Tech supplier Chowly was founded as a third-party order aggregator to help independent restaurants escape “tablet hell.” Over the past couple of years, it has become far more than that, branching into online ordering, digital marketing and more.
The Chicago-based company has now stitched together its various products into a single system, which it calls the Chowly Platform. Launched Monday, the platform aims to give small restaurants all the tools they need to run their off-premise business.
“Everything's done in one place, managed in one place,” Chowly co-founder and CEO Sterling Douglass said in an interview. “And then we measure everything for them, so we can tell them exactly where their orders are coming from.”
The platform includes online ordering, a website and mobile app builder, third-party order integration and dynamic pricing for third-party marketplaces, as well as email marketing, paid ads and a Google Business profile integration.
These tools were previously offered a la carte but will now be sold as a bundle. That’s because Chowly believes they function better as one.
Digital marketing, for instance, “just doesn’t work as well if it's not tied in with the rest of the ecosystem,” Douglass said. When used in tandem with online ordering, “now we can actually measure it for you and tell you whether it's working or not.
“It’s a very classic [example of] ‘The whole is worth more than the sum of its parts,’” he said.
Douglass also noted that an all-in-one system like Chowly’s will cost less than it would to cobble together a similar system from different vendors.
The move is part of a larger shift among restaurant tech suppliers from offering point solutions to fully integrated systems. It’s being driven in part by restaurants’ desire to simplify their tech stacks, which have become larger and more complex since the pandemic.
“My belief is that the restaurant industry is kind of converging on three [technology] categories: Your off-premise, your POS and your back-of-house,” Douglass said. He cited the example of a Chowly customer that is operating with just three pieces of software.
Chowly itself cut about a third of its internal vendors last year, Douglass added.
“When the market gets really tough and you're facing challenges, you have to simplify the business, because you just create more problems for yourself that you can't afford,” he said.
Chowly was founded in 2015 and works with more than 17,000 restaurants nationwide.
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a Restaurant Business member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.