Fraser Thompson handles strategy and operations at Burgers Never Say Die (BNSD). “Burgers Never Say Die is a classic American smash burger spot here in LA, and we have an unwavering commitment to simplicity.”
BNSD began as a backyard pop-up, opened its storefront in February 2019, and is now “largely credited with sparking L.A.’s smashburger frenzy.” The menu stays small on purpose: smash burgers, fries, and a house cheese sauce. “Anyone can add,” Thompson says. “What’s actually hard is taking things away and deciding what makes the cut.”
A short menu still runs a demanding kitchen. The restaurant is open 12 hours a day, and about 60% of its business is delivery. “We have to run 12 feet of grill just to keep up,” Thompson says, all of it under a 20-foot hood.
At that pace, guessing costs money. Thompson moved the operation onto Square for Restaurants to start measuring what sells. Then he turned to Squaremates to find new ways to grow sales.
The challenge: Running a high-volume kitchen on anecdotal data
For years, the kitchen ran on paper tickets, and the team tracked pickup times by hand. Average ticket times hovered around 14 minutes. “For years we worked off paper tickets and super analog like that,” Thompson says. “We could only really work off of anecdotal data. I knew that for us to maintain the throughput that we needed in such a high volume business, we needed to really start measuring things.”
Thompson set a clear target for the kitchen: “I want every customer to have their burger in under five minutes.” Two things stood in the way: time-consuming pickup orders and the complexity of managing delivery apps. Pickup orders came in by phone, and staff sent payment links to close each sale, taking up hundreds of hours a month. Without integration, each delivery app would need its own “sidecar tablet,” making restaurant back-of-house management harder during a rush.
Thompson had a second goal: grow sales on a menu that stays small on purpose. The house cheese sauce, made from trimmed cheese to cut waste, was an if-you-know-you-know item, and new customers often missed it. Paper tickets couldn’t show who ordered it or how often.
Manage your entire restaurant business on one POS system | Explore Square for Restaurants
The solution: Using Squaremates and one connected system to find what customers want
Thompson chose Square partly for Square APIs, which open up business data. “I know that I can build anything that I need to on top of my business,” he says. He built BNSD’s operation around one connected system:
- Kitchen display: Square KDS screens sit at the front-of-house expo and in the back of house. They sort tickets by pickup time, delivery, and future orders. “So our team is always working on the order that needs to happen next,” Thompson says. The screens also time every ticket, and that data led BNSD to change processes and equipment so burgers and fries go out together. (Read how Bagelshop runs its kitchen with Square KDS.)
- Online pickup: Square Online replaced phone orders. (Here are more ideas for growing online orders through a restaurant website.)
- Delivery integration: Delivery apps feed into the POS and pull the menu from it, so the team manages stock in one place. “It’s critical that our delivery partners integrate in our point of sale,” Thompson says. “So we don’t have all these sidecar tablets, and it all has to be in one place.”
Together, those tools give BNSD one shared picture of the restaurant, from every ticket in the kitchen to every order on a delivery app. Squaremates, the AI business partner built into Square Dashboard, works from that picture, so it offers insights on how every part of the business is performing. That connection turns the anecdotal data Thompson described into numbers he can act on.
Thompson used Squaremates to test one specific hypothesis: more customers would order the house cheese sauce if they knew it existed. He asked about cheese sauce and dug into attachment rates plus monthly and weekly trends. The pattern surprised him. “With Squaremates, we kind of surfaced that our OGs, the folks that have loved BNSD since day one, they’re into it,” he says. “They’re ordering it at significantly higher rates than all of our new customers.”
You can put the same kind of question to Squaremates about any item on your menu.
It was such a simple insight, and it would have been so much harder for me to find out on my own. But in collaboration with Squaremates, it just became inevitable.”
Fraser Thompson → Strategy and Operations, Burgers Never Say Die
Impact: Turning one insight into 12X cheese sauce sales
Squaremates helped identify the gap: regulars loved the sauce, and newer customers weren’t finding it. It also suggested ways to close that gap: email and text campaigns, social posts, and featuring the sauce on delivery app menus. Thompson chose channels that fit BNSD. “BNSD doesn’t need to be in people’s inboxes,” he says. “People know where to find us.” His team posted irreverent social content (the “food jacuzzi”) and added a cheese sauce bundle on delivery apps, where about 60% of orders start. Both put the sauce in front of people already engaging with BNSD. “We’ve 12X’d cheese sauce in a matter of months,” Thompson says. Average ticket size rose with it.
Find the insight hiding in your sales data | Explore Squaremates
With Square KDS, Square Online, and delivery apps all feeding one POS – and Squaremates on top of it – BNSD now has numbers for the kitchen it used to track by hand:
- Ticket times: Average ticket times fell from 14 minutes to under five (about 3.5 to 4.5 minutes) after BNSD added KDS and changed its kitchen routines. “Square helped us streamline our operations. But full credit goes to these guys,” Thompson says. “Our team made it happen.” Ticket time now sits alongside the other restaurant metrics that shape daily decisions.
- Pickup orders: Pickup orders rose 73% after the switch to Square Online, and the team saves hundreds of hours each month managing them.
- Forecasting: Thompson builds on the APIs, including an ordering and forecasting engine that recommends orders for the next few weeks.
Kitchen data now shapes the requirements for BNSD’s new spaces. “As we think about what’s next for Burgers Never Say Die, and we think about bringing BNSD to more customers, we know that Square is going to scale with us through that whole process,” Thompson says. “That makes it really easy to build our business on top of Square.”
