Five Points Hot Chicken

Highlights – TLDR

1. Unique Nashville Hot Chicken in Toronto: Five Points Hot Chicken, which opened in early 2018, introduced Nashville Hot Chicken to Toronto, partnering with local bars to create a distinctive dining experience.

2. Pandemic Shift to Delivery Focus: With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Five Points Hot Chicken pivoted from primarily a dine-in establishment to focusing on delivery, which became 95% of their revenue.

3. Challenges of Managing Multiple Delivery Platforms: Before Deliverect, managing orders from various platforms was chaotic and time-consuming, involving multiple tablets and manual processing.

4. Operational Transformation with Deliverect: Implementing Deliverect streamlined operations by routing all orders into the POS system, eliminating the need for multiple tablets and significantly reducing order management chaos.

5. Enhanced Menu Management and Customer Experience:Deliverect’s Menu Builder allowed for easier menu updates and consistent information across platforms, improving the online customer experience and freeing up time for management to focus on broader business operations.

After opening up in early 2018, Five Points Hot Chicken successfully introduced Toronto to its fiery Nashville hot chicken brand.

After a mind-blowing experience trying hot chicken for the first time in Nashville, co-founder and managing partner Jake Holton says he and his co-founders couldn’t resist the opportunity to bring this unique take on fried chicken to a virgin market. And using a bar as the vehicle made sense for the concept.

“We were the first place in Toronto that was doing Nashville hot chicken,” Jake reveals, “We opened up in a bar and we’ve now partnered with three different bars in Toronto.”

“The bar partnership model works really well for us,” he adds, “We find that having different perspectives on the food and the service just adds to the wealth of ideas that make our product better and ideally create a more unique restaurant experience.”

Delivery suddenly becomes 95% of the business

That unique customer experience was jeopardized as pandemic restrictions were imposed on the city in March 2020. Jake explains that although they had dabbled in delivery orders already, it wasn’t a focus for the brand. But suddenly, the team was forced into making it the core revenue driver for the business.

“At the beginning, I considered it a nice little bonus, but it was far from being a central part of our business model for the first year and a half,” Jake says.

“It also was a huge hassle – it was really annoying,” he adds, “The driver element is one thing. But the actual interaction with all the different platforms was a huge hassle, and there are certain functions like menu building that didn’t exist when we started.” 

In early 2020, the team started putting more effort into improving the online menus and images – and they were seeing results.

“It probably went from 10% of our revenue to 50% between January and March 17th, which was the Covid lockdown,” Jake reveals. “Then, after that happened, delivery exploded and is now at more like 95% of our revenue. It’s now our whole business model.”

Deliverect eliminates tablet madness

Once delivery became the primary focus, the challenge became handling the massive volume of orders. Jake recalls the struggles involved: 

“At the height of our online ordering volume in June 2020, before we had Deliverect, we had in-house orders coming in from Uber, Skip’, DoorDash, Ritual, and Foodora. We had all those tablets right in front of the line.”

In fact, it was so busy and chaotic, Jake was forced to work in the restaurant running the line. 

“It was insane. It was totally wild,” he says, adding, “You’d have up to five orders on each tablet, and there were around 10 tablets.”

After implementing Deliverect, all the orders from the delivery platforms were routed automatically into the POS system, completely eliminating the need for extra tablets and manual management of orders.

“I can’t overstate how unbelievably annoying it was,” Jake says, “Deliverect basically just took all of that away.”

Deliverect’s Menu Builder saves time & improves the online customer experience

Jake says he wasn’t able to stay on top of menu changes while running the line for 12 to 14 hours a day. He didn’t have the time to go into every platform and update each menu.

He explains the extent of the problem: “Having 10 logins is annoying to keep track of on its own. Then, each platform has a different process for making items. You have to learn 15 different ways to add an item, to add a modifier, add an image, add a price, or add a description.”

“It’s not just that you have to do it in 10 different places,’ he adds, “You have to do it in 10 different ways.”

Jake recalls that he couldn’t even edit the menu with some platforms. He had to send an email and sometimes wait a week or more for changes to be made. He says the menu might come back with errors, and he would have to start the whole process over.

Jake is sure that the lack of control over menu changes negatively impacted the customer experience. With the availability of dishes not up to date, along with incorrect prices and spelling errors, customers were not getting the quality of experience that the brand aspired to offer. 

Deliverect allowed the team to take control and make changes in one place. The updates are now pushed automatically to all the delivery platforms, improving consistency, reducing errors, and improving the customer experience. All while saving Jake and his team a whole lot of time and stress.

Deliverect enables Five Points’ managing partner to run the business rather than the line

Jake reveals the huge impact Deliverect had on operations: “Deliverect simplified our in-kitchen operations to such an extent that I personally was able to stop working in the kitchen and being the only person who could reasonably run the line.”

Instead of sweating through a 14-hour shift worrying about not keeping up with menu changes, he could step back and trust other staff members to run the line.

“Deliverect allowed me fully step out of the kitchen and focus on other areas of business operations. The whole rest of what it means to be a restaurant owner,” he says.

“Everything from payroll and ordering to content creation on social media,” Jake adds, “My whole role as a restaurant operator changed. Truly it made a huge difference.”