Technology
High tech meets high touch at Woworks, powered by Qu
Check out this fast-moving collaboration that blends high tech with high touch.
September 9, 2025
When Woworks began looking for a kiosk partner to support its expansion into nontraditional venues, the brief sounded simple on paper. The company wanted technology that would be easy to manage across six brands and roughly 250 locations, flexible enough for small footprints like grocery store counters, and resilient enough to keep humming even if the internet blinked. What it found in Qu's kiosk platform has since shaped store design, franchisee operations and the guest experience across the portfolio.
"We oversee all technology for Saladworks, Barbarios, Fruitables, Garbonzo, Zoup and The Simple Greek," Kyle Mark, CIO at Woworks, told Kiosk Marketplace in a Zoom interview. "When we moved Zoup onto our stack, it was the perfect time to introduce kiosks. Every location got at least one, and the learnings were immediate."
Small footprints, big impact
Woworks' nontraditional strategy includes "store within a store" counters in grocery, along with food trucks and other flexible formats. In these environments, labor and equipment footprints are tight. Kiosks became a way to maintain speed and accuracy without staffing a full front counter.
"In a grocery setting, you may have one person making salads," Mark said. "A kiosk means you do not also need a dedicated order taker or a cashier. Throughput is higher and the same person can focus on production."
Qu's hardware approach turned out to be a differentiator. The team highlighted an RFlex configuration that can act as a traditional POS terminal or as a self-service kiosk depending on the shift.
"You save on equipment, which matters in small formats," Mark added. "If one device can do both jobs, your up-front cost drops."
Darien Bates, chief product officer at Qu, framed it as a platform decision rather than a device decision.
"The previous generation thought of kiosk software as a separate thing tied to a single box," Bates said. "We build a unified platform where the same ordering APIs power POS, kiosks and digital channels. The experience adapts to the form factor, but the data and logic are shared."
Real time by design, even offline
Speed of insight was another early win for operators. Sales from the kiosk post to the same real-time reporting used at the POS, and they appear instantly.
"If you ring a sale and open your reports, it is there," Bates said. "There is no 15-minute lag and no round trip to the cloud for aggregation."
The reliability comes from Qu's edge computing device, which performs the heavy lifting in store.
"You do not need internet to run your kiosk," Bates said. "The order is processed locally, passed to the kitchen display system and printed in the back of house. That was a big selling point for us," Mark added. "The order never has to leave the building to reach production."
Adoption lessons: Placement, volume and upsell discipline
Rolling out kiosks across a brand network surfaces practical truths. Woworks learned quickly that placement and quantity matter.
"Two kiosks draw more attention than one," Mark said. "If a single unit sits by itself, guests may overlook it. Positioning is critical."
The operational payoff showed up fast. Check averages rose, and so did modifier capture and attachment rates.
"Kiosks never forget to ring up extras," Mark said. "In walk-the-line concepts, a cashier might miss a premium topping or forget to ask about a drink. The kiosk asks every time, offers sides and cookies every time and captures those high-margin add-ons."
Labor did not disappear, it shifted.
"We did not see pure labor savings," Mark noted. "We reallocated. The production side got stronger, and the overall flow improved."
That reallocation informed new store designs. Woworks is exploring secondary make lines dedicated to kiosk and digital orders to keep the front line moving and avoid the perception of "skipping the line."
The approach has already supported big moments. "We opened a co-branded Barberios and Fruitables location that was our largest grand opening ever," Mark said. "It ran fully on kiosks with no cashier walk-down. Being able to take three or four orders at once made that volume possible."
High tech that enables high touch
Both teams returned to a theme that often gets lost in automation debates. The goal is not to replace people. It is to free them to do the work that only people can do.
"A great general manager is an all-in-one talent," Bates said. "They run the books, schedule labor, manage people and build community. Technology should take the math off their plate and give them back the moments that require empathy and judgment."
That logic extends to frontline roles. "Some employees are phenomenal food makers but less comfortable with constant guest interaction," Mark said. "Kiosks let you put those team members where they excel and have a single person at expo focus on the face-to-face experience. Our franchisees told us it opened up the labor pool."
Guest reaction mirrored the internal benefits.
"Customer surveys surprised us," Mark said. "Many guests preferred ordering on the kiosk and then having a focused, friendly handoff. You will always have a few who want a human to take the order. But the net effect was a better, more personal end interaction."
One platform, many touchpoints
While kiosk, web and mobile front ends each have a look tailored to their screens, they all pull from the same menu and brand assets, and they all run through the same backend.
"For my team, everything is managed in one place," Mark said. "We are not building separate menus or images for each system."
That makes it easier for Qu to pursue what both companies see as the next big leap: unified personalization across every channel.
"Guests expect you to meet them where they are," Bates said. "Today our upsell models are mostly preset. We are moving toward more intelligent, personalized recommendations that are consistent whether you are in a drive-thru, at a kiosk or ordering online."
Loyalty is part of the roadmap, especially for a multi-brand platform like Woworks.
"If you move between Barbarios and Fruitables, those are distinct brands," Bates said. "The loyalty experience should still feel unified. We also want to start guest engagement earlier than traditional loyalty, with better data collection and identity resolution even before a program sign-up."
What comes next
UX will keep evolving. Friction will keep dropping. Bates points to inspiration from retail, like item recognition that removes scanning steps, while being careful to note that some innovations are directional rather than imminent.
"You never declare UX finished," he said. "The challenge is to remove steps without losing the small moments of engagement that make hospitality feel human."
For Woworks and Qu, the collaboration has proven that operational flexibility, resilient infrastructure and disciplined design can turn kiosks into a strategic lever rather than a gadget.
"High tech unlocked high touch for us," Mark said. "The kiosks gave us higher check averages, better modifier capture and a smoother production flow. More importantly, they let our people focus on the handoff and the relationship. That is the part guests remember."
Included In This Story
Qu
Qu is the restaurant technology company evolving POS, responsibly, for a more sustainable future. With the industry’s first unified commerce platform, Qu’s fully integrated products go beyond fragmented ordering and tech experiences to create healthier connections for restaurant operating teams and their many stakeholders.
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