For a brand that is heavily off-premises-focused, Scooter’s Coffee proved to be a relatively late adopter of third-party delivery, piloting its first 3PD delivery channel in late May and early June.
The Nebraska-based, drive-thru-centric chain with more than 900 cafes initially launched delivery exclusively through DoorDash using a previous integration partner. However, complications quickly emerged, causing the brand to consider whether the channel was a good fit after all.
Tyler Marpes is Scooter’s vice president of technology.
“Scooter’s is 28 years old and had never had third-party delivery, and so we took a creative swing,” Tyler Marpes, Scooter’s vice president of technology, said. “We said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this in ’26,’ and we were planning to use the incumbent’s integration service. So we had launched three pilot stores towards the end of May, early part of June, and [saw] about a 25 percent order failure rate—modifiers were unmapping mysteriously [and] the integration was failing.”
Marpes said the tech issues left three franchisees frustrated because the channel was failing despite its potential to generate incremental sales and attract new guests.
“The biggest thing for us in any technology is that it’s scalable and it’s reliable, and it’s invisible to the operators,” Marpes said. “Tech needs to be an invisible enabler to ops and marketing, and the previous integration that we were using was very visible. It was contentious, and it caused some doubt in the home office. Like, maybe this isn’t going to be for us. We can’t have our operators, our franchisees, in this support modality. I certainly can’t have my team triaging every single 3PD order that comes in at three stores, let alone 900 stores.”
So, brand leaders reached out to restaurant technology platform Olo and promptly requested an unusually quick turnaround to relaunch 3PD services through Olo Rails, a software service that connects 3PD platforms with point-of-sale systems.
“We had some commitments to our partners at DoorDash. We had committed dates to our franchisees of when we needed to do this, and so we hopped on the phone with Olo, and their team was fantastic,” Marpes said. “We were in the room and set some aggressive timelines. I think they were in Omaha on a Tuesday. Jo [Lambert, Olo’s chief operating officer] and I chatted on a Thursday, and I was like, ‘Look, we kind of need this to be in the lab for quality assurance by Monday morning.’”
While Marpes ultimately extended that deadline by one day, Olo still prepared Scooter’s integration with Rails over that weekend, deploying the service to the same three franchisees from the initial pilot just a week after pursuing the partnership.
“This was definitely the most aggressive one we’ve had,” Lambert said of the Rails integration.
Jo Lambert is Olo’s chief operating officer.
Despite the aggressive timeline, the Rails integration proved effective, with no cancellations, Marpes said. Within 60 days, he added, 700 Scooter’s locations launched 3PD channels through Olo.
“We had confidence, the Olo team had confidence, and that confidence was applied to our franchisees, and that’s how we were able to onboard two-thirds of the system in a non-mandate environment,” Marpes said. “DoorDash was totally optional, and when you have three franchisees that had an amazing experience, they go and tell their peers this works.”
Scooter’s relatively late entrance to 3PD demonstrated the brand’s determination to keep guest experience consistent across ordering channels. To help drinks reach guests at their intended temperatures, baristas prepare beverages between Dashers checking in at the speaker post and arriving at the drive-thru window.
With 3PD expanding across the system, Scooter’s returned to Olo to rebuild the brand’s digital ordering infrastructure through its first-party app. While the chain established a longer-term deadline this time around, Marpes said the project had a 90-day timeline that concluded in September.
“Everything works in the lab. Put it in the hands of 19,000 baristas, and you’re going to find out really quick if you built the right thing,” Marpes said.
Lambert said the app migration was challenging given the ambitious timeline, but it came with tremendous upside.
“It’s a very complex menu,” Lambert said, “over 260 menu items, very intricate modifiers and it’s drive-thru oriented, so definitely a lot of complexity, and obviously huge scale … millions and millions of orders that were going to come on straight away, but that’s what it’s all for.”
The Friday before it went live for Scooter’s app users, Marpes said he had enough confidence in the system to deploy it to 50 percent of Android users at 3 p.m. before the weekend—ignoring the common practice of avoiding Friday afternoon technology deployments. Still, the weekend brought only one failure through the channel, which he attributed to a user error.
“[On September 15] every single Scooter’s Coffee loyal guest mobile app user was transacting as they normally would, with no knowledge really that a change had even happened,” Marpes said. “It was seamless to them, and the most important thing outside of it being seamless to guests, it was seamless to our franchisees.”
With Scooter’s online ordering infrastructure and 3PD services gaining momentum following the Olo partnership, Marpes said the brand is now focusing on AI-driven personalization for next year.
“Bells and whistles without stability, scalability and reliability mean nothing,” Marpes said. “Now that we have a solid foundation and a great relationship with the Olo team, we’re able to start having some of those roadmap conversations that continue to push the Scooter’s Coffee mobile app and loyalty experience into the leading-edge category where it’s been over the last three years.”
