitive advantage. So we built almost everything, except credit card processing. The, you know, we built our own point of sale, we built our own middleware, we built our own data warehouse. Today, 15 years later, there's a lot more commercial off-the-shelf applications that exist for some of those pieces. But I would still, if I could d identify and define something that would give me a competitive advantage, I would build it and own it.
and prevent somebody else from replicating it, hopefully for about 24 to 36 months, because that's as long as it's going to live as a competitive advantage. but if you could if you can get 18 to 24 months out in front of your competitors, I think that's a great scenario to be in.
You mentioned pause there. Obviously for for pizza brands, they're notoriously complex for for pause operators to handle. is that something that you considered building at Blaze Pizza?
no, because most of the point of sale solutions, in my opinion today, handle pizzas pretty well. I think the particularly from a operational model within Blaze Pizza, it works really well, similar to what it did at Domino's. I think the complexity comes in for e commerce systems. making the guest experience for off premises easy is the piece.
But a point of sale, if a point of sale vendor focuses on providing point of sale functionality, I think they can accommodate any QSR, fine dining, et cetera. obviously there's doubles in the details in some of those, but I did not consider building our my own for Blaze Pizza. There are too many good point of sale solutions available to to do that myself.
you look at the makeup, your channel makeup today, it's about seventy thirty, if I'm correct in saying down into off premise. And we're seeing like that grow as a share of the wallet across Europe, across the US, kind of year over year. How has that changed your tech strategy fundamentally? And and how how does that change how you procure tech for the guest experience?
The issue is our guests are changing so fast. COVID changed in the United States. COVID changed how people order and what their expectation was around convenience. So in the United States, convenience is almost number one. If you can't give it to me where I want it, when I want it, how I want it, I'm going to go to somebody else that can. And so off-premises orders or
guest convenience orders, I think, are the number one thing that restaurants need to focus on because convenience is going to continue to grow. We're we're all getting busier in our lives and we want to do the things we want to do. And, you know, obviously we have to eat, but the dine-in experience and the traffic with dine in experience has been going down for the last 15 to 20 years because off premises is so easy. There's somebody that will give me what I want where I want it.
And so most of my innovation is around smoothing out the rough edges of the guest experience, whether it's in the restaurant or off premises. because I don't think it if you create something that conflicts with that guest experience, you're just shutting down a channel that I don't think any restaurant organization can afford to shut down.
No, I agree. I thought it was really interesting to see that you run what what is called a channel inclusive strategy. So you're working with twenty plus channels for off premise, I think. I know personally as an operator, I spent some time selling exclusively through one channel and up recently opened up to multiple channels and there's quite a bit of humming and howing over like commission structures, operational complexities to doing that and
It's usually like the like you mentioned, the guest experience in the middle of the PL that caused the friction in the decision. What drove you to make the decision to work with a channel inclusive strategy and the twenty plus channels? And how did you get to that being the correct model for you?
Well, I think it it comes down to the the guest chooses the channel. And so if you consciously say I'm not gonna leverage a channel, you are by definition limiting your potential traffic. Now, having said that, what you have to do with that partner is make sure it's profitable for both parties.
So I don't I don't go into a partner relationship where I try to it's only good for Blaze Pizza. It has to be good for both the the channel partner and Blaze franchisees. and so I I think it becomes a a relationship between Blaze Pizza and partners to to get a negotiated reasonable service fee associated with any channel, whether it's
DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Mavi. and so I sort of have a cap as to what I think is reasonable to pay to somebody to engage with their marketplace services or their platform services. And I'm I'm very transparent when I do contract negotiations. This is this is what we could bear so that I don't have to shut off a channel or consciously exclude a channel.
That might drive a lot of traffic.
Have you had scenarios where any of those vendors have come in and tried to undercut significantly to get exclusivity in the business?
