Tech on Toast · Sep 22, 2026 · 27m 14m saved
With Katie Grundy, CRM and Loyalty Manager at itsu
In July itsu offered free gyoza to anyone who downloaded its app, and the app went to No. 1 in the App Store's food and drink category. The chain's app supplier puts loyalty members' visits at three times those of other itsu customers, and Katie Grundy confirmed the figure.
A stamp card pays customers for coming back. Grundy said that is only the base, and that itsu spends its effort on what a stamp cannot buy: a call from the customer services manager, a photo with the shop manager, a reward list rebuilt from customer surveys.
"It's the interaction with the team when you go into a shop. It's the experience of like having your voice heard by us and having your feedback then turn into something that we do on the app."
Katie Grundy, CRM and loyalty manager at itsu, on Tech on Toast. She has worked in loyalty for about eight years, first at L'Oréal, and works on the rewards scheme that itsu rebuilt at the end of 2025 for its roughly 80 shops.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 27 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
A free gyoza for a download took the app to No. 1 in the App Store's food and drink category in July
Loyalty members visit about three times as often as other customers, a figure from the app supplier that Grundy confirmed
The free can of water was dropped after a survey found customers wanted a more generous reward
Shop staff also had nothing exciting to tell customers about the app
The app had no name until the revamp, so staff could not explain what it was for
Personalization still needs manual work at a chain with a lean marketing team
The best customers get a phone call: itsu's customer services manager rings them to ask how their visit went
itsu brings its supplier into next year's plans early, and often finds other brands have asked for the same features
Menus tailored to each customer at the kiosk are where Grundy would like itsu to end up
AI is making a lean team more efficient, she said, but she hopes a person will always be needed
1. From L'Oréal To Sushi
Grundy has been at itsu for about two years. It is her first job in hospitality; before it she worked in fashion and beauty, most recently in CRM and loyalty at L'Oréal. She described herself as a big foodie and said she looks after loyalty, the app and customer marketing. She said interest in loyalty schemes runs across every industry, and dated it, she supposed, to Tesco.
Loyalty has become an obsession, with mixed results
I think everyone's got obsessed with it and there's some brilliant examples of what good looks like and then some others which aren't great.
Katie Grundy
Asked about the size of the chain, she gave a hedged count and said most shops are company-owned, with a few franchised.
itsu runs about 80 shops
I think we have around 80 shops at the minute.
Katie Grundy
The principles are the same as at L'Oréal, she said: the same metrics, the same focus on segmentation, the same aim of getting people to visit or buy more often. The difference is that the shops, their teams and the operation play a much bigger part than they did when she worked on e-commerce behind the scenes. She said meeting the people on the front line has been the part of the move she has enjoyed most. Head office staff work a couple of shop days a year, making sushi on the shop floor at the lunchtime rush, "not as well as the shop teams".
2. Emotional Over Transactional
The host, Chris Fletcher, asked what loyalty means at itsu. Grundy split it in two. Transactional loyalty, where people visit, get rewarded and come back, is important and forms a base. The goal is the level above it.
itsu aims for emotional loyalty
But I think at itsu where we really strive for is that sort of like emotional loyalty.
Katie Grundy
She said that means long-term relationships that a stamp card or an app cannot build alone, and that the approach runs from Julian, itsu's founder, down to the team members in each shop. The chain operates at scale but in "a very like small and local way" in each shop.
Fletcher said that at L'Oréal she was behind a physical product, while this felt more human. Grundy agreed.
A meal creates a memory that a parcel does not
Yeah, it's an experience like someone coming in with their family, sitting down, enjoying the food.
Katie Grundy
She contrasted that with a product ordered online that arrives in the post. The aim is positive experiences that bring customers back and lead them to recommend itsu to friends.
3. Seven Stamps To A Free Meal
Grundy set out how the app works. A customer gets a stamp for every visit of £5 or more, plus a free miso or edamame for signing up. Three stamps earn a free snack or drink, five earn free gyoza, and seven earn a free meal, which she called "by far the most popular reward." Members also get free gyoza on their birthday, occasional surprises, and app-only prices that support launches and new menu items.
