Floridino's Pizza & Pasta x Otter

1 General Manager. 1 Location. $1,400 increase in monthly sales. 

Overview

Floridino’s Pizza & Pasta in Chandler, Arizona prides itself on being a local, family-owned, community-driven restaurant
.

General Manager, Jason Stephens, loves that Floridino’s is an independent restaurant. And he loves what he does because he loves his team,” From the dishwashers, to the prep cooks, to the kitchen staff, to the servers, we’re like a little family of our own.” Jason and the team at Flordino’s have created a welcoming environment centered on hospitality, “we want our customers to feel relaxed, like they’re at home. We want everyone to be able to be their full selves in our restaurant.”

While Jason describes Floridino’s as, “nothing fancy: just simple, delicious, home cooked Italian food” the Arizona-based restaurant is well known for something that is anything but ordinary.

The food network featured, locally loved, infamous, pizza muffin. What used to be a one-line item on the back of Floridino’s has quickly become what the home cooked Italian restaurant is famous for.

“Our pizza muffin looks like a mini cinnamon roll or pinwheel, and really, it’s essentially a cinnamon roll made with all your classic pizza ingredients. We roll it up, cut it, it goes through the oven, and when it comes out you have a dippable mini-pizza that you can eat in two or three bites.”

Since being featured in Food Network Magazine, Floridino’s has applied on Goldbelly to be able to ship the beloved pizza muffin nationally, as well as taken the pizza muffin on tour to various music festivals through their food truck. 

The situation

Being a restaurant that prides itself on creating a family-like environment, transitioning to delivery was anything but easy. “We wanted to make sure we were still able to serve our customers the best possible experience even when they weren’t able to dine-in.”

And being a local favorite, Floridino’s saw a major uptick in delivery orders at the onset of the pandemic. “From Friday through Sunday, we do well over 100 delivery orders a day. On weekdays, we see between 60-80 orders daily, and that’s only inclusive of third-party delivery.”

While Jason and the Flordino’s team were happy to be able to continue providing their customers with the food they love, managing delivery operations was getting out of hand.

“It was complete chaos. A lot of restaurants refer to what we were experiencing as ‘tablet hell.’ And that’s what it was. We had five tablets dining at one time, constant sounds and notifications. Then we integrated with Toast and our direct-to-consumer delivery began automatically flowing into our POS which removed one tablet, but the team was still struggling to keep up with four while doing everything else. We were missing orders, making errors, and duplicating orders accidentally. We had to constantly cross-reference the size of the check with our point-of-sale system to make sure we got everything right which wasted a lot of time. It was a mess.”

Solution

Jason and the team at Flordino’s heard about Otter through Toast – their point-of-sale system. “I learned what delivery aggregators were at the Pizza Expo a few years ago, so I knew it could be done. But I just hadn’t found the right partner. When we started using Toast for our point-of-sale, we learned that Toast and Otter integrated and I just knew it was the right thing to do.” 

“Getting started with Otter was simple. The team sent over a step-by-step process that we followed, then we integrated Otter with Toast, optimized our menu for delivery, connected our delivery platforms, and got rid of three out of our four tablets.”

“Otter’s had a positive impact on our entire staff. From a morale level, it’s way more relaxed out on the floor than it was before. We don’t have to have someone stationed in one spot keeping tabs on all of the tablets. Everything auto-accepts, closes, goes straight to the printer and straight to the POS. It’s reduced stress for our team. We love that we can pause all of our delivery platforms with the click of a button during the Friday night rush or when we have a huge catering order come in.”

Outside of increasing efficiency and decreasing stress, partnering with Otter has also helped decrease missed and duplicate orders, and make fewer errors overall. “We love the auto-accept feature. It protects us from missing an order because someone was too busy to run over to the tablet and push ‘accept.’”

“It’s just seamless. With Otter, it almost feels like we’re living ‘pre-tablet life’ – it’s great.”

Results

“We talk about it all the time. We have no idea how we did delivery without Otter. It’s just a no brainer.”

Using Otter’s Order Manager, Floridino’s PIzza & Pasta has increased monthly sales by $1,400. Other results include:

• 2x net margin ROI
• 88% first month uptime availability
• 99% fulfillment rate

‍

Start succeeding in delivery with Otter today