I have had partners that come in and said, you know, this is our cost. I can't get any better than that. And I'm like, then I'm gonna have to not include that channel. But the newest ones that are coming up are voice AI ordering. The costs seem to incrementally increase above anything else. So we've gone through three voice AI vendors because they come in at a low cost and then
They're like, yeah, well, we forgot this part of it. So the costs are going up. And we we switch vendors. So it's, you know, it's sometimes a challenge when you have to do that. But if you go back to I want to make sure the guest experience is great and I want to manage the middle of the PL for my restaurant providers, that's what makes being a technology person in the restaurant industry so fun. I'm never at a law lack of work, whether it's changing partners or incorporating partners or whatever it happens to be.
He talked a bit about convenience being the modus operand for a consumer of stateside, speed of service being so key to blaze. is that K the key KPI that you look at as a technologist to ensure like success of of systems that are in place? and is there any other KPIs that you look at today to ensure that the systems that you've implemented are working successfully?
You know, the speed of service is an operational KPI that IT supports. There's a lot of other average ticket is another financial KPI that we look for so that as we implement new channels that allow orders to flow into the restaurant through technology, I know that if a technology we implement reduces the average ticket, nobody's gonna want to use it.
It may be great for the guests, but franchisees would shy away from it. So we do something called channel analytics. I support the finance team, the operations team, and the marketing team from a channel analytics perspective. And we look at obviously speed of service, we look at average ticket, we look at an average ticket is impacted by cross-sell and upsell. We also look at tips. You know, the tips are a great indicator of
guest satisfaction, whether it's off-premises or dine in. And so we look at all of those financial and operational things. We from a technology side, we also look at uptime, how how long is a restaurant online during business hours to accept off-premises orders? and, you know, process credit card orders. So we look at all the normal
uptime, you know, 99.99% uptime of the technology platforms. So we monitor all of those. you know, interestingly enough, a lot of internet service providers go offline periodically as they revamp their systems. You know, so something we've done is we've put in 5G backups in our locations so that we're available when somebody wants to order from us.
It I know that sounds doesn't everybody have a five G backup, but a lot of organizations don't do that because they they don't understand how to look at the metrics and then do a use case associated with proving the value of on on time availability.
Super interesting. one of the things like a lot of people we speak to or even work with struggle with is like when you look at the data, you can have so much data at your fingertips, but influencing the numbers can be challenging, particularly at scale. So you touched on some metrics there, like speed of service, the number of minutes from from order to to have it in front of the guest and
also average transaction value or or check size. If you're looking at the data across the estate and you can see the numbers are trending maybe in the wrong direction or a portion of franchisees are s underperforming the benchmark for the business, how do you work cross functionally with operations to try and influence those metrics? Do you have any kind of advice that you could give to people listening who are going through this today that transaction value on some channels is lower than others?
What could they do to potentially influence that, or if speed of service is higher in some restaurants than o than others? How have you worked to solve these problems before?
Years ago while I was with Domino's, we adopted and sorry I'm gonna use this term, the the concept of agile. Agile means a lot of different things to different people, but it's a philosophy around project management primarily, instead of just doing builds and releases every two to three weeks in sprint. so w one of the practices I adopted is I create every working day.
I have a maximum of a 15 minute call with a cross-functional team to and that's how we manage projects on a day-to-day basis. And so if if something's very curated and it's been in place for a long time, typically we don't talk about it unless we get an alert that something's going sideways and we talk about it on that call from the perspective of, hey, I just saw that average tickets dropped a dollar.
Across all of our restaurants, what's going on? And then I engage that cross-functional team to say we need to go figure out what's going on because if you were going to lose, you know, five percent ticket, something's going on, whether it's the e-commerce platform, whether it's wrong pricing within a restaurant, whatever it happens to be. So
My technique is I I have training, ops, marketing, and finance on a call for 15 minutes every working day. And I know that sounds pretty onerous. but what it does is it we don't let things drop through the cracks anymore. we used to you could go a week or two and not know something's going on, but sometimes our calls are one minute, sometimes they're fifteen minutes.
but generally if there's action that we have to take, we we have a follow up meeting once we have that discussion. So that's one of the things I do that I found to be very successful over the last ten to twelve years.
So it's like a first team stand up, daily stand up, but yeah, I like that. That's very clear.
