Delivering a new concept of fresh and healthy

Vitality Bowls, a superfood café, was founded in 2011 in Northern California with a commitment to bringing health and wellness to every community across the country through fresh, high-quality superfoods. Since franchising began in 2014, the brand has grown to more than 135 cafés open and in development. Vitality Bowls offers an antioxidant-rich menu, with breakfast, lunch and dinner items made to order for each customer.

The combination of a dynamic café vibe with a unique collection of menu items containing high nutritional values and extraordinary tastes has solidified Vitality Bowls’ status as a pioneer in the industry. This has earned them many accolades over the last nine years, including being ranked in the top-half of Inc. magazine’s top 5,000 list, being named to Franchise Times’ Top 200+ list, being ranked #25 for Most Innovative Restaurant Brands by Restaurant Business, and the list goes on.

Making one-to-one customer connections

Wanting to build on that momentum and on the commitment to serving their communities, Vitality Bowls realized they needed a better way to communicate with their customers than through their current, basic POS- provided rewards plan. Listening to their franchisees, they began the process of finding the perfect partner to provide a comprehensive loyalty program.

“What sold us on Punchh was the ability to really engage with our customers, instead of just handing out discounts,” said Uriah Blum, Vice President of Operations. “We wanted to be able to reward loyal customers and communicate with them about new menu items, valuable promotions and interesting news about our restaurants. We wanted to establish a more personal connection with those we serve.”

A successful launch in 2017 quickly got Vitality Bowls up and running through simple APIs with their POS system and mobile app. Blum notes how Punchh already being integration partners with Auphan made for a very smooth transition. Vitality Bowls’ team was impressed with the easy configuration of the dashboard that immediately helped them see and begin to understand their customers’ behaviors important ways.

The Punchh Marketing Cloud Platform is now the single solution they rely on daily to guide their marketing and loyalty efforts. The platform facilitates the adoption of their mobile app and ordering ahead feature, which helps to decrease restaurant wait times. According to Blum, they also create email campaigns that customers view through their app to receive announcements, fundraiser information, special offers, and much more. “The Punchh platform gives us new ways and new channels to engage with our customers, which is helping us increase vital aspects of our business such as customer frequency, recency and spend.”

Punchh provides us with tools for two-way communication to gain valuable customer feedback and insights that we use to deliver a better experience every time customers visit.

Building loyalty and optimizing results

Vitality Bowls benchmarks their progress every step of the way, looking particularly at customer participation rates across the company and per location. Analyzing their customer data demonstrates the value that loyal customers bring to their business through increased spend lift month-over-month.

Blum believes Punchh will continue to deliver tremendous impact to Vitality Bowls because it provides them with three ways to increase revenue: through new customer acquisitions like referrals, by increasing customer check lift with app messaging and offers, and by generating more customer visits through segmentation and campaigns.