The stamp-card scheme in its current form dates from 2024. The rewards were changed at the end of last year, and she said the scheme is still finding its feet.
The job now is to scale the scheme and keep existing members
But I think we're in a really good place now where we're just really trying to scale it and also just nurture the people that we have and the people we've onboarded over the last couple of years.
Katie Grundy
4. Free Gyoza Topped The Charts
Fletcher said he had seen a screenshot of the app's chart position on her LinkedIn. Grundy said it came from a July campaign that gave free gyoza to anyone who downloaded the app.
There was no catch
No catch. You just download the app, you get the gyoza.
Katie Grundy
She said it "by far exceeded our expectations" and also brought people into the shops, where customers queued for the gyoza to come out of the kitchen.
The app reached the top of its category
yeah, we were number one in the food and drink category in the app store.
Katie Grundy
It also climbed the general App Store chart, she said, and influencers and other customers talked about the offer. Fletcher said a marketer rarely gets to see a direct reaction like that to one piece of work.
5. Three Times The Visits
Fletcher then cited a figure from Pepper, the company that supplies itsu's app, and asked her to confirm it.
The host put the supplier's figure to her
three time loyalty members are visiting three times more often. Is that accurate?
Chris Fletcher
Grundy replied, "Yeah. Yeah. Than our like non-loyalty customers." She said itsu already had a very loyal customer base but that the increase did not come by itself. Visit frequency among loyal customers has grown over roughly the past year, since the team put work into the scheme, the CRM and the customer lifecycle program.
Hospitality sales swing with the weather and with train strikes, she said, while app customers keep coming back regardless. Fletcher said he had once doubted that brand loyalty would carry over to phones.
The host's view on phone space
But it feels like the real estate on your phone is taken up by the stuff you actually love, which is what they're proving.
Chris Fletcher
6. Why The Free Water Went
In 2025, about a year after the scheme launched, itsu reviewed the app. The data showed two groups.
Many sign-ups never used the app
So we reviewed that and we saw we had again like this pot of very very frequent customers but there was a lot of customers that had downloaded the app and not really used it and had that low level of frequency.
Katie Grundy
A customer survey asked about the app and the rewards. The old ladder gave a free miso on sign-up, a free snack and a free can of water. The water was itsu's own fruit-flavored Zen water.
Customers wanted something more generous than water
It's like a fruity water, but people were more swaying towards like a more generous gift, shall we say?
Katie Grundy
The shop teams were a second input. Grundy called itsu "a really shops first business" and said staff had nothing to sell the app with.
The old app gave staff little to talk about
And sort of the shop teams didn't really have anything any tools to really sell the app as well because, you know, it wasn't that exciting.
Katie Grundy
The team modeled several scenarios and chose the more generous scheme in use now. Since then, she said, itsu has "managed to grow frequency quite significantly." Fletcher said front-line staff are often not asked for feedback, even though they hear everything.
7. A Name And A Tagline
Asked about the size of her team, Grundy said it is a very lean one. She said some of the fixes were basic. The app had no name and was called simply the itsu app, so staff asking customers whether they had it were met with questions about whether it was a menu or a rewards scheme.
The revamp renamed it itsu rewards and added a tagline to make the exchange of visits for rewards plain to customers: "The more you come, the more you get." That gave shop staff something to say about the app and the better rewards. Fletcher said staff are usually set targets, and a clear offer makes those easier to hit.
Regulars already come every day
Grundy pointed to itsu's shop on the King's Road, where she said "these customers come like day in day out and are very very loyal." The aim is to get those people using the app. She said that is better than blanket discounts because itsu has more control over the data and over how it messages those customers afterwards.
8. Personalization Is Manual
Fletcher said personalized CRM was promised around 2018 and 2019 and never worked, and that operators now have more data than they can use. He asked whether itsu had reached its personalization target.
Some personalization is still done by hand
Like I think obviously we're a lean team and you know we've got great tools but you know there's still an element of manualness to personalization.
Katie Grundy
The data has shown her how varied itsu's customers are. A customer in the city is very different from one in a village, she said, and messages are tailored accordingly.
Breakfast customers get different messages
You know we started selling breakfast so