Originally founded in 2003 by the two LSU basketball alumni Brandon Landry and Jack Warner with the goal to provide high-quality food in a restaurant with an unparalleled sports environment. Due to their unique vision, business started growing, but at first they had used the traditional restaurant set-up; standard paper tickets and regular service. After Walk On’s started enjoying bigger and bigger success, it became obvious that the standard paper ticket system that was being used was not enough, and logistical challenges started cropping up.

Walk On’s was getting increasingly popular and it expanded at over a hundred locations in Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The ambiance of the restaurants, with their time-tested ‘sports and socializing’ aesthetics,’ was drawing in people, but because of volume of orders and services that were needed to be provided, the quality of the food started dropping. After getting Mike Turner as a Vice President of Culinary, that’s when the entire service process turned around.

From his experience at Cheesecake Factory, it became obvious that using a powerful automated solution was a must. With the help of the best in the class Kitchen Display System (KDS), everything changed almost instantly. They saw 50% increase in food quality, their ticket times dropped 50% and the number for overall guests seated rose by 5%. Since the volume had drastically increased in Walk On’s the newly implemented Kitchen Display System ConnectSmart Kitchen was the ideal solution, as they could easily keep track of everything.

Using standard paper tickets meat that the food quality was suffering and that the hardest-working man was the chef. He’d garnish all the checks and the items, gather all the checks and sell the food, which is why automation was the answer. Because of the multi-faceted nature of restaurant management, using the newest kitchen technology for automation, with a system that can take every disparate stream of data that can render every piece of information digestible, is the only way to work with a restaurant kitchen, according to Walk On’s management. Paper ticket were a thing of the past, and Walk On’s realized that they needed something better.

Mike Turner, the Vice President of Culinary, calls himself ‘a data guy’ and true to his moniker, he collected data and statistics, and along with the Director of Operations Keegan Lanier both knew they wanted a robust KDS that would streamline their workflow and turnover higher guest counts, but most importantly, the implementation of such a system had to mean minimal fuss. After all, simply by looking at the KDS and being able to determine optimal cooking time, chokepoints, and potential hazards towards ticket times, meant that every part of the restaurant was much more organized and efficient.

For Walk On’s, the implementation went buttery smooth. Starting from Baton Rouge as their test site, they’ve since gotten comfortable with using the system, and they’ve opened at several other locations, all of them running on CSK.

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