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Case studyFood & Beverage / Hospitality

Cava

Creating a foundation for scale with CAVA, American fast casual’s standout success story

In under a decade CAVA has gone from a handful of assembly-line restaurants around Washington DC to 476 sites, a New York Stock Exchange listing and the strongest traffic growth in American fast casual. Revenue in the most recent quarter was $365m, up 31% on the year, digital orders bring in 39% of it, and the company has told investors to expect at least 1,000 restaurants by 2032.

  • 400%

    rise in online orders per store

  • 4x

    larger orders from group ordering

  • 4.9

    rating for the apps on the App Store

The problem

Made by Many was hired in early 2016, when CAVA had four restaurants and a growth plan out of all proportion to its size. The brief was a best in class ordering and pick-up experience, and we defined, designed and built it: the ordering, pick-up and loyalty platform CAVA scaled on, across web, iOS and Android.

CAVA’s appeal is that you build your own bowl, which means 59 million possible combinations, and people split portions and order for a table as well. Choice on that scale is hard to make quick. And the busiest hour is lunch, when a kitchen can only make so many bowls, however many orders the internet sends it. An ordering platform that ignored either would have made the restaurants worse.

What we did

We deployed a cross-functional team, bringing business strategy, customer and operations insight, design and software engineering together. The team worked directly with CAVA’s CEO, CTO and COO from first research to working software in ten weeks. Prototypes and code builds went into the restaurants and were tested with customers and store teams during live lunch rushes, and what came back shaped the product.

The platform was built around the kitchen rather than the app. Customers choose a pick-up slot and the system holds it while they pay. It throttles the orders going to any one store, offers a quieter restaurant within walking distance when one is full, and delivers each order to the kitchen fifteen minutes before pick-up, which is how long a bowl takes. Web in React, iOS and Android in React Native, with checkout and payment integrated directly into the point of sale.

The result

Online orders per store rose 400%. Group ordering produced orders four times larger. The apps held a 4.9 rating on the App Store, and the platform stayed in service for years, built on rather than replaced. CAVA went from four restaurants to ninety-four in the four years that followed.

“The app was able to get us from 12 to 94 stores, which is remarkable. It was massive in our scaling.”

Josh Patchusthen Director of Technology, CAVA

CAVA bowls, a pita wrap, a cup of soup, pita chips and drinks seen from above on a dark table
A customer with a CAVA bowl and drink talking with a man at a restaurant table, laptops open beside them, against a white brick wall
A man talking with a CAVA team member in a cap and a CAVA Washington, DC T-shirt behind a restaurant counter
A member of CAVA’s leadership gesturing from an armchair against a brick wall as an interviewer with a laptop listens
A sketch of a hand holding a phone of reward badges, such as Order 5 bowls and Refer a friend, between cards for redeeming a Premium toppings badge
The CAVA ordering website, with a banner announcing the winter menu above a Build a meal section of bowls and a salad at $9.87 each
Six App Store screens for the CAVA app on mustard yellow: customising a meal, filtering the menu by dietary preference, Apple Pay, CAVA Rewards and ordering ahead for pick-up or delivery
A woman in a patterned dress biting into a CAVA wrap against a brick wall

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