Customer Spotlight: Jack Stack Barbecue
In their fourth generation of Fiorella family ownership, Jack Stack Barbecue is the largest wood fire cookery in the United States and one of the most well-known brands coming out of Kansas City. For generations, the Fiorella family has honored and delivered on their commitment to preparing Kansas City barbecue “using the highest quality ingredients, with high standards and tradition while treating every guest like family.” But, unlike a few generations ago, this family business has been serving up its Kansas City barbecue for the rest of the nation to enjoy, competing against some of the most well-known global brands.
CHALLENGE:
COMPETING WITH GLOBAL BRANDS WHILE MAINTAINING THE HIGHEST QUALITY & SERVICE STANDARDS
Being a family-owned business and operating in a niche among massive global brands, Jack Stack Barbecue sought to become more sophisticated and intentional when responding to changes in guest needs. As was the case with the entire food service industry during the pandemic, Jack Stack Barbecue experienced an unprecedented shift in demand toward online ordering and carry-out. This uptick has resulted in lasting business changes and the need to understand and respond to these and future changes with timely, actionable insights.
In order to better meet this need, Jack Stack Barbecue launched a new online ordering platform, Olo, in 2021. With the implementation of the Olo platform, they now had access to data and insights they never had before. However, this new platform was designed for some of the biggest restaurant brands and was not necessarily ideal for their use case. As their businesses are unique, they wanted to use the data the way that best worked for them. Read on to learn how a family-run business uses data to compete at the national level. Warning, you may get a bit hungry.
INITIAL DATA PLAYS:
OPERATIONS, GUEST SERVICE & MARKETING
Jack Stack Barbecue’s IT organization partnered with Stacked Analytics’ Mark McKelvey and team to develop their initial AWS data warehouse instance and related operational dashboards. Their number one need was around forecasting for production, specifically around high volume, recurring occasions such as holidays or sporting events. This manual process took place the night before the significant volume events to determine the SKUs and related amounts to be prepared by each location. With the development of this production dashboard using the Olo data, their managers can now go in daily and easily run these reports on their own from their desktops or their phones. This has been game-changing as they know exactly what they need to produce each day. This is not only a time saver, but their ability to forecast brings more efficiency to their overall operations.
The news of the success of the production dashboard spread to the marketing team resulting in a request to better understand the impact of their special promotions. Stacked Analytics developed a menu item analysis dashboard that shows the results for each restaurant and special in terms of items sold, check averages, and total check values the very next day. Through the combined efforts of their marketing agency and analytics team, Jack Stack Barbecue can save both time and money as they can be more sophisticated in how they look at the performance of their specials.
Another area where Jack Stack Barbecue has leveraged its new data platform is through greater sophistication around its survey process and reporting. Before implementing Olo, they used a basic survey resulting in very little feedback. Using data from Olo and other webhooks piped into their AWS instance; Jack Stack can get more frequent and timely guest feedback to their managers. Managers and their leadership team can look at this daily, weekly, and trend over time to better serve and respond to their guests. Jack Stack Barbecue is even using the backend machine learning algorithms of ChatGPT to categorize survey responses looking for sentiment analysis from their written comments as they want to understand and address their guests' needs to provide the best service possible.
Kansas City-style barbecue is a method of hot smoking or grilling a variety of meats seasoned with a dry rub and then finished with a tomato-based barbecue sauce. Just as the dry rub is the initial part of the KC barbecue process, so are these initial data plays at Jack Stack, just a flavor of what is to come.
NEXT UP:
IMPROVING THEIR ABILITY TO SERVE THEIR GUESTS
As burnt ends, those charred, crispy morsels sliced off the fatty ends of barbecue beef brisket are a quintessential part of KC barbecue, the quintessential heart of Fiorella’s family business is their guests.
On deck and in the discovery phase for the data team at Jack Stack Barbecue will be their guest data platform, a 360-degree guest view. Jack Stack Barbecue has a diverse line of businesses in addition to the six restaurants offering sit-down and carry-out. They also have a catering business that offers full service and dropoff, an event venue, a USDA food manufacturing plant, and a nationwide shipping business.
Jack Stack Barbecue wants a unified, sophisticated view and understanding of its guests across all of its channels and offerings, which operate on disparate platforms. How often do they dine in a restaurant? Place orders for pick up? Have their business meetings catered? Use the event venue? Send gift cards to their associates on the east coast? By having a better understanding of their guests, they will be able to optimize menu items and develop more tailored marketing and promotions based on individual guest preferences. Jack Stack Barbecue wants to shift performance where necessary to meet their guests’ needs better; a guest data platform will enable them to do just that.
FUTURE VISION:
OPTIMIZING SERVICE, QUALITY, & OPERATIONS
Blue smoke refers to that magical moment when the smoke coming off the flame is lightly tinged blue, the optimal time for throwing meat onto the smoker. Just as they know the optimal time for their meat, Jack Stack Barbecue wants to run optimally across all their business units and functions. They are building a solid foundation by starting out with impactful wins on their data journey. As the organization and leadership team continues to adopt this data-driven approach while working on new software across the other business units, they will naturally expand their data access and insights to other operational areas.
Jack Stack Barbecue will have the chops to develop a comprehensive, operational look across all of the Jack Stack Barbecue business units and how they can be run more efficiently, not just the restaurants. For example, they are looking at ways to use this data platform to help control food costs to help keep menu prices as competitive as possible. Using data in their catering operation to automate the routing of deliveries for the optimal routes will reduce delivery time, wear and tear on vehicles, fuel usage, and the impact on the environment. In addition, it will reduce the manual labor of route scheduling while increasing capacity to take on more deliveries. They can create KPI dashboards to more easily measure store performance and forward-looking metrics to help forecast sales and labor requirements, as accurate forecasting of sales is imperative to scheduling the optimal amount of labor to meet guest needs which makes or breaks their ability to run a healthy business.
By partnering with Stacked Analytics, Jack Stack Barbecue has access to a team of experts, including data engineers, data analysts, BI developers, data scientists, and data strategists, depending upon their specific needs as they arise throughout their data journey. Jack Stack Barbecue can access all of these functional areas without having all of these individual capabilities on their payroll. It allows them the flexibility to be efficient in their internal development as their in-house technical skills develop over time. Stacked Analytics role will be as a partner to help them move forward as they develop the full capability of their own.
Interested in learning more about how you can partner with Stacked Analytics to build your own data warehouse and operations dashboards? Reach out; we’d love to hear from you.
