Case Studies

Cunningham Restaurants Migrates 23 Sites in 45 Days with BentoBox

How a regional hospitality group refreshed their digital front door in just over a month.

Locations:: 44

Founded:: 1997

City:: Indianapolis, IN

Products Used:

Cunningham Restaurant Group is growing quickly. “Currently we have 44 locations,” says VP of Marketing Carissa Newton, “but that number grows every day.”

Based in Indianapolis, the restaurant group operates concepts that range from quick-service to fine dining across three states. Part of Newton’s job is managing the sprawling group’s digital presence.

With so many restaurant websites to manage, the Cunningham marketing team was finding it harder and harder to make updates. The websites were built in a patchwork way: some were on a proprietary CMS, some were not. Some felt modern, others hadn’t been refreshed in years.

Changes had to be made on a daily basis, Newton says, but it wasn’t happening. “We were experiencing longer wait times for changes to websites because we had limited access to changing them ourselves. And the bigger the group got, the bigger the issue became.”

Seeking an industry expert

Cunningham needed a website solution that would plug into their existing technology and scale with the company. “A lot of technology is great for a single restaurant or brand. But when you’re a multi-concept group, it gets complex very quickly.”

She decided to launch with BentoBox. “Having partners that understand your industry is critical,” Newton says. “When I spoke to BentoBox, it was clear that they knew restaurants. That’s the only way we could have completed this migration as quickly as we did.”

BentoBox gave us the capability to make any change, across all our websites, on our own. It gave us the keys to be much more nimble in the changes that we want to make.

Carissa Newton

VP Marketing, Cunningham Restaurant Group

A “seamless” migration

At the time of the project’s kickoff, Cunningham had two months to migrate more than twenty websites from the old CMS onto BentoBox. Right away, the project moved swiftly.

“BentoBox was very positive and flexible,” Newton recalls. “They already understood restaurants and ordering channels and menus, but they also took the time to understand our group and how we're structured. It was a very easy process for us to go through.”

Working closely with her BentoBox rep, who spearheaded a team of designers, engineers, and strategists, Newton supplied a library of brand materials and let the BentoBox team get to work.

“We handed over everything from our restaurant directory to our brand guide to our marketing plan, and just said, ‘Here’s all our information.’ It was seamless. Probably the easiest migration I’ve worked on.”

Accelerating the timeline

Weeks into the project, Newton got a surprise from Cunningham’s outgoing web developer: the deadline to migrate all the websites moved up a week.

“I came to the BentoBox team and said, ‘Hey, this is a week earlier than we expected. Can we get it done?’ So they reprioritized the order of the sites being migrated and got it done.”

BentoBox homepage of Bru Burger Bar, Cunningham Restaurant Group’s biggest brand concept.

Results

A project that kicked off in early May launched 23 websites by the middle of June. “We finished ahead of schedule,” Newton says.

“BentoBox gave us the capability to make any change, across all our websites, on our own. It gave us the keys to be much more nimble in the changes that we want to make.”

BentoBox is still standing by to assist the Cunningham marketing team with any time-saving tasks, but most of the management is happening in-house, where Newton wants it to be.

“The only thing we're sending to the BentoBox team is our finalized menus,” Newton says. “They’re helping us get those on. Everything else we're doing on our own.” Cunningham has even been able to eliminate a subscription from their tech stack. “We’re not going to need our old menu aggregation service, because we’ll be able to do it through BentoBox.”

Early results of the migration are positive. “We're seeing additional traffic,” says Newton. Potential reasons she cites are:

Better SEO. “Our sites are better search-optimized now; all our sitemaps are consistent and updated.”
Web accessibility. “Not many of our former sites were ADA-compliant. That’s one of the things you don’t think about when you go site by site over the years, but a big migration project cleans everything up.”
Mobile optimization. “Only about 70% of our old sites were mobile-optimized. With this migration, all of them are.”
Faster load times. “Site speed is another factor attracting traffic. Load times seem to be improved as well.”

With BentoBox, Cunningham Restaurant Group was able to take control of dozens of restaurants’ websites in a scalable, consistent way — on a tight timeline.

“I can't speak highly enough about how well BentoBox did,” says Newton. “It was a very successful project because both sides were invested and both sides had the knowledge.”

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