Captain D's has been serving seafood since 1969—but keeping up with how guests want to order today is a different challenge entirely. With more than 520 locations across the United States, the brand needed online ordering and loyalty tools that were easy for guests to use and easy for the team to manage—without getting locked into technology that would limit growth. By partnering with Olo, Captain D's overhauled its digital systems: Ordering and Serve gave guests a smoother, more intuitive ordering experience, while Loyalty replaced a cumbersome, password-dependent program with a simple phone-number-first experience that made signing up and earning rewards feel effortless. The result: online ordering more than doubled, loyalty membership grew 42%, and loyalty members now spend 30% more than non-members.
Increase in loyalty membership year-over-year
Higher spend from loyalty members vs. non-members
Growth in SMS subscribers since program launch
Growth in online orders
Captain D's occupies a distinctive niche in the QSR world: the experience of a sit-down meal delivered at fast-food speed and price. With a loyal guest base and a growing footprint, the brand recognized that its approach to online ordering and loyalty had not kept pace with how guests wanted to engage.
The previous online ordering front end was clunky and required too much manual work for simple tasks such as promoting limited-time offers. While the provider always promised improvements, they never materialized. Meanwhile, the loyalty provider required guests to remember passwords, navigate cumbersome account flows, and jump through hoops just to redeem a reward—the opposite of what a fast-food brand should offer. The legacy systems provided little insight into who guests actually were or how they wanted to be reached, making it difficult to develop a solid loyalty strategy.
Captain D's overhauled its digital infrastructure, with a firm requirement: it did not want another monolithic, all-in-one platform that would lock it into a rigid technology stack or make it hard to adapt as the industry evolved. Kiosks, AI-powered drive-thrus, and touchless ordering were already emerging as the next frontier. Captain D's needed a partner that could grow with the brand.
Olo rose to the top of the evaluation for its forward-thinking roadmap and clear status as an industry leader with reliable, capable technology. First, the team migrated to Olo for online ordering and implemented Serve, a conversion-optimized, white-label ordering experience for web and mobile that’s included with Ordering.
For Loyalty, Olo offered the flexibility Captain D's needed. A simple, passwordless phone-number-first enrollment process removed the biggest barrier to guest sign-up. Integration with the brand's existing Olo online ordering platform was seamless. And crucially, Olo Loyalty could scale and pivot as Captain D's strategy evolved.
Captain D’s saw immediate benefits by migrating to Olo Serve—online orders increased in the first month. Onboarding new stores once took 7–10 days; now it's nearly instantaneous. Captain D’s had a complex menu with modifiers and side options, and Serve highlighted all the options with eye-catching photos, making ordering easy and error-free. Since migrating to Olo, the brand has increased its digital ordering mix from roughly 5% of total sales to approximately 10%, with select locations reaching up to 40%—growth the brand attributes in part to a guest experience that simply works.
Where other restaurants are stuck in all-in-one solutions they can’t unbundle, Captain D's chose Olo Loyalty precisely because it wouldn't box in the brand’s capabilities. The flexibility positions Captain D's to tackle its next frontier: reaching drive-thru guests (historically the hardest segment to engage) and converting anonymous transactions into trackable loyalty relationships.
Keith Canseco, Senior Director of National Marketing
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