Top Women in Restaurant Technology: CMO Integrates Marketing, IT
Jodi Boyce, Chief Marketing Officer, Teriyaki Madness received HT’s Top Women in Restaurant Technology Lifetime Achievement Award at MURTEC 2024 in Las Vegas.
Sponsored by WWT Digital, the 2024 Top Women and Rising Star in in Restaurant Technology awards were presented at the 29th annual MURTEC conference in Las Vegas on March 13.
Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award is “a surprise and honor,” Boyce said. “Several years ago, this award would not be given to a marketing person – it would be someone in IT. Today, the marketing teams are the ones very often leading the need for the tech, so marketing and IT have more crossover now than any other two departments.”
Her-Story
Boyce decided early on to pursue a career in marketing. When I was 5-6 years old, I used to sit in on my mom’s Junior League meetings where she taught marketing to the groups. I never thought anything of it until I sat in my first college marketing class and said, ‘Oh, this is marketing!’ I already had an understanding of it and knew immediately it was what I wanted to do,” she recalls.
Fun fact: Boyce’s first job after graduating from Colorado University Business School in Boulder, Colo., was driving the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile as a Hotdogger. “This job had nothing to do with the food or hotdogs – it was 100% marketing and PR. It launched my career into marketing as well as into the food industry,” Boyce explained. She’s been working in marketing ever since.
During her seven years at Teriyaki Madness, Boyce has helped lead multiple technology projects for the Denver-based franchisor with 150+ locations. When joined the fast casual brand, there was no mobile app, no online ordering, and a minimal social media presence. To this day, “we don’t even have an IT department,” she says. “It falls a lot to marketing these days because it’s integrated. And not only with all the programs we’re using but also with our customers.”
Frictionless Order Pickup
A recent tech win was integrating Flybuy by Radius Networks (with Olo Expo) to help streamline its curbside order pickups. “We won’t use any technology if they’re not already or willing to integrate with the systems we have … One of our reasons for choosing Olo seven years ago was because of their integrations with delivery partners.” In the last 18 months, Teriyaki Madness shop owners have saved $1.7 million in commissions. “It’s a lot of money, and that’s just by getting people to order directly through us, which has a whole other line of benefits as well,” Boyce explained during the MURTEC 2024 panel discussion, Lessons and Insights from MURTEC Award Winners.
When it comes to technology solutions, Boyce says she gravitates towards “selecting technology that is not only easy for consumers to understand and operate, but it functionally makes it easier, faster and smoother to get food into consumers’ hands.”
Looking ahead, Boyce said she is jazzed about fully integrated tech; “any new technology we look at today must be integrated with tech we already have. It has to be easy to operate and easy to understand – and our franchisees and their employees can’t be expected to look at or get into 10 different dashboards to control or understand the programs.”
There’s more to come from Boyce and the TMAD team. “In 2024, we will be rolling out several tech-based programs we tested in 2023. Some are consumer-facing, others are back-of-house efficiencies or training improvements.”
Strategic and Methodical Marketing
Looking back over her career to date, Boyce notes that she’s worked at several large companies with big budgets. “Being at Teriyaki Madness for the past seven years has been extremely rewarding because we learned to be scrappy. Many marketers throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. With our limited budgets in the earlier days, we had to be extremely strategic and methodical about how to spend our marketing dollars. We test and analyze everything we do and it has paid off. And we made technology our priority early on. I’m proud of how far we’ve come in a fairly short amount of time with our limited resources,” she said.
About the Top Women Awards
After a call for nominations, Top Women in Restaurant Technology Award winners were chosen by Hospitality Technology magazine editors and members of its Research Advisory Board. The winners were announced and honored during an awards program, sponsored by WWT Digital, on March 13 at the 29th annual MURTEC (Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference), in Las Vegas. HT will begin accepting nominations for the 2025 Top Women in Restaurant Technology Awards and 2025 Rising Stars in Restaurant Technology in mid-October.