WOWorks—the Florida-based parent company of restaurant brands such as Saladworks, Frutta Bowls, Barberitos and Zoup Eatery—is nearing 240 total locations nationwide while leaning heavily into nontraditional units and savoring off-premises momentum.
CEO Kelly Roddy credited the company’s aggressive approach to online ordering, off-premises channels and experimentation with artificial intelligence as factors fueling WOWorks’ recent growth spurt.
Kelly Roddy is CEO of WOWorks, the parent company of restaurant brands such as Saladworks, Frutta Bowls, Barberitos and Zoup Eatery
“We have what probably is as aggressive a third-party and online ordering strategy as anybody else out there,” Roddy said, adding that roughly 49 percent to 52 percent of orders classify as off-prem, with catering or third-party leading the way depending on the brand.
WOWorks’ brands follow similar off-prem strategies, according to Roddy. Olo is the primary partner for online ordering; agreements and promotional strategies are in place with third-party delivery platforms; and digital marketing efforts have boosted catering programs across the portfolio.
While many similarly off-prem-friendly restaurant brands push first-party ordering channels in place of 3PDs to avoid high commission rates, Roddy said WOWorks does not emphasize guiding digital orders that way.
“It happens if it happens,” Roddy said of shifting online traffic to first-party channels. “… Uber Eats or DoorDash, they created their own marketplace. People made the choice to go there to shop around, and you’re fortunate enough to get picked. So, don’t mess around with it. … Sure, we’d love for them to come directly to our site, but at the end of the day, we won that customer on somebody else’s site. So, let’s not bite the hand that feeds us.”
Through September, WOWorks opened 23 new restaurants, with 15 more in development; co-branded stores account for nearly half of those openings. Successful pairings within the company’s portfolio include Saladworks and Frutta Bowls—bringing together a 40-year-old and decade-old brand.
“In particular, we’re adding Frutta Bowls to quite a few of the co-brands,” Roddy said, adding that the brand has a younger audience than Saladworks and brings in more digital orders. “There’s not a lot of prep. It’s basically fruits straight from the earth, right, so you’re just cutting up stuff and putting it into bowls.”
Roddy said having two brands share a space is a strategy the company has leaned into since 2021.
“The co-brand is something you know we learned a long time ago,” he said. “You can stick two brands into the same four walls and the same footprint, same rent, same manager salary and same team members—you really don’t have to hire new people. You can bring in a new demographic. You can bring in more checks and more dollars for the franchisees for basically the same cost structure.”
Roddy said kiosks are now in almost all co-branded locations featuring Frutta Bowls, as the technology allows staff to begin making orders all at once and improve operational efficiency. WOWorks uses Qu as its kiosk and point-of-sale partner, Restaurant365 for back-of-house operations and Olo throughout the tech stack.
“We probably have more access to more data than I’ve ever had, and I know so many of our reports are AI-generated now,” he said. “Claude is tied into everything we do, so we’re constantly querying and getting really good data that we didn’t used to get.”
Roddy said AI tools are already influencing decision-making processes within the company, with brand acquisition posing a major opportunity for the technology.
“You can ask Claude questions about brands you’re going to buy, but there’s a specific mergers and acquisitions plugin that you can do that will value the company for you, for example, and it can do it in three hours,” Roddy said. “[Our internal analysts] have still been doing it side by side and getting the same answers. It just takes three weeks versus three hours. So, at some point we’ll trust it more and more.”
Earlier this year, the technology suggested putting cold sandwiches back on one of the brand’s menus, roughly 18 months after they were removed because of perceived poor performance.
“We gave it all kinds of data, and the analysis came back that when you took cold sandwiches off the menu and just had hot sandwiches, you lost a cohort,” Roddy said. “You can see the sales go and sandwich [orders] dramatically drop, and that was not something we noticed because we had just added hot sandwiches.”
Sandwich sales rose again when the AI-suggested menu items returned, Roddy said. Another example Roddy used of AI influencing menu innovation is a push for $6.99 offerings that have already reached Saladworks and Frutta Bowls, with other brands developing products or in the menu engineering stage.
“We wouldn’t have believed it was going to work and be profitable,” Roddy said of the $6.99 offerings. “[AI] sort of predicted it, and then when it happened, the analysis was like ‘This is amazing.’”
WOWorks is testing another application of AI at about five Saladworks locations, Roddy said: Qu technology that uses cameras above the preparation line to detect ingredients added to an order. The goal is to automatically add extras, such as additional chicken, to the customer’s total.
“[AI] has been crucial recently and will be incredibly crucial going forward,” Roddy said. “It helps us make good decisions, and it tells us things that we would not have caught on our own, to be honest.”
