Selling out is not a bug. Zayos builds the menu around it.
Zayos gives an Atlanta soul food kitchen commission free ordering on its own domain for a flat $499, $599 or $699 a month per location. Every item carries a daily count, so the oxtails close online the minute they close in the kitchen, and holiday pans sell by the slot.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why does this kitchen’s week point the wrong way for a delivery app?
Delivery platforms are tuned for a flat weekday dinner curve and an ASAP order for one or two people. An Atlanta soul food kitchen is the opposite on every axis. The volume is family sized, it clusters on Sunday and on holidays, and much of it is decided days in advance. Here is the actual week.
Sunday
The whole week in four hoursAfter church, families of six ordering plates and sides together, a line out the door, and a kitchen that has been prepping since Friday. The busiest window of the week is a window most delivery platforms treat as an ordinary afternoon.
Monday to Wednesday
Lunch plates, one at a timeWorking lunch, mostly pickup, mostly people who come every week. Small tickets, high repeat rate, and the exact orders a percentage of the ticket punishes hardest because you are paying a finder fee on a customer who found you in 2016.
Thursday and Friday
Prep for the weekend, and the fishFish fry volume, family packs starting to move, and the first calls about Sunday. Any ordering system that cannot take a Sunday order on a Thursday is leaving that money on the counter.
Holidays
A different business entirelyThanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day and Juneteenth are whole pan weeks, ordered days ahead, paid ahead, picked up in a scheduled hour. A marketplace has nowhere to put a 40 pan order and no way to stop you taking more than the oven can hold.
What happens when the oxtails run out at 1:40?
Every soul food operator knows this hour. You cooked a set amount of the expensive item that morning, the price of it has been moving for years, and when it is gone it is gone until tomorrow. On a marketplace the tickets keep coming, because the platform has no concept of a kitchen that cooks a finite number of portions. Then you are the one calling the customer, issuing the refund, and taking the rating hit for running a kitchen the way this food has always been made.
On your own storefront, the item carries a daily count. Set it at 45 in the morning. When the forty fifth order is placed, oxtails close on the site by themselves, and the phone stops ringing about it too. Same control for the greens that go early, the fish on a Friday, the banana pudding, the last four pans of mac and cheese.
A menu that closes itself when the food is gone is the difference between selling out and being punished for selling out.
How does a plate get built when the sides change every morning?
A meat and three is a choice structure, not a list of dishes. One entree, two or three sides off a board you edit each morning, cornbread, a drink, a dessert. If the cabbage is not on today, it is not on the board, and no diner can build a plate you cannot make. The ticket that prints in the kitchen reads exactly what goes in the box, in the order the line packs it.
Family packs work the same way at a bigger size, feeds four, feeds eight, feeds twelve, with the sides scaling to the count and the add ons scaling with them. That is the order a Sunday family actually places, and it is the one a generic checkout turns into six separate line items and a phone call.
How do you take forty pans for Thanksgiving without a legal pad?
Holiday weeks are a second business with its own rules. Dressing, greens, candied yams, mac and cheese, turkey, cobbler and banana pudding by the pan, ordered a week or two out, paid ahead, picked up in a scheduled hour. Most kitchens still run it on a notebook by the register, which works right up until two people write on the same line. Five steps move it onto your own site.
- Open the window early and close it hard. Put the holiday menu up two to three weeks out with a stated cut off date. The site stops accepting pans the moment you close it, which ends the week of calls from people asking if you can squeeze in one more.
- Cap every pan by count, not by hope. Give each item a total available count for the holiday. Forty pans of dressing means forty. When the fortieth sells, it disappears from the site by itself.
- Take a deposit at booking. A holiday no show is not a lost sale, it is food you already bought and cooked. A deposit collected on the site at the moment of ordering changes that math.
- Sell pickup slots, not a pickup day. Fifteen or thirty minute pickup windows spread the day out so you are not handing eighty pans across a counter in one hour with everyone parked in the fire lane.
- Text the whole list next year. Every holiday order is a customer record you own, with a phone number and exactly what they bought. Next November that list is your entire marketing plan, and it costs cents instead of a commission on every pan.
The same structure carries repasts, church functions, graduations and family reunions, which for a lot of Atlanta kitchens on the Westside, in the Old Fourth Ward, in College Park, East Point and Decatur are steadier than any weeknight. Details on how large orders are built are on the catering and large order page.
If we close when the food is gone, what does that cost us on a platform?
More than most owners realise, because it does not show up as a fee. A marketplace listing that says you are open at 4pm when you sold out at 3pm produces cancelled orders, refunds and a lower rating, and the platform records all three against your restaurant. Over a year that quietly costs you placement, which the platform will then sell back to you as promoted visibility.
On your own site the truth is one tap on the tablet. Closed, sold out, back tomorrow at eleven. Nothing to dispute, nothing to refund, no rating written by a person who never got food.
The fee side is simpler still. Zayos is $499, $599 or $699 a month per location, month to month, no setup fee, and there is no commission on food revenue at any volume. The diner pays a small service fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, nothing for dine in, and 10 percent on catering and holiday pans. You keep 100 percent of the food revenue and 100 percent of the tips. At 700 online orders a month and a $29 plate, a 28 percent blended marketplace rate runs about $68,200 a year against $7,188 for Operator plus Marketplace.
The rest of the metro picture, neighborhood by neighborhood, is on Atlanta restaurant online ordering. Plans in full are on pricing.
Who is running Zayos right now?
One restaurant is live and taking orders today: Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, keeping $48k+/yr that used to leave as commission at roughly 3,000 orders a month. Storefronts are built and ordering opens at launch for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke across 13 locations, Yalla Market and Tap That Ash. No Atlanta kitchen is on the platform yet and we will not invent one. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida company, and Atlanta is a market we serve from South Florida. Most operators are live in under 2 weeks and take a first direct order within a week of signing up.
Questions Atlanta soul food owners ask.
What happens when the oxtails run out at 1:40 in the afternoon?
Can an ordering site handle a meat and three when the sides change every day?
We close when the food runs out. Does an online ordering system even fit that?
How do we take Thanksgiving pre orders without a legal pad by the register?
We do a lot of repasts, church functions and reunions. Can that live online?
How much is a percentage of the ticket actually costing an Atlanta soul food kitchen?
Do I have to give up DoorDash and Uber Eats?
Is there an Atlanta restaurant live on Zayos today?
Run one Sunday through the numbers.
The free report takes your own plate count and average ticket and shows what a percentage costs against a flat monthly fee over a year.