Chad Franzen 11:20
So if you don’t mind, just tell me kind of like, just give me a brief description of what like, you know, Love Bowls is?
Markus Pineyro 11:31
Yeah, Love Bowls sorry, lifestyle bowl concept. So, you know, it’s, you know, a little bit of Mediterranean, a little bit of Latin-infused flavors, more like global flavors, but you know, very, like lifestyle driven, you know, so anything from like a shawarma bowl to a buffalo chicken bowl. So very, very diverse.
Chad Franzen 11:49
And Clucky’s? I’m guessing the name kind of speaks for itself.
Markus Pineyro 11:52
Yeah, that’s our chicken wing house. So you know, wings and fried chicken. So, you know, we got some great fun flavors for our wings. And then we also do tenders and chicken sandwiches.
Chad Franzen 12:04
What about Hot Lips?
Markus Pineyro 12:06
Hot Lips are Asian concept in probably one of our most popular one. So anything from that Thai to Drunken Noodles. We have a hot chicken, like a bank bank, chicken. And I mean hot lips is a good example of like some of the things that we do that gives us a like, because we have such a diverse menu, you know, we’re able to cross utilize some of our ingredients. So we have a Barbara ca egg roll. So we use a barbacoa from Urban Taco to make an egg roll. So that’s something fun that we created in house.
Chad Franzen 12:35
Very nice. I’m guessing I know what Bowlrito is. But can you tell me?
Markus Pineyro 12:39
Yeah, so Bowlrito is, you know, it’s a little bit. It’s like a sister brand to Urban Taco. So imagine Urban Taco but in a burrito.
Chad Franzen 12:45
Sure. So that’s why I kind of figured that. So and then Savage Rabbit would be the last one that I’ll ask you about.
Markus Pineyro 12:54
Yeah, that’s like, big salads, you know, we’re getting, we’re doing salads right now, eventually we’ll do wraps. But, you know, they’re very fun and creative salads that, you know, have a little bit of a savage attitude.
Chad Franzen 13:10
Yeah, very nice. So a very hungry rabbit would attack those things. Yeah. Hey, you mentioned that a lot of those brands were founded upon kinda like feedback from customers. How important is customer feedback to oomi?
Markus Pineyro 13:24
I think it’s probably the top three most important things for oomi. I think that it should be for any restaurant operator if there’s nothing, there’s no more valuable data than actually listening to your customers and getting their feedback. So we really, really focus on getting as much feedback from our customers at any point of their, you know, their life cycle through us. So, you know, whether it’s them picking up Urban Taco, you know, picking up their food and just asking them questions. Hey, how are you doing? How did you hear about us? Hey, like, how was your dish yesterday, I noticed, you know, we can look up at a customer and say, hey, this person ordered one of our new balls last week, let’s ask him what they thought about it. And that’s just like, at a personal level, but then we also, you know, have different levels levers in the back that we can pull with, you know, follow up questions, you know, because every transaction that’s done through our platform, you know, we we, we have the data, we have either an email or phone number. So based on that, you know, we’re able to retarget the customer and ask them directly for their feedback. So, about an hour after the order is picked up, we send them a follow up text question and ask them for feedback. So, you know, it could be you know, good feedback, and we, from there, we funnel them to maybe a Google review, or maybe some other perks, if it’s negative feedback, which is to me the most important one, we you know, I come in and troubleshoot it myself and figure out a way to one figure out what happened, you know, who was on the shift that they you know, what items they ordered, and then what can we do to fix it internally, but also how do we turn around this customer to make them happy? And that’s where you know we are different. Well said, we can invite him back in, you know, turn the customer around and avoid a negative review.
Chad Franzen 15:23
How did customer feedback then lead to you know, Love Bowls? Clucky’s? Hot Lips?
