The challenge
Knowing when guests would arrive, with a locator they couldn't control
Senior Director of Digital Experience, Dan Cardamone, oversees Culver's guest-facing digital channels, from the website and mobile app to third-party delivery and the loyalty program.
As the company leaned into digital convenience, Dan and team set out to create a seamless yet uniquely Culver's guest experience from discovery to pickup and delivery. That meant rethinking their previously undifferentiated digital ordering setup, starting with a custom store locator that could do more than link guests to a restaurant page.
For a cook-to-order brand that doesn't compromise on quality, accurate order timing is paramount. Culver's needed to know when guests were on their way, and most importantly, when they were approaching and arriving at the restaurant, so restaurants could prepare orders closer to arrival without food sitting for too long.
“When you're dealing with perishable food, timing is everything. You need to know exactly when a guest will arrive so meals are prepared at the right moment.”
At first, Culver's experimented with a web-only, templated locator, but the tool offered little control over configuration or troubleshooting. They needed a developer-friendly, API-first platform that would integrate into their custom stack without rigid workflows—and without building and maintaining an in-house solution. When Culver's was introduced to Radar, they immediately recognized it as the flexible, reliable solution they'd been looking for.
The solution
An API-first location platform that powers loyalty-building experiences
Right away, Radar gave Culver's the building blocks they needed to create customized ordering and pickup experiences—and the platform fit directly within Culver's existing tech stack. To support a smooth implementation, Radar paired the team with a dedicated customer success manager and solutions engineer. “It was one of the best onboarding experiences we've had,” Dan says.
Today, Radar powers the restaurant search and selection behind every digital order. Guests share their location or enter their city, state, or zip code to find their nearest restaurant and check the local Flavor of the Day, on a Culver's-customized map powered by Radar Maps. Once an order is placed, Radar ties it to a specific restaurant and uses geofences to track trips and detect guest ETAs and arrivals—so teams can adjust workflows to ensure every order is picked up fresh.
“Even if we're stretching feature boundaries, Radar can get our ideas cleared within weeks. They've saved us from standstills and helped us give customers the best possible experiences.”
The results
Culver's increases tracked customers by 5X YoY
With Radar, Culver's has created a faster, more reliable order-ahead experience for guests and scaled digital ordering across their growing restaurant footprint. Since implementing Radar:
- 130K+ growth in repeat customers in one year
- 35% increase in online ordering volume
- 50% cost savings from choosing Radar
- 50% decrease in wrong-location arrivals
Next, Culver's plans to expand how they use Radar for location-based marketing and customer engagement, particularly across their loyalty program, with Radar's location intelligence supporting more location-aware experiences across the app and website.
