World Economic Forum
Case studyFood & Beverage / Hospitality
Nando's
Co-creating a mobile experience that became the beating heart of Nando’s
Nando’s is one of the most loved brands on the British high street, with more than 460 restaurants in the UK, revenue of £1.48bn in the year to February 2025. Behind the counters are around 17,500 Nandocas, two thirds of them under 35, more than half under 25, almost none of them ever at a desk.
The problem
Nando’s gave Made by Many a brief few companies would have the nerve to write: make us an employee experience that creates lasting happiness. That meant looking for pain points across the whole of working life: day to day operations in the restaurants, learning and development, communications and the culture of the company. Off-the-shelf workplace tools had been tried and had failed to stick, because nothing generic felt enough like Nando’s. We defined, designed and built the Nandoca mobile app, an experience co-created with the people who use it to organise how ‘stuff gets done’ at Britain’s favourite chicken restaurant.
The sharpest of those pain points was the rota: a daily problem, and therefore a great place to start. The rota was printed on paper and pinned to the staff room wall. Nandocas photographed it on their phones, and the moment a manager changed a shift the photo was wrong, and people missed shifts. Swaps and updates moved to unofficial WhatsApp and Facebook groups, where the messages that mattered drowned in the noise and store information sat on platforms Nando’s did not control. Onboarding, learning and company news were scattered the same way, across noticeboards and systems with logins. For people who ran the rest of their lives on their phones, work ran on paper and passwords.
What we did
A small cross-functional Made by Many team looked at the daily Nandoca context, operations and technology. We reported directly into the Exec Team and worked closely with Nando’s CTO and People Director. We worked on-site. The research happened in restaurants, not the studio, and we sketched and tested with Nandocas during working shifts. A working prototype was in the hands of staff in two restaurants within six weeks, around 150 restaurants helped shape the app as it grew, and it was live across every restaurant in the UK and Ireland in under twelve months.
We launched the app around the live rota, the one thing every Nandoca needs daily, with managers editing it on the app as things change. Once that daily habit was established, everything else joined it: news from across the business, how-to videos, careers and learning, incentives, feedback, and campaigns like Nando’s Fighting Malaria. We also developed the multi-year people experience vision Nando’s used to guide the procurement of its new back-end systems, and helped the CTO recruit and build the in-house digital product team that ran the platform after we left.
The result
87% of the UK’s 17,595 Nandocas used the app, and 77% used it every week. Staff turnover fell by 4%, and Nando’s saved £500,000 a year in onboarding costs.
“We weren’t very confident making products for our employees. Made by Many gave us the confidence to try things out and learn. We found a partner who could think really big and understand the importance of our culture.”
