WOWorks CMO Joel Bulger on Loyalty’s Next Act and Making it Easy for GLP-1 Users

Our Conversations series from the National Restaurant Association Show continues with Joel Bulger, CEO of multi-brand fast-casual platform WOWorks. Bulger and I got pretty deep into AI and loyalty and one of the big topics of this year’s event (as you will see in future Q&As), GLP-1s.

Here is our talk. Bulger will also be a speaker at our upcoming QSR Evolution Conference, if you want to jump into the debate. Registration is now open here.

Let’s start with an innovation you think is really making a difference for restaurants.

AI is easy. Let’s start with even some simple ChatGPT or Claude. For the restaurant industry, or industries in general, I think it’s a crazy advantage the things you can do. It’s almost a sounding board of 1.7 trillion websites you can bring at your disposal. It’s incredibly valuable for small restaurant groups because they can do labor scheduling, or brand strategy, or look at competitors, or do market evaluations. All basically for free.

And they can even do menu items. Between ChatGPT and Flux 1.1 and all these different AI resources out there, you can literally do an entire menu without doing any photography. But you can also do training guides. You can do all these back-of-house things that really help the industry. That’s probably, now, much more helpful for smaller brands that don’t have the resources to do that in another way.

I use it for competitive evaluation. I use it if we’re doing some type of new technology. I’ll even do it for looking at trademarks and new names for products and things like that. It’s having this at-hand resource that’s pretty incredible and very efficient for a first-hand option. Then, you take that and re-sort it into whatever data resources you have to verify with.

Some of my previous conversations have brought up this idea of optimizing AI on the wrong path if you train it that way. What do you think?

Do you know Coursiv? You’re right. It’s like the old garbage in, garbage out. You’re only as good as the prompts you put it. Coursiv is a way, 45 days, a class a day, 15 minutes, where you will learn how to do prompts and everything else. It’s a real cool way to walk through the different AI programs out there that are most useful and then how do you use them to boost efficiency.

OK, the opposite. What are you skeptical of still?

I don’t think anybody’s figured out the perfect mousetrap for small- to medium-sized brands in terms of loyalty. I don’t feel like it works hard enough for them. You have to get to a Starbucks, McDonald’s type-of level until you can really make that work and put the effort and time behind it.

A true loyalty program, the benefit, obviously, is you’re creating that so if Danny Klein is the center of the spiderweb everything that comes in, whether it’s SMS or email or POS or how you purchase, when you purchase, dayparts, how many people you come with, all of that lands in the middle and that’s your source knowledge on your customers, right? And then you use that to market to them in a meaningful and relevant way.

It’s hard for smaller companies. There are a lot of out-of-the-box products. But somebody needs to figure out a one-best way for smaller brands where there’s a higher level of engagement and higher level of usage. People do it to be able to give out coupons to drive traffic. I don’t think a lot of brands use it for the customer data they can then harvest to do other things with. Somewhere along the way, and maybe with technology and AI and all the things that are out there, maybe it will come along quicker.

A lot of companies will tell these brands the what. But they don’t tell them the why or the how. It’s like a checkbox. It reminds me of back in the day when you had to have an app. You didn’t know what it did. It wasn’t useful. People got rid of it in three days. Eventually somebody said, alright, it has to be an app that people want to engage with. Therefore, it’s useful. Therefore, they want to have it on their phone as the one of eight restaurant apps people carry on average.

That’s a big thing. I’ve done every type of loyalty in the world. I’ve done points.

I’ve done where you just do added value. I’ve done hybrids. I’ve done, back in the day, the buy 10, get one free.

Surprise and delight. There are 1,000 things. Unfortunately, generationally, it changes.

If you get into Gen X and it was kind of OK. The Starbucks generation right now, which is a lot of Gen X and younger, they’re fine. Or Delta.

I want to know where I stand with you. I want to bypass everybody in the world to get what I want to get. At Delta, you want to get on first.

At Starbucks, you want to go to the front of line and for people to say your name as you come in.

But as you get younger, it’s more, I want you to know who I am. I want it to be meaningful as you’re giving me things. Either I want to be my only person in my friend group in the know. Or I want it to be something super cool I can post socially to make my journey more meaningful. I’m not sure anybody is there yet. Hopefully they will be soon.

I love loyalty programs. You hear all these companies every three to five years they completely change them. That means nobody has found the one-best way.

Give us a topic for next year you think will be a big one, or one that maybe we’re not talking about enough right now.

GLP-1 is not going away. You figure right now, last summer, Fortune Magazine said one in 12 people. So, 8 percent of the population was on GLP-1. But more importantly, of the people on GLP, 57 percent said they were dramatically decreasing business to restaurants. And I think that was a combination of you’re not as hungry, but also you feel like you’re going to fall off the rails of what you’re trying to do if you come to a restaurant.

But, at the same time, of those people who aren’t on it yet, I think seven of them said I would be on it if it was cheaper, because I’m not also going to spend $1,000 a month. So, I think that whole wave is going to continue to grow. The brands that are getting way ahead of it, and fortunately for my brands, not only do we have a lot of GLP friendly products being on the healthier side of the platform, but we’ve always had a nutritional website I think is best in class where you can go in and it’s got your typical calories, fat, salt, and all that.

But on the right, it’s all the lifestyle filters.

If your kids, if one is lactose intolerant, and one can’t do gluten, you put in those filters and tap the restaurant, and it will tell you exactly what you can eat, which is great for parents. Then you take it a step further and we just added a GLP filter as well. Now, it will tell you all the things that are GLP friendly.

What does GLP friendly mean?

It’s a combination of you have to have a certain amount of protein, a certain amount of fiber, and a certain amount of calories. The cool thing is, if it’s GLP friendly, it falls within that. And there’s “GLP close” where it will say these products, they’re not exactly GLP. If you click on it, it will tell you why. It will say you need a little bit more fiber, etc. But you’re not falling off the tracks by eating it.

You see some of the bigger brands doing it. Smoothie King and some other people who were really pushing forward on the GLP menu. Now, we have a GLP bar at the top of each of our websites that says if you want to eat better, come in here.

To me, it’s not dissimilar to when Atkins came around. It’s not just, I’m going to give you food that makes you stay in your diet. It’s I understand what you’re going through. A restaurant’s job is not to stop you and make you come to our restaurant. A restaurant’s job is you’re living your life, and if I can just weave myself into that life as you’re going along and you feel like that actually made my day a little bit better versus I had to change my life for you, that’s where we come in.