Restaurant Internal Operations App Design &
Development for Soul Foods Group

Aly Janmohamed started Soul Foods Group in 1985 with a single KFC in East Finchley, London. Four decades on, that one restaurant has become a portfolio of more than 400 locations across the UK and Canada, with a workforce of over 10,000 people.

The company manages four major brands of fast food powerhouses such as – Taco Bell, Burger King,  KFC, and Starbucks. Every brand comes with its own rules, safety/compliance standards, and way of doing business. Keeping all these factions working perfectly across two different countries is a major headache for the management.

Soul Foods came to us because the tools holding the operation together had not kept up with the business. Spreadsheets, email chains, and disconnected systems were doing work that a proper platform should have been doing years ago.

When you run more than 400 restaurants in two countries, you can not afford communication delays. Area managers require quick updates about how their locations are doing. At the same time, executive teams in Toronto and Rickmansworth need to see exactly how the whole business is doing in real-time. This ensures no waiting time for compiled reports.

Soul Foods needed one platform purpose-built for their operation that gives every level of the business what they actually need, from daily checklists to cross-country performance views. That was the brief.

• Replace fragmented tools with one centralised platform: a single application covering outlet management, operational workflows, and performance tracking across all 400+ locations.
• Give operations teams daily-use tools that work: digitised checklists, structured workflows, and status tracking, replacing the email and spreadsheet processes that had become the default.
• Build cross-country visibility for leadership: real-time oversight of the full UK and Canada portfolio, without manual compilation or time zone delays in reporting.
• Design for the long term: a platform architected to grow alongside Soul Foods as the portfolio expands not something that needs a rebuild when they hit 500 restaurants.

Running a business this size comes with structural complexity that most software isn’t built for. These were the real problems we had to solve:

Brands following different Operational and Compliance Standards:

• Food brands like Taco Bell, KFC, Burger King, and Starbucks do not run the same way. They follow unique franchise standards and audit rules. We need to design a single platform for Soul Foods that can easily adapt to all four distinct workflows. This will save the hassle of creating completely separate systems that just cause more confusion.

Spreadsheets Were Running the Business:

• Day-to-day business depended heavily on a mix of  spreadsheets, chaotic email chains, and separate tools. Getting a clear report was a slow process. Teams had to manually follow up just to get updates. All the data was there, but it was not in one single place, which makes it quite frustrating to find it on time.

Two Countries, One Leadership Team:

• With the UK business headquartered in Rickmansworth and the Canadian operation based in Toronto, getting a consistent view of what was happening across both markets was difficult. Time zones didn’t help. Neither did having no shared system to look at.

No Unified View of 400+ Restaurants:

• Area managers were monitoring their locations through whatever tools were available, not through a designed workflow. For senior leadership, building a picture of the full estate meant waiting on reports rather than checking a dashboard. That kind of lag costs time and good decisions.