GoTo Foods uses data and partnerships to maximize its portfolio

I’m not a gambling man, and yet I feel confident I have a two-leg parlay on what you don’t know. First, I bet the last time you enjoyed your favorite mall snack you weren’t thinking about your pretzel’s parent company. Second, if I told you it was GoTo Foods (formerly Focus Brands), which owns the likes of Auntie Anne’s and McAlister’s Deli, I’d wager that was your first time learning this (if I’m wrong we never shook on it).

Even if GoTo Foods has never crossed your consciousness, the company is probably thinking, and learning, about you. In 2024, a corporate name change marked its steady transition to a platform-company model, unifying operations and technology across different brands with the goal of scalability (Marriott is a successful example of how this type of asset-light strategy can work).

To help facilitate this, GoTo Foods has spent years building an industry-leading data platform that can predict when a customer will visit, what partnerships might work, and what new items might get customers excited. It also restructured to deploy top-level talent across its seven brands (Cinnabon, Carvel, Jamba, Moe’s Southwest Grill, and Schlotzsky’s round out the list), while at the same time distilling what makes each of them unique.

Revenue Brew spoke to three GoTo Foods executives and one food industry expert to decipher how GoTo Foods has used this approach to boost revenue numbers.

The foundation for a large portfolio

When Jim Holthouser, former CEO of GoTo Foods, spoke with Revenue Brew, he hadn’t yet announced his departure after six years at the helm. Looking back, his somewhat reflective tone could have been a tip-off.

One of Holthouser’s main focuses was using the brand's extensive portfolio as an advantage, rather than a sprawling burden.

“It’s not just adding brands for the sake of adding brands. [There] has to be a lot more purpose,” he said.

To achieve this broad alignment, GoTo Foods reorganized in two major ways. First, a centralized corporate team focused on translatable success across the brand’s portfolio, giving each of the seven brands access to top talent. Holthouser said being part of a portfolio, and learning how to put scale to work, is the magic sauce; if the brands all functioned on a stand-alone basis, they couldn’t perform as well.

“We’ve taken a lot of the things that we used to do seven different ways, seven different times, and we’ve taken those out of the brands, and we’ve centralized those,” Holthouser told Revenue Brew.

Second, it deployed a unified technology platform across the brands. Holthouser oversaw the rollout of this centralized data system (including a partnership struck with restaurant technology company Qu in early 2024) that synthesizes each transaction across all seven brands to identify trends and opportunities—it even keeps track of the weather.

“[The database is] going back to your history and saying, ‘he always orders a drink.’ Then it’s going through some logic in the algorithm of saying, ‘it’s Phoenix, it’s 110 degrees…let’s offer up a bottle of water or soda.’ The use of that data gives us a 10% to 11% bigger check,” Holthouser said.

Putting this data platform to use resulted in GoTo Foods generating $1.5 billion in retail sales in 2024. When factoring in other revenue streams like licensing and partnership sales, the brand stated that it generated over $4 billion in system-wide sales in the same year.

WWDD (What would data do)

Kieran Donahue, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at GoTo Foods, is part of the team responsible for distributing data across the company’s brands. She says one of the ways it’s utilized is by indicating where new items might be a good investment.

“One of the things that we are looking at when we look at our data is: Do we have guests that are in one loyalty program as well as another loyalty program? Are we seeing some trends across our guests?” Donahue said.

According to Donahue, the consumer data platform also accounts for customer feedback, which means it can solve problems as granular as what temperature to cook an item.

“The mozzarella bites that we have [at Jamba]...we were getting some comments early on about maybe they weren’t cooked long enough,” Donahue said. She said that GoTo Foods was able to identify affected locations and create solutions within hours.

Elsewhere, Donahue said that the consumer data allows for more strategic selection and execution of external partnerships. For example, the company has a popular partnership with Taco Bell where it offers Cinnabon Delights; this boosted awareness and sales, despite being a tie-up with major competitor Yum! Brands.

“Our licensing team does a great job of leveraging our really iconic brands in a way that is not competitive, but it’s additive in other channels,” Donahue told Revenue Brew.

Influence meets strong branding

Harnessing unified data and high-level talent is integral to GoTo Foods’s success, as is the work of brand-exclusive teams. One of the leaders overseeing that corporate balancing act is Danielle Porto Parra, chief brand officer at McAlister’s.

“It’s been absolutely critical to the continued brand growth to tap into the platform’s capabilities, and that starts with unified data that anticipates guests needs,” Porto Parra said.

Porto Parra gave an example of how this unified data approach can be tapped for the benefit of individual brands at specific locations.

“We do that by being able to tell the cashier whether it’s a loyalty member or not…So if you’re a loyalty member, you get one color. If not, you get another color…We’re applying it to our brand purpose of nourishing connections,” Porto Parra said.

Parra says leaning into what is unique about each brand while leveraging the scale leads to success. One example is when centralized and brand-specific teams work together within the supply chain.

“We have procurement experts who absolutely know each area of what we’re bringing into our restaurants. So whether that’s proteins, whether it’s dairy, whether it’s packaging, they’re able to work across brands,” Parra said. “That does not mean that every brand has the same packaging...We can come together and get some great pricing and get supply continuity that you just couldn’t easily get on your own.”

Each brand also works with a central platform marketing team to create campaigns. Parra said that this is a prime example of the power of working with a portfolio.

“Independent, mid-sized brands are probably not going to have that level of sophistication we have,” Parra said. “We have the data platform, we have internal media experts, and we have a great agency.”

Expert insight: food and beverage industry

While many of us might have felt like experts in fast food during college, Shikha Jain, partner for consumer and retail in North America at consulting firm Simon-Kucher, can make a legitimate claim to the title.

Jain highlighted the importance of companies like GoTo Foods harnessing data, but warned that if used incorrectly, it can also be misleading.

“Data can be an incredibly powerful tool, but you have to remember that when it comes to the consumer, consumer behavior is incredibly varied, ” Jain said.

Jain breaks down data into three buckets: historical (“behavior that you’d expect”), predictive (“use that to extrapolate out”), and market research (“hypothetical situations”), with the idea being that each form of data needs to be deployed intentionally. Jain says data can be a very powerful tool, but also a blunt instrument.

“There’s always changes in the macro economy, and we don’t know how that impacts people’s willingness to pay,” she said.

Jain highlighted real estate as an area for companies with large portfolios like GoTo Foods can look toward.

“You could think carefully about how you do your real estate expansion in the future so that you can create more synergies,” she said.

On the bigger picture, she says it’s hard to gauge where and when potential acquisitions will happen in the quick-service restaurant (QSR) space.

“Private equity has a lot of restaurants that they tend to back, or find large franchisee groups that they back. So it’s not uncommon for there to be constant M&A deal flow or exits and acquisitions on an ongoing basis,” Jain said.