When TGI Fridays rolled out a rebuilt mobile app this month, it wasn’t a vanity project. The casual-dining chain had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024 and watched more than half of its domestic locations close. The new app, which lets guests find a restaurant, order for pickup, curbside, or delivery, and manage their rewards, sits at the center of a turnaround plan to grow from roughly 400 units to 1,000 and reach $2 billion in revenue by 2030. CEO Ray Blanchette framed technology bluntly as a conduit for driving traffic, lifting sales and deepening guest engagement.
A brand fighting for its life and choosing a mobile app as a cornerstone of its recovery tells you everything about where the restaurant industry now lives. For food companies and franchises, a great app is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s an essential part of what keeps these franchises going.
The behavioral shift isn’t coming. It has already happened. Off-premises channels (takeout, delivery and drive-thru) now make up the bulk of restaurant business, with National Restaurant Association research indicating that close to 75% of restaurant orders are taken to go or delivered. Mobile is the dominant device in that mix, accounting for roughly 60% of all digital restaurant orders.
Adoption has surged across the board. Industry surveys cited in 2025–2026 roundups found that 78% of adults had downloaded at least one food-related app, up from around 51% during the pandemic era, and that a majority kept three or more installed. The National Restaurant Association has reported that 57% of U.S. adults, including 74% of millennials and 65% of Gen Z, have used mobile or app ordering. Full-service restaurants, the segment once thought least likely to digitize, saw digital orders climb 237% from 2020 onward, according to figures compiled in a recent industry roundup by Restolabs.
The market behind these habits is enormous. Mordor Intelligence values the global online food delivery market at about $257.7 billion in 2025 and projects it will reach roughly $468.5 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate near 10.5%. A franchise without a strong mobile ordering experience isn’t holding steady in that environment; it’s quietly ceding ground.
It’s tempting to lean entirely on third-party marketplaces and skip the cost of building a branded app. The economics argue otherwise.
Consumers increasingly prefer ordering directly. Restolabs’ industry roundup also states that roughly 67% of consumers say they’d rather order from a restaurant’s own website or app than a third-party platform, and about 70% said they prefer a custom restaurant app over a third-party one, largely to avoid fees and to support the restaurant directly. That preference has real financial weight: analyses of restaurant sales data indicate that customers ordering directly tend to spend meaningfully more per transaction than those coming through aggregators, while operators save on the commissions that third-party platforms withhold (with native ordering often cited as saving around 35% per order versus marketplace fees).
Just as important is what a branded app captures that a marketplace never hands over: the customer relationship and the data. When orders flow through a third party, the franchise often doesn’t own the contact information, the order history or the ability to re-market. Owning the channel means each order feeds the next, and that self-reinforcing cycle is where the largest brands have built lasting advantages.
The case for investing in a top notch app isn’t theoretical. The most digitally mature restaurant companies report it directly in their financial filings.
Starbucks. As of its Q1 fiscal 2025 results, Starbucks reported 34.6 million active U.S. Starbucks Rewards members (90-day active), with a global membership in the tens of millions. The rewards program, accessed primarily through the app, has come to anchor a majority of the company’s U.S. transactions. Industry analysis pegs its contribution at well over half of U.S. sales. The reason it matters: loyalty members visit far more often and spend more per visit than non-members, turning a coffee run into a repeatable, app-driven habit.
Chipotle. In its full-year 2025 results, Chipotle reported $11.9 billion in total revenue, with digital sales representing 36.7% of food and beverage revenue. When the company relaunched Chipotle Rewards with “Rewards on Repeat” in April 2026, it reported roughly 21 million active members, with nearly 90% of digital transactions tied to a rewards account. Notably, the company has said loyalty-linked comparable sales outpaced non-loyalty sales in 2025, evidence that the app isn’t just a convenience layer but a measurable driver of repeat business.
Domino’s. Long considered the foodservice digital pioneer, Domino’s generated more than 85% of its U.S. retail sales in 2025 via digital channels, on global retail sales of over $20.1 billion for the year, with its app and loyalty program continuing to push order frequency.
The pattern is consistent: brands that treat the app as core infrastructure, not a side feature, convert it into higher order frequency, larger checks, richer customer data and a loyalty loop that competitors struggle to replicate.
A clunky app can do as much harm as no app. The brands above don’t just have apps; they invest continuously in the experience. A few features consistently separate the winners:
Build those well and the app becomes a compounding asset. Build them poorly and you’ve spent money creating a reason for customers to uninstall.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth for most franchises. The strategic case is clear, but execution is genuinely difficult. A “top notch” app requires more than a development team. It requires a coherent strategy: how the app fits the brand, how loyalty is structured to drive frequency without eroding margin, how the launch is marketed, how data feeds future campaigns and how the whole thing is measured against revenue rather than downloads. Many operators have the capital and the will but lack the in-house expertise to tie technology, brand, loyalty design and customer acquisition together.
That’s where the smartest move is often to bring in outside partners.
If your franchise is convinced the mobile opportunity is real but unsure how to capture it, the next step isn’t to hire a single freelance developer and hope for the best. It’s to work with an advertising and marketing agency that can build the strategy around the app, not just the app itself.
A strong agency partner can define your digital positioning, design a loyalty program that actually changes customer behavior, plan and execute the launch campaign, set up the analytics to prove ROI and turn the customer data your app collects into smarter, more profitable marketing over time. The brands dominating digital didn’t get there with technology alone; they got there with sustained, strategically guided investment.
The phone is already where your customers decide where to eat. The question is whether your franchise shows up there with a polished, loyalty-driven experience, or gets passed over for a competitor who does. If you’re ready to make that investment count, talk to an advertising agency that can turn a mobile app from a line item into a growth engine.