If if you're familiar with Agile, there's a contact concept of every day you stand up and it particularly you're really looking for blocks. Is anybody blocked on something they're trying to get done today? And can I help? and that's how you build a cross functional, very powerful, resourceful team because other teams know you're willing to do whatever it takes to help accomplish what they're trying to do.
Alright, really nice. Shifting gears a little bit into AI, it's everywhere. Earlier on you talked talked about voice AI and moving through a number of vendors. can you talk to us a little bit about some of the system changes or implementations you've done at Blaze that are AI centric?
The primary one is we use a kitchen display system technology built by a company called FreshTech out of the Nashville area. I call it a KDS platform. You know, most people would say, yeah, we use kitchen display system. What what this company built is a an AI based backend that it it learns the manufacturing speed of each restaurant by day part.
And they built it over time. And why is that important? Because for off-premises guests, the number one issue off-premises orders create is something called an emotional roller coaster of I know I placed an order, but I don't know where it's at. And it goes back to the concept of pizza tracker from Domino's because my team helped build that out.
But it's the concept that I want to inform the guest with the most accurate manufacturing time that my my kitchen is currently going through because it varies by day of the week, by time of day, by volume of orders. And so that's the first AI item we did within Blaze is it knows how long it takes for a team to manufacture products at any particular point during the day.
And we update our off-premises guests with when their order will be ready in a more accurate way. We're also looking, we've looked at voice AI for phone orders. We're looking at some AI for lead generation to sell new restaurants. So there's various other AI things we're looking at. But the primary one we did was an operational look.
in manufacturing time.
If looked at like what you're most excited to pilot in the next twelve months, is there anything top of mind you're thinking of new technologies?
Well, I'm I was really excited about the Mavi integration, which comes, you know, out of the BMWs and Kias and because that's the potential of twenty million vehicles or twenty million new potential guest experiences, right? There's some other technologies I'm looking at. if if you think about it from a speed of service perspective, today we know when a guest starts their order. What I want to do is I want to
pull forward that timeline a little bit. I want to know when they walk in the restaurant. So we're I'm looking at some technologies to allow me to s to extend my speed of service calculation of I know when they entered the restaurant. Now I know when their order started. that would give me information like Starbucks has is what's the what's the length of their queue? how long are those people standing there before they turn around and go out the door.
To somebody else that's close. so I'm looking at some technologies to do that to tack onto the front end of my speed of service calculation.
That's like C C T V based or computer vision based? Yeah.
There's several there's several that'll leverage existing we we use so link cloud based systems. So there's several solutions that can leverage those cameras that are already inside restaurants in order to identify a guest and then track to the point of sale where their order starts.
So mentioned MAVI there, which is pretty exciting. it gives for those who don't know, it's obviously access to a whole new consumer base for a restaurant like yourselves. that enables people to place orders from their car. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what it means for your business and what it can do in terms of traffic.
Well, I mean you can order from your car today. You pick up your phone and call, right? But the whole concept is I want convenience. So if I can just press a button in in my vehicle and say I want to order Blaze Pizza and the car interacts with me without me having to hold a phone or anything like that, I think the potential is huge, particularly if we have an accurate quote time of when your order will be ready from our kitchen display system.
Because that that person's already in their vehicle. We already know we're all around I believe we're all around convenience. And so I think if we are consistent and accurate in when their food would be ready, I think more people would order from their car using a voice authored ordering system. So it's it's not so much AI built.
It's just integrated into our existing platforms and then into BMWs, Audis, and Kias. And they're expanding their their reach. So
an order or a speed of service or a prep time as close to zero coming near us soon, right? as close to the cook time. Place to order and match the cook time, it's gonna be the perfect level of convenience.
Yeah, the the the the interesting thing is for dine in guests, your speed should be eight to twelve minutes for fast casual. For off premises guests, it's plus or minus two minutes from when you say it's gonna be ready. So it's a totally different KPI from dine in to off premises around how you measure speed of service.
It's the inverse. If you go to do a pickup and you wait five minutes, you're furious that you're standing around. versus in a restaurant, yeah, it's about how how how quickly you can get it to the table, right? It's
Correct. Yeah, that it is a it's a different guest expectation. Now is is there something critical around the plus or minus two minutes or plus and minus five minutes? I've just found that the closer you get to being accurate, the more often a guest will return. There there is the philosophy that well they can go anywhere. And I agree with that. Like if you're really, really slow or not accurate, they're gonna go someplace else.
