How Chili’s cooked up a network and tech revamp

One digital transformation, coming right up!

Since 2024, Chris Caldwell, CIO of Brinker International, which controls restaurant brands like Chili’s, has been swapping out the slow wi-fi and outdated tech in Chili’s US stores for something a bit more appetizing.

After joining Brinker International, Caldwell spent a great deal of time listening to team members to understand how they felt about the technology they were working with. Those conversations, he said, were telling.

“I got a lot of feedback from slow performance, inconsistent experience in the restaurant, some outages,” Caldwell said. “So, a lot of foundational challenges that the restaurant teams had that actually got in the way of their ability to serve our guests.”

Missed connections. After absorbing those pain points, Caldwell and his teams leapt into action. One of the first tech initiatives: improving network speed and performance within the restaurants.

Chris Munz, founder of fractional advisory firm Restaurant Tech Partners, told IT Brew that reliable wi-fi and back office connectivity are the “lifeblood” of a restaurant, and that poor connection can greatly disrupt operations.

“I know of brands that I’ve worked with that stores have gone down and they have to completely close the business,” Munz said.

Caldwell said Chili’s “re-architected” the networks within restaurants for added resiliency: “That was really a two-year initiative to go into every single restaurant, replace the network, add failover capabilities, [and] get additional bandwidth for the restaurants.”

The company also replaced wi-fi access points in all of its US restaurants, performing overnight installs to avoid business disruptions. Chili’s has more than 1,200 locations in the US.

“Not only did we replace all their access points, [but] we basically ripped out all the networking gear overnight, rewired everything, [and] added new racks to mount all the equipment in every one of the back offices because they had wiring that had been there for decades that really needed some care and maintenance,” Caldwell said.

Leaving legacy tech behind. Updating outdated tech was another project Caldwell and his teams took on. This included modernizing Chili’s kitchen display system (KDS), which is responsible for displaying orders to kitchen staff.

Munz called the KDS the “brains” of the kitchen, and said older KDS tech may not have the right capabilities for modern restaurants, such as the ability to differentiate between in-store pickups versus deliveries.

“If a kitchen doesn’t have that ability to understand how these orders differentiate from each other, they’ll all fire at the same time, and now you have cold food for delivery or you have missed items,” he said.

“We basically upgraded like 9,000 screens to touchscreen new technology,” Caldwell said, adding it was a “massive” investment that was a significant undertaking.

Chili’s KDS wasn’t the only hardware receiving an upgrade. Listening sessions with team members revealed that iPads used to take orders were old and had a poor battery life, prompting the company to purchase 23,000 newer model devices for members.

Worth it? Efforts to improve the tech experience at Chili’s have already paid off. Steve Kelly, VP of marketing at Chili’s, told IT Brew the restaurant chain has had 20 quarters of consecutive same-store sales growth.

“A lot of what we attribute that success to is improving the experience for the team members, making their job easier, and that comes from listening to them,” Kelly said. He added that putting in the “hard yards” was critical for the brand, and that team members are now sharing more “detailed experiential opportunities” to improve their workflow.

“Now they’re getting into real minutia of what the guests and the team members are experiencing, instead of just general problems that are hampering them day-to-day,” Kelly said.

What’s next? Chili’s digital transformation journey hasn’t come to a halt just yet. Caldwell said the brand has started to add redundant servers with failover into Chili’s restaurants, allowing for continuous operation if the primary server fails.

“We’re just kicking that project off, but the plan is…we’ll start deploying that for the next 12 months,” Caldwell said.

He added that initial improvements made to Chili’s stores will help pave the way for more complex projects down the line: “Now that we’ve gotten some of the foundational, fundamental technology core issues behind us, now we can focus on the really big things that are experiential that’ll kind of move the business even further forward.”