Success Story: Chopstix
Chopstix is a fast-growing quick service restaurant brand, that selected Access EPoS technology to keep pace with its ambitious expansion plans. With one centralised system, future acquisitions can be added as easily as possible.
About Chopstix
Chopstix reached its 20th anniversary in 2022, having been founded by Sam Elia and Menashe Sadik in Camden Market in 2002.
It now has 80 restaurants across the UK and Ireland, with a further 10 under its sister brand, Yangtze and has a rapid expansion strategy driven by a programme of site openings in shopping centres around the country.
Preparing for growth
Chopstix recognised that its existing EPoS system wouldn’t be capable of accommodating new sites as quickly as the business needed and that the lack of integration with other technology would hold it back. It needed to have a more robust system that provided comprehensive sales reporting without the need for manual intervention – and to provide the information quickly and effortlessly.Without making a change, the business would have had no confidence in its EPOS reporting and would have struggled to monitor the cost of sales from its menu, nor could it have measured levels of wastage accurately.
Putting trust into Access technology
As an existing customer of Access Maintain, the Chopstix team was familiar with the software the Access Group provide for the hospitality sector. “We knew that a lot of big businesses already used Access EPOS,” said James Cowan, Chopstix Systems & Insight Manager, “so were confident that it would provide the scalability we needed as the business expanded. We needed the reassurance that we could switch on a new site and it would be up and running on the system as soon as it went live with minimal manual input.” James explained that Chopstix also wanted to get as much out of the data it collects as possible.
We recognised that scaling up the level of reporting and potentially developing a stock system would improve visibility and efficiency as we expanded further. Having the capability of adding other modules that are all powered by Access Workspace in one place is, therefore, a huge advantage in providing simple, but effective, reports across all operational areas of our business.
Keeping our existing hardware was also a consideration when we reviewed our EPOS capability as it was still working so didn’t need to be replaced for the sake of it. Access Hospitality provided the flexibility and expertise to incorporate this into the project plan, avoiding the need for costly replacement of functioning equipment.
Quick and flexible implementation across the estate
After initial discussions and scoping of the project, Access EPoS was initially deployed in one trial site, with three others following to thoroughly test the technology. Just three months later, in January 2022, it was rolled out across the whole estate using a phased approach.
The Access EPOS team brought great flexibility to the implementation of the technology and brought creative solutions to some particular challenges we had. A franchisee, for example, was using Access EPOS but had been set up differently from the HQ brand approach. The Access team incorporated a change in product set-up to align with the Chopstix brand so that products, till screen and pricing can be updated centrally, saving time and streamlining reporting processes and which provides a template for similar applications in the future
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