And that other place is just gonna be as slow and not accurate, hopefully. So if you can improve your accuracy, they will come back to you more often and be in the top of the consideration set.
Yeah, definitely. It's transparency and it's managing expectations. I think hospitality is all about managing expectations, right? Giving at every touch point. Super interesting stuff, right? I think there's a lot to learn there across the board and sounds like you guys are doing some really interesting things with technology and AI. We're gonna move into our next segment, which is called a quick turn. It's effectively a couple of quick fire or rapid fire questions. I'd like to get your take on. Are you okay with that? Yeah.
What is one system that you could not live without?
Point of sale because it's the heart of a restaurant and you have to capture your sales. So you can't live without that no matter what.
What's the most overrated piece of tech in hospitality today?
I would say digital menu boards. It's very difficult to provide an ROI on that.
What's the most important metric from a team or from a staffing perspective that you'd look at?
For Blaze Pizza, my most important from a team is do our franchise restaurants like us or do they complain about us? And that's a soft metric, if you will. But when our franchisees get on the phone with us, if they don't want to talk anything regarding IT, I'm very successful.
What is the biggest operational time waster that you see too often?
Telling a story three different ways to three different audiences because particularly in my role as a leader within the organization, some leaders aren't very focused and they tend to deal at a very, very thirty thousand foot level. And so what I waste a lot of time doing is explaining it to five levels of management, versus you know, so I found find myself to be a storyteller.
And so I have to tell the story three to four different ways.
Yeah, they say that as you scale through an organization, I was at an executive education course last summer in the States, and they said as you scale through it, your role becomes chief evangelist officer. If you're CTO, CPO, CMO, your role is just to recurringly shape and tell the vision until you feel blue in the face saying it. So you must be doing something right, right? What is one red flag that you see during one of your pilot?
Phases that sho tells you that a system is not fit for scale. So you mentioned you go from one to five to twenty to a hundred. what is the big red flag that shows you that this won't scale to the whole estate?
Finding new yellow flags. If every time you move from s you know, a one to a five to a fifteen or a twenty, if you continue to identify things you didn't know, it's not scalable yet. and so I mean it seems obvious to me now, but the number of things you learn new about what you're working with has to go down as you scale. Because if you're learning things still when you're at twenty or a hundred.
You ha you haven't managed it right yet.
Last one, what's the best decision that you've made operationally in blaze in the last year?
I would say scaling out some what we call skip the line options within Blazed Pizza. So our traditional model is a a Chipotle like model of where you walk in, you you walk the line and you you get your pizza, your order custom built. What I've found is that a lot of people that walk into a blazed pizza, they already know what they want because the food's good, but they don't want to walk the line anymore. They want to skip the line.
And so we've we're rolling out QR code ordering for those people that want to skip the line from tables. we're also in some locations looking at kiosks. I'm not a big fan of kiosks because of the cost and the ROI on that is typically three to five years versus other technologies, but I am a fan of QR code ordering properly implemented.
Very nice. Well, Chris, look, it was a fantastic to have you on the show today. I think it was a masterclass in how to run technology and how to work cross functionally at scale. You've worked with some of the most impressive brands in the States and really wish you and Blaze all the best for the rest of the year, the new openings and into next year. And just thanks for your time. What a banger of an episode with Chris, the first CTO on What's Cooking this season, and he delivered.
Chris has worked and built technology functions for some of the biggest brands Domino's, PF Changs, and now Blaze Pizza. But his mindset is like something out of the lean startup. Test, iterate, deploy. He talked about how he put systems into one location, graduated it to five, twenty, and then a hundred. Nothing would graduate unless he could ensure it was ready for scale and it was solving one of the two core problems for the business. One, drive guest traffic, two, increase margins in the middle of the PL.
That is all Chris cared about. It wasn't technology for technology's sake. It was technology to drive profitability. And if you took something from Chris's story, share it with a fellow operator. And if you're not already following us, now is the time. Until next time.
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