When Mike Smith and Donna Varner sit in the same building, the temptation to cross-pollinate menus is apparently real. On a recent episode of Fast Casual Nation, the chief brand officers of Moe’s Southwest Grill and Schlotzsky’s traded good-natured jabs about queso-topped sandwiches and pretzel collaborations, but underneath the banter was a serious conversation about how GoTo Foods, the seven-brand platform behind Moe’s, Schlotzsky’s, McAlister’s Deli, Auntie Anne’s, Cinnabon, Carvel and Jamba, is trying to prove that shared infrastructure can coexist with distinct brand identity. Smith described his fellow CBOs as an informal board of directors, a built-in sounding board of peers who can stress-test new product ideas without any incentive to simply agree.
That collaborative structure was central to Schlotzsky’s recent repositioning. Varner explained that after extensive consumer research, the brand discovered two-thirds of people already referred to it informally as “Schlotzsky’s Deli,” so rather than fight decades of shifting identities, the team leaned into what customers already believed to be true. The research effort, she noted, was made possible by GoTo Foods’ internal insights team combined with outside vendors, a resource smaller standalone chains would struggle to access on their own.
Both executives pointed to real estate and prototype design as areas where the platform model pays off. Schlotzsky’s has moved toward a roughly 2,100-square-foot “entry-level” format that skips the drive-thru in favor of self-order kiosks and a more flexible grab-and-go layout, betting that digital and delivery growth make the traditional drive-thru lane less essential in every market. Moe’s, meanwhile, operates around 550 restaurants concentrated in the East and Southeast, with an ideal footprint near 2,200 square feet, though Smith said the chain can shrink to 1,800 square feet in the right space. Drive-thru adoption at Moe’s remains limited, fewer than 20 locations, plus another dozen with app-order pickup windows, largely because the brand’s build-your-own burritos and bowls, which Smith said typically carry 11 to 13 ingredients, don’t translate well to a speaker-box transaction.
Digital ordering has become the connective tissue across the portfolio. Smith said more than a third of Moe’s business now comes through digital channels, and both brands are using aggregated dashboards that pull in first-party app data alongside third-party delivery feedback from services like Uber Eats and DoorDash. GoTo Foods has rolled out a shared “next-gen” loyalty platform across its brands, though each concept still maintains its own points system for now. Varner said the company is inching toward a unified customer data platform that would let brands share more information without merging loyalty currencies outright.
Artificial intelligence entered the conversation as an emerging but still cautious tool rather than a wholesale operational shift. Both executives described early-stage use cases: competitive and social-review monitoring dashboards, predictive suggestive-selling features built into the loyalty platform, and internal experiments with inventory calculation. Smith was direct about the guardrails, saying the brands avoid open-source AI tools where proprietary data could be exposed, and Varner echoed that GoTo Foods is “cautious but still looking forward,” particularly as the company explores AI-assisted media buying to make marketing spend more precise at the store level.
The bigger philosophical takeaway from both guests was about restraint. Smith argued that any efficiency AI creates should be redirected toward customer service and staff interaction rather than simply cut for cost savings, warning against a future where restaurants “do less with less people.” Varner’s closing lesson centered on humility, crediting cross-functional collaboration inside GoTo Foods for surfacing ideas from unexpected corners of the business. Between the two, the message for restaurant operators eyeing multi-brand platforms was consistent: shared systems can accelerate growth, but protecting what makes each brand distinct still requires deliberate, ongoing attention.
