Upgrading The Online Ordering Experience

With 120 restaurants and counting, Grill’d is fast becoming Australia’s favourite burger joint. On top of bold, modern storefronts and a menu that caters to food tribes of all stripes—from vegan to paleo, dairy-free, and everything in between—the brand is also known for its ‘Be Good. Do Good. Feel good.’ philosophy. Every month, each Grill’d franchise supports three local community groups through a ‘Local Matters’ community donation program.

Eager to generate the same buzz around their digital presence as their physical product and in-store customer service, Grill’d looked to Evolution 7 for help. Based in Melbourne, the award-winning digital transformation agency is known for delivering user-centred experiences that join creativity, strategy, and technology.

Evolution 7 has successfully produced hundreds of digital projects and worked on large-scale application development for global brands including Qantas, Abercrombie & Kent, and Flex. The team understands that an intuitive, responsive content management system is critical to project success, both during development and before turning the keys over to a client. Craft’s content- and customer-first approach earned it top spot in Evolution 7’s arsenal of go-to platforms, after proving its worth over a number of complex projects.

Grill’d had big plans for its digital transformation: in addition to a new website and digital platform designed to streamline business processes, drive customer engagement, and work in harmony with ongoing marketing campaigns, the growing franchise had both a mobile app, ecommerce integration, and data management platform in the pipeline.

Because Grill’d prides itself on a customer-first philosophy, it came as no surprise they wanted website users to be able to customize menu items to suit their diets and tastes. For Evolution 7’s team of developers, this meant complicated product modeling. Balancing price differences, location-specific product names, nutritional information, image variants, and, of course, ingredients is no small task, but Craft Commerce’s ability to manage high-volume, complex content made it an obvious choice. Before, Grill’d website information was often out of date due to a clunky, confusing backend experience; with Craft, Grill’d staff could easily input to-the-minute updates to protect the site’s accuracy and functionality, and then expose that content to the rest of the enterprise via the Grill’d API.

Craft’s baked-in Element API made integrating a Grill’d API (powering both the site’s ‘Order Up’ ecommerce element and its mobile app) easy and effective. Craft Commerce offered a powerful foundation to expand the site’s capabilities with custom features and plugins, and the content editing interface provided the tools necessary for compelling, fully editable designs. Incorporating several data sources into a unified API endpoint made porting product or restaurant information over to other properties in the ecosystem a simple, stress-free experience.

Security is always a topmost consideration, especially when working with a high-profile, high-traffic brand. The new Grill’d site and Craft Commerce platform was put through 3rd party penetration tests and passed with flying colours, achieving top marks for server, network, and application security—a rare (and impressive) result.

Looking at the numbers, Grill’d customers are as pleased with the new product as the folks who worked behind the scenes to bring it to life: in the first three months post-launch, traffic jumped by 52.6%, with the average user spending 65% more time exploring this booming burger biz.