Britney Ziegler had a ghost kitchen ready to go. She had a location picked out in Larkspur, Calif. She had a chef. She was not far away from opening the doors. Then she changed her mind.
Britney Ziegler, founder of Panso
“It was when I got to the tech stack,” she said in an interview. “I was blown away that I needed seven different platforms to manage the guest experience and none of them talked to each other.”
That stopped her cold. She couldn’t stop thinking about how thorny of a problem this was. So she pivoted. The ghost kitchen idea became a ghost. And Panso, which is taken from the word pansophy and means universal wisdom, was born.
“I decided to build a system that would address the data fragmentation, the tech stack, and the cost structure,” she said. “I wanted to offer a single platform to streamline operations and unify customer data.”
Ziegler has seen it all in the industry. She started as a teenage server at Planet Pizza in the Hudson Valley, where she grew up. She waitressed through college. And she rose to become a restaurant executive helping launch 10 concepts and working with celebrity chefs David Burke and Carla Hall.
She built Panso as a hospitality management system and CRM, with operators like Andrea Boyd of Wayfare Tavern in mind.
Wayfare Tavern, an iconic establishment in San Francisco, has served as Panso’s beta partner. Ziegler and Boyd, the restaurant’s director of sales and events, worked for a year in advance of Panso’s launch in January.
Andrea Boyd, sales and events director at Wayfare Tavern
“What we had before was unmanageable,” Boyd said. “We’re on all the third-party delivery marketplaces, we run our website, we do email marketing, it’s a lot of different platforms. I’d be at home and somebody would ask me, Can you log into DoorDash and turn off the orders? It’s a lot to manage. We don’t have time to think about all the different logins and where the data goes.”
Perhaps bigger brands are comfortable with all the orchestration. They have copious staff to manage the minutiae. But smaller brands often have just one person wearing 50 hats.
Boyd is quick to point out that she doesn’t have issues with the customer service provided by any specific platform. She has been well counseled on the extensive capabilities. But it’s too much.
“There’s a lot of stuff on the back end that we just don’t need,” she said. “We were looking at 15 different subscriptions for 15 different companies. Now I just log into Panso. It’s our hub for everything.”
She’s not the only one at Wayfare Tavern feeling the ease of use. The chef can log in and review reservations. The accountant can run a customized report.
“We used to reconcile financials from all these different companies, with each platform using a different payment processor,” she said. “Our poor accountant was like, What program is this coming from? Why did we get $5,000 yesterday from this one program and $2,000 the day before? It was maddening.”
Boyd emphasizes the value in being able to look at info and get what you need from it quickly, and in a 360-degree way.
“You’re not getting that kind of comprehensive view of your guest with any other platform,” she said. “We can review data from across sales channels. If a customer is booked through an event, we can still see other data from previous visits, like if she comes in every Tuesday with her family and gets the fried chicken. I have that information accessible to me.”
Not only can operators see that data, it’s their data. They own it. Ziegler insists on it.
“When we onboard a client, all of its data is stored within its own account,” she said. “We’re not sharing customer data. We’re not a marketplace. The management of that guest experience is owned by the restaurant.”
She’s come a long way from hustling pizzas to customers in high school..
“My mom told me when I was little that I was going to be a chef and work in the restaurant industry,” she said. “I would tell her absolutely not. And while I’m not a chef, I do love restaurants. I want them to succeed. This is where I’m supposed to be.”
