Poke House: The Fresh Food Chain Going Global With Lightspeed

Cool and capable

From one location in 2018 to 130 in 2023, Poke House’s needs have changed in the past six years, but Lightspeed has remained a constant throughout.

“Poke House’s CEO Matteo Pichi chose to use Lightspeed from the beginning. At the start, it was the modern and sleek iPad devices that made Lightspeed an obvious choice, as Poke House is a very design-driven concept. We got an iPad from the Apple store, downloaded the app, set up a menu and started doing business.” said Alberto Vernazza, Chief Operating Officer.

“With 130 locations, our needs are now very different from when Poke House first opened, but Lightspeed is still proving to be a great solution.” Alberto added.

“Compared to legacy systems, Lightspeed is a much smarter solution and it’s ready to start using within one minute.” Alberto said.

Bowled over by Lightspeed

Scaling fast calls for an efficient system which is exactly what Lightspeed is.

“The best feature of Lightspeed is the speed. At one point, we were opening a site a week, and we needed to open as quickly as possible. With Lightspeed, you don’t need to wait on anyone as you can activate the software yourself and deploy it really quickly.” Alberto shared.

“It’s a 30 minute procedure to open a new restaurant from a technology standpoint because the menus are already set up and the payments are embedded. Everything is consistent across locations.” Alberto added.

Another of Lightspeed’s best-loved features? The fact that it’s built for ease of use. “Lightspeed is really user-friendly, both from the front and back end. As soon as you open it for the first time, it's really easy to use. It’s also really fast for us to modify or add something on the menu as it will then update across all locations.” said Salvatore Mancuso, Operations Manager.

Payments powering poke bowl sales

With multiple locations come a multitude of challenges, but for Poke House, processing payments isn’t one of them.

“Lightspeed Payments is a unique solution and it's easy to implement in every opening. It's really smart and fast. And, of course it eliminates all the problems that something that is not embedded can have, for example manual mistakes. Operational errors are really low with Lightspeed Payments.” said Salvatore.

“With Lightspeed Payments it’s really easy to reconcile all the store financials since every transaction is recorded on the ePOS. This also saves time and is easier for our financial departments.” Salvatore added.

Accurate data with MarketMan

As the needs of Poke House have developed, the opportunity to use Lightspeed’s array of integrations has increased.

“Our first need was to go fast without thinking a lot about the system apart from it being user-friendly and fast. Now our needs are really different and we need software that is integrated with other best-in-class systems which Lightspeed lets us do. We integrate with MarketMan which is one of our most-used platforms because in the food and beverage industry, knowing your COGS is vital, so we needed a platform that integrated into our ePOS and gave us accurate data.” said Alberto.