Markus Pineyro 15:28
Yeah, so we did that through a series of polls and asking customers like, hey, like, if we were to come up with a new concept, like what would be your top concepts that you would recommend? We add. And then we also look at what people are ordering the mouse. So we realized that our demographic and our customers really like spicy and really like, like, like rich food. So we then created our cookies concept thinking with that in mind, you know, so very bold sauces for our wings for our tenders, like very, like, strong bold flavors. And then we also had a cohort of customers that were looking for something that, you know, isn’t necessarily Mexican isn’t necessarily ethnic or spicy, and, you know, more of an everyday lifestyle type brand. And that’s how we say it. Okay, well, let’s, let’s think about milder flavors. Maybe not, you know, when you were not. So it’s like, you have two different different cohorts, and you got to kind of in the same at the same time, like the same person that you know, we study our customers behavior. So, you know, we can see when customers on Monday and Tuesday, they like to order salads, they like to order bowls, they like to kind of stay healthy recovered from the weekend. By Thursday, they’re ordering tacos. And then by Saturday and Sunday, they’re, you know, heavy on the wings, chicken sandwich tenders, peptide, Drunken Noodles. So because of that, and like our customer, you know, we have a flavor for every occasion. So you know, the same customer that likes Love Bowls on a Monday or Tuesday, there might like, you know, wings on a Sunday night or Sunday evening or Sunday morning. So that’s another reason why our customers can keep coming back to us because it’s not the same dish over and over like you can, you can pick a restaurant that you like, and you know, you probably go once a week, you know, it’s hard to start going to three times a week with us because we have different flavor profiles in different locations, different different menus, were able to cater to the same customer customer multiple times a week,
Chad Franzen 17:31
you literally just described my weekly eating habits. Is operating a digital restaurant vastly different from running a brick and mortar restaurant?
Markus Pineyro 17:27
I would say yes, there’s definitely, there’s a lot of similarities like our kitchen or four walls in the kitchen, it’s very, very similar. Actually, I like to think about it more like a traditional restaurant, because we want to put out good quality food, you know, we have experienced cooks, we have full recipes. You know, we don’t, we don’t, you know, everything is made in house from scratch. And our sauces are marinates. So it’s operating like a traditional restaurant. But then past the expo, that’s when things change up a little bit. You know, we don’t have waiters, we don’t have front of house staff. We don’t have busboys. So we don’t have to do you know, we also don’t have like our ticket times a little bit different, you know, we, we base our ticket time based on where the drivers are, you know, when they’re picking up the food. And that’s when we start making food, it’s based on our driver demand in our drivers, I guess, our driver supply and where the drivers are at a time. So we don’t want to make a prepare a bag, a ticket when our driver is 20 minutes away, we want to start making that food when our driver is about five to seven minutes away. And that’s when we go that’s about how long it takes to make a dish. So that’s where, you know, they’re, you know, we’re using and power delivery to help us with that, you know, it’s you know, their system is based on machine learning. And it helps you optimize when to make a dish based on where your drivers are. So when a customer gets our food, that food literally got made about eight minutes ago, it got made, the driver picked it up delivered to your house. So there’s not sitting around an expo counter is not going around the city taking a tour, while you know they’re delivering other restaurant food. It’s going from our kitchen straight to the drivers hand and then straight to your door. So that experience is it’s hard to be you know, so that’s where our best in class delivery experience comes into play.
Chad Franzen 19:28
What about — do you guys hire your own drivers? Like, you know, if it was a brick and mortar, you’d hire the service staff obviously. What about this case?
Markus Pineyro 19:36
Yeah, so we have our pool rolling drivers, and that’s who we deliver our food through? Correct.
Chad Franzen 19:44
What about marketing? Is that a lot different from brick and mortar compared to, you know, these kind of Digital Kitchen environment?
