Aiming to nearly triple its restaurant count and reach $2 billion in revenue by 2030, TGI Fridays is leaning on a new mobile app to help achieve aggressive growth ambitions outlined in a strategic vision released at the start of the year.
With 354 total restaurants across the globe and 76 operating within the U.S., the June 22 app launch demonstrated TGI Fridays’ efforts to guide online orders to first-party channels by leaning into surprise-and-delight rewards, personalization and multi-channel communications.
For TGI Fridays, the ongoing digital transformation represents a growth lever for its “1-2-3 Strategic Vision,” which the brand unveiled in January. That vision includes hitting 1,000 units before the end of the decade. According to 2024 reporting from the Associated Press on the brand’s bankruptcy filing, TGI Friday’s peaked in the U.S. in 2008, with 601 domestic restaurants.
TGI Fridays announced the launch of its new app June 22.
, TGI Fridays’ director of global digital marketing, said the brand is taking a multi-phase approach to its digital-presence makeover.
“We begin by leveraging the first-party home data that we have to bring them offers and surprise-and-delight moments that are relevant to the way that they’re already interacting with the brand, and then use those data points to help us determine what other ways they might enjoy that we can also get them to continue to engage,” Houston said. “We leverage segmentation and the other data points that our tech stack allows us to have access to.”
Houston reported that the app launch generated promising consumer response, such as increased usage frequency and average spend among loyalty members.
“On the app specifically, with only about a month of marketing in place, we did see over 10,000 downloads,” Houston said. …“We’ve seen our app’s online-order-average spend increase compared to our normal web orders.”
The new app surged to 15 percent of first-party online orders within a month. Houston said the brand leaned into a distinctly emotive look and feel for the app, incentivizing direct orders with free delivery offers and similar efforts.
TGI Fridays is leveraging the app as a channel to share exclusive rewards with consumers, endeavoring to make the promotions “as personalized as possible.” Houston identified steering online orders to first-party channels as a primary focus of the new app.
Simplicity and personalization were points of emphasis during the development of TGI Fridays’ new app.
TGI Fridays declined to provide the percentage of off-prem sales previously directed through third-party channels.
“One of the things that was really important for us was a full integration of our online ordering system within the app that offered a cleaner, more simple and streamlined way for you to get in there and place your orders quickly and efficiently,” Houston said. “It’s fully integrated with our first-party online ordering partner, as well as our rewards platform. One of the big benefits, of course, of ordering through first-party (channels) is that you can apply all of your Fridays Rewards and loyalty points towards it.”
TGI Fridays migrated its loyalty program to the PAR Punchh customer engagement platform in early 2025, according to Houston, and the brand followed up by working with the New York-based foodservice technology provider on the recent app rollout.
Alongside the app launch, TGI Friday introduced SMS capabilities, added text messages to a communications strategy that includes email and in-app push notifications.
“The other benefit to driving people towards that first part of the ordering system is that we do get all that data, (which) allows us to be even more personalized and segmented in the way that we interact with them and present them with different offers,” Houston said. …“The goal is, of course, to move more and more in that direction of providing people with an excellent experience within our app and within our first-party systems, so that maybe they don’t feel the need to shop elsewhere.”
Houston said TGI Fridays will enter its first “loyalty phase” in the coming weeks, so app users will soon see changes in engagement approaches, such as new offers. Within the next couple of months, he added, those approaches will expand and grow more dynamic in nature.
