How one franchisee cut wasted time and made onboarding easier, joining more than 1,200 Chick-fil-A locations
This story describes the customer's experience with Jolt, which SmartSense acquired in 2025.
Where Things Started
Sam is a veteran restaurant owner, and even with years behind him, he'd hit a wall. He was wrestling with accountability and productivity across his stores and needed a better way to onboard new hires. The frustration was mounting.
"I was getting so frustrated. I thought, 'I need a tool for this.'"
He heard about the solution from a fellow Chick-fil-A franchisee, and decided to try it.
Joining More Than 1,200 Locations
Sam joined the more than 1,200 Chick-fil-A locations already using the platform to run their daily tasks and checklists. His employees took to it right away, and the financial case became clear just as fast. By his own conservative math, he estimates he saves at least $25 a day, more than $650 a month.
" At an average wage of $12.50 an hour, saving two hours every day in wasted time, the savings are significant. Jolt is well worth the monthly investment."
A Year Later
Twelve months in, Sam's store in Norristown was running noticeably more efficiently and productively than before.
And his store is far from alone. It's one of more than 1,200 Chick-fil-A locations using the platform to work through daily operations. Across the country, more than 40,000 Chick-fil-A employees rely on it, and to date they've used it to complete over 10 million tasks.
The solutions behind the story
Chick-fil-A owners like Sam rely on:
- SmartSense Operate, so the whole team does the right thing, at the right time, in the right way.
- SmartSense remote monitoring that sends alerts when temperatures fall outside a defined range.
How the time savings add up
Sam’s own numbers make the arithmetic plain. At an average wage of $12.50 an hour, two hours of wasted time is $25 a day. He treated that as a floor, more than $650 a month, not a best case. The same daily tasks and checklists that cut that time also gave new hires a set of steps the rest of the store was already running, which is the onboarding problem he had been trying to solve.
A year later he still described the Norristown store as more efficient. It was one location among more than 1,200 Chick-fil-A restaurants on the platform, with more than 40,000 employees and over 10 million tasks completed.
Related reading
For more on restaurant onboarding and daily accountability, read It's so simple to adopt, says 3rd generation McDonald's owner, How 19 McDonald's Stores Mastered Food Safety and Shift Management, and New Hire Onboarding: Best Practices with SmartSense.