Marie Callenders’ Holiday Feast Program

Marie Callenders and TakeOut Technologies first began having partnership conversations in mid 2007. During the first initial conversations, Marie Callenders’ Chris Yeh, Director of Restaurant Services, explained their challenges for the chain’s annual Holiday Feast, which runs between October and December of every year.

While Marie Callenders had experienced success, it became clear there were several obstacles and challenges that were growing every season. Their main challenge was the volume of phone calls during this period. Because of the high volume of calls, and amount of time needed by the internal host to answer specific questions or take an order, they were no longer able to increase the volume of orders physically coming into each location. The volume of calls also led to an increased possibility of mistakes during the ordering process and even impacted guest satisfaction-both for the Holiday Feast guests and the everyday guests inside the locations.

After discussions with TakeOut Technologies, it was decided that there was a strong opportunity to increase sales, grow revenue for the Feast program and improve the accuracy of orders-while also lowering labor costs. TakeOut Technologies designed, tested and implemented a Marie Callenders’ branded online ordering site in approximately 3 weeks, which was then approved and functional for online orders beginning in November, 2007.

With some small internal marketing in the 90 corporate Marie Callenders and 22 franchisees that came on board with TakeOut Tech’s program initially, the success of the program was almost immediate-and measurable.

Chris Yeh compared the 2006 Holiday Feast Program to the 2007 program, with online ordering provided by TakeOut Technologies. Here are the following key measurements from Marie Callenders:
1) Labor costs were reduced 1500 man hours in only the first 3 weeks of the program, resulting in approximately $10,000-$13,000 savings for the company.
2) The amount of Holiday Feast transactions almost quadrupled from the previous year.
3) 40% of ALL Holiday Feast orders were produced via the online ordering system.
4) 21.5% of those ordered were also placed AFTER working hours, further growing Marie Callenders’ incremental business.

Because of the success of the TakeOut Technologies’ online ordering program and their partnership with Marie Callenders’ for the Holiday Feast program, the decision was made to continue online ordering throughout the year and rollout the complete Marie Callenders menu. The complete menu rollout, design, testing and implementation was completed in May, 2008.

In every way the success of the Marie Callenders program highlights the opportunity for restaurants and groups to increase their business via online ordering, it has the added benefits of improving accuracy of the orders, lowering labor costs and providing further incremental revenue by offering guests the ability to order anytime-anywhere.