The Big Greek Café, the Maryland-based fast-casual Greek chain founded in 2009, is deploying a combined Deliverect and Thanx technology stack across its entire U.S. network — unifying first-party digital ordering, third-party marketplace aggregation, courier dispatch, and loyalty into one integrated system as the brand pushes beyond its Maryland and Virginia base.
The move addresses a pain point familiar to growing regional chains: fragmented digital infrastructure that forces operators to manage menus, pricing, and fulfillment rules separately across every channel. For The Big Greek Café, that meant staff time spent correcting menu errors and routing around platform outages rather than focusing on the guest experience.
The Platform Breakdown
The Deliverect Commerce API handles ordering on the brand's own mobile app and website, managing location-level complexity including dayparted menus, size-based pricing, nested modifiers, and separate pricing for pickup versus delivery. When a location hits a volume spike, prep times adjust automatically rather than requiring staff to suspend ordering manually — a meaningful operational safeguard for a fast-casual kitchen running a broad Greek menu.
Deliverect Dispatch routes delivery orders placed through the brand's own channels to couriers automatically, without requiring the brand to negotiate market-by-market courier contracts or reconcile marketplace invoicing. Deliverect's third-party order aggregation layer pulls marketplace orders directly into the POS and syncs menu updates — price changes, limited-time offers, and 86'd items — across every selling channel simultaneously.
Thanx powers the guest-facing loyalty and marketing layer. Rather than a separate sign-up flow bolted onto checkout, loyalty enrollment is embedded in the ordering experience, so the brand begins building purchase history from a guest's first transaction. Automated campaigns use that history to drive repeat visits, and targeted rewards replace blanket discounts — a structure designed to grow visit frequency without eroding margin.
Why the Integration Model Matters
For restaurant operators scaling beyond a handful of units, siloed loyalty programs have become a recognized drag on digital sales performance. When loyalty sign-up sits outside the ordering flow, enrollment rates suffer and the brand accumulates less usable purchase data. Embedding loyalty at checkout — as both Thanx and several enterprise platforms now do — is increasingly the standard expectation for brands aiming to compete on retention rather than discount depth.
Niko Kontos, Chief Operating Officer of The Big Greek Café, framed the operational stakes plainly: "We were spending too much time fixing menus and working around problems instead of taking care of guests. 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."
Deliverect currently serves more than 85,000 restaurant locations globally and processes 30 million API calls daily across more than 1,000 certified integrations. The scale gives regional chains like The Big Greek Café access to enterprise-grade infrastructure without the custom development cost. For operators evaluating foodservice technology investments, the combined Deliverect-Thanx stack represents a relatively turnkey path to first-party digital ordering with integrated loyalty — a combination that has historically required stitching together multiple vendors.
Thanx CEO Zach Goldstein noted that integrated loyalty consistently outperforms add-on approaches: "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." The full network rollout is slated to launch soon, with no specific unit count disclosed. Operators tracking loyalty program trends in foodservice will want to watch how the brand's direct-channel sales mix shifts as the integrated stack reaches full deployment.
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.
