The Big Greek Café is overhauling its digital infrastructure, selecting Deliverect and Thanx to unify first-party ordering, third-party aggregation, delivery dispatch, and loyalty across its U.S. locations. The Maryland-born fast-casual brand, which operates across Maryland and Virginia, is moving away from a fragmented tech stack that required manual menu fixes and workarounds — and is betting a fully integrated platform will drive repeat visits without leaning on discounts.
The Stack
The combined Deliverect-Thanx deployment covers four operational layers. Deliverect's Commerce API powers ordering on The Big Greek Café's own mobile app and website, handling nested modifiers, size-based pricing, dayparted menus, and differentiated pickup-versus-delivery pricing across every location. When volume spikes, prep times adjust dynamically rather than forcing operators to shut off ordering — a meaningful relief valve for a brand that positions hospitality as its core differentiator.
Deliverect Dispatch routes delivery orders placed through the brand's own channels to couriers automatically, eliminating the need to negotiate market-by-market courier contracts or manage marketplace invoicing separately. Third-party order aggregation and menu management close the loop: a single menu update — a price change, a new LTO, or an 86'd item — propagates across all channels, including delivery marketplaces, with orders flowing directly into the POS.
Thanx handles guest engagement and loyalty, with the program embedded at checkout rather than bolted on as a separate sign-up step. Automated campaigns use purchase history to convert first-time guests into regulars, and targeted rewards replace blanket discounts — a unit-economics-friendly approach in a segment where margin compression remains a persistent pressure.
Why It Matters
"We were spending too much time fixing menus and working around problems instead of taking care of guests," said Niko Kontos, Chief Operating Officer of The Big Greek Café. "Deliverect and Thanx give us a digital ordering platform we can rely on and a loyalty program that is part of the experience, so a first visit turns into a second and a third."
The partnership reflects a broader consolidation trend in fast-casual technology, where operators are prioritizing integrated, API-first platforms over point-solution stacks that require custom middleware to share data. Deliverect serves more than 85,000 restaurant locations worldwide and processes 30 million API calls daily — scale that gives mid-sized regional chains like The Big Greek Café enterprise-grade infrastructure without enterprise-scale IT budgets. For operators in the fast-casual segment, the calculus is straightforward: first-party digital sales carry higher margins than marketplace orders, and loyalty programs that live inside the ordering flow convert at materially higher rates than standalone apps.
Thanx CEO Zach Goldstein framed the loyalty logic plainly: "When loyalty is built into the ordering experience instead of bolted onto it, more guests join, more of them come back, and the brand doesn't have to buy that frequency with discounts." That matters for a brand like The Big Greek Café, which has built its identity around hospitality and community rather than promotional pricing over its 17-year operating history.
A full network rollout across all U.S. locations is slated to launch imminently. For regional fast-casual operators evaluating digital ordering and loyalty platforms, the deployment offers a real-world case study in consolidating off-premise infrastructure ahead of scale.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