Markus Pineyro 19:51
Yeah, that’s it. I think it’s very correlated to being a digital footfall. So digital marketing for us is essential. We rely on, you know, our social network channels. You know, that’s to me, it’s like we’re, I guess we’re different is, you know, we, the way that we market our food is we try to create content that has a certain viral component to it. And we want, you know, our network of, you know, whether it’s influencers or customers, like we want our food to live on the internet. So when we think of making food, you know, we think about how it’s going to photograph, we think about how it’s going to travel, how we package it. So when the customer receives a food, it’s kind of like the apple box experience, like, when you buy an Apple product, and you open the case, it’s a really nice box, it just feels like you’re about to like, it feels like good quality. So our food has a similar component to where, you know, we want people to look at our food tastes great, but we also want people to spread the word, post our food. So we, you know, our social, and our online channels are very important. And I find them to be more relevant and more important than traditional brick and mortar, where it’s, you’re not in a traditional brick and mortar, you’re selling an experience with food, you know, with us, you know, the experience comes in the bag. And, and that’s, that’s the entire experience. So, one, the food has to shine, and it has to be, like, a much better than a traditional restaurant delivering food. And then once we receive the food, like we want that food to shine, and really come through.
Chad Franzen 21:36
Speaking of traditional, you know, I barely am aware of ghost kitchens, but do you view oomi as a traditional ghost kitchen?
Markus Pineyro 21:44
Absolutely not. So I think so we were delivery kitchen, you know, we’re forward facing, you know, our brand is very important to us, it’s an open kitchen, we’re on almost a main and Main Street. So there’s really not a lot of mystery to it or, you know, dark kitchen component to it, you know, we’re like, as you can see, you know, very, like, this is also part of the experience is the pickup, you know, when customers pick up like it’s not, you know, you’re not going to a warehouse district and picking up food from, you know, the back of a warehouse, you know, where this is also part of the experience. So we differentiate ourselves in a way where also our food, you know, where we’re responsible for our own food were responsible for our platform, you know, most ghost kitchens, you know, they don’t control the entire vertical. So, that’s a little bit different in terms of how we perceive ourselves to our customer.
Chad Franzen 22:42
Do you use a software platform that has made you unique to something you’re doing? And has it helped you a lot?
Markus Pineyro 22:50
Um, yeah, I think the Empower Delivery platform has been essential for our, you know, our growth and our operation. It really is the brains and kind of like our command station. So we, like our business revolves around Empower.
Chad Franzen 23:09
Do you? What’s kind of your goal for the future? Would you view growth as expanding the brand’s currently offered or moving to different locations? Or both?
Markus Pineyro 23:18
Yeah, it’s, I think, it could be a little bit of both. But really, like, our focus will be based around like expanding the oomi footprint, and then, you know, whether, you know, most likely those brands will come along with it. But you know, let’s say we’re going to a demographic where maybe one of the brands is not relevant, like people maybe don’t like fried chicken and wings, where we’re going so we can create a different brand. And we have that flexibility that we can launch a digital brand. Pretty much in 30 days, you know, we don’t need to build a restaurant. You know, we’re building a menu, we’re building a brand. And that’s all it takes. So we have flexibility with our brands, and we can replace them. If a brand doesn’t perform how we think it should be performing. We can always either improve it or replace it, but the idea would be to grow our UI footprint.
Chad Franzen 24:06
I have one more question for you. But first, tell me how people can find out more about me on the kitchen.
Markus Pineyro 24:13
Yeah, so our social handle is at oomi Kitchen across all social platforms, and then our website as well at oomikitchen.com We’re located in Dallas, Texas.
Chad Franzen 24:23
Okay, great. Okay, last question for you. You go to oomikitchen.com And you go to the brands drop down menu and you’ve got those brands what’s kind of your go to meal of choice when you’re a customer
Markus Pineyro 24:37
Depends on the day of the week. Now so so for me like my my go to right now is and I also go through like phases, but under Love Bowls. We have a Sunset Strip ball. It uses a rosewood ranch ribeye. It’s a prime cut, so it’s just a phenomenal addition. I’m just kind of hooked on it right now. And then every once in a while I’ll kind of go into the wings and you know, mix them up a little bit. Like, like our angry buffalo wings or phenomenon.
Chad Franzen 25:14
Sounds fantastic. Yeah, I’m looking at the Sunset to Sunset Strip now looks great. Hey, Markus, it’s been great to talk to you. Thank you so much. Best of luck with oomi and everything in the future. Really appreciate it.
Markus Pineyro 25:24
I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
Chad Franzen 25:25
So long, everybody
Outro 25:26
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