Page 120 - Entrepreneur - USA (January - February 2020)

THE FRANCHISE

tablet for incoming orders.
That tablet is actually a big selling
2 0 2 0
point for Kitchen United. “One of the
Join the #1 Dry Cleaning problems with delivery, and any restau-
and Laundry Services rant owner knows this, is that with all
*
Franchise NOW! these apps going at once, it’s like bing,
bing, bing: DoorDash, Postmates,
Tide Cleaners is the fastest-growing brand Grubhub,” says Koontz. “You can get
in dry cleaning. stressed-out very easily.” But Kitchen

With reduced fees and royalties through United solves the problem with soft-
our conversion and development incentive ware that aggregates delivery services.
programs, there couldn’t be a better time
to join our ever-expanding team. Everything is in one place.
When an order comes through, Dog
Haus staffers prepare and bag it just like
they would at a real restaurant. But then
things get different. They place the order
onto a stainless steel platform the size of
a record album. A hydraulic lift carries it
upward toward a conveyor belt, and off it
Proudly
Using
goes on the labyrinthine journey through
*Based on Entrepreneur Franchise 500 Report
the building until it ultimately ends at a
Contact us TODAY to learn more: Franchising@TideDryCleaners.com tent outside the building. There, delivery-
www.TideDryCleaners.com men congregate like cabdrivers outside
an airport. As food shows up on the con-
veyor belt, a dispatcher calls out the next
driver, and the food quickly goes into a
passenger seat and then off to a home or
office building.
If there are any hiccups in this process,
Koontz knows immediately. In the kitchen,
for instance, cameras powered by facial rec-
ognition software trigger an email alert if
someone unauthorized so much as steps on
Dog Haus turf. “The cameras can even pick
up on body motions,” he says. “So if some-
one starts acting erratically, like if they’re
upset and waving their arms, you’ll be noti-
fied. Or if someone is lying on the floor,
it’s like, ‘Hey, this person is passed out and
unresponsive.’ ”
The delivery software even draws on
traffic data to dictate the delivery radius.
Dog Haus will ferry food as far as four
miles away during slow times, but that
drops to two miles during the peak hours.
That way, nobody ever receives a sack of
cold dogs.
Almost seven months in, with zero
seats, the virtual Dog Haus is feeding 200
people per day. Koontz is happy with his
new franchise—and at the corporate level,
Dog Haus is now thinking even bigger
about ghost kitchens. It has agreed to a
25-unit partnership with Kitchen United
and is making ghost kitchens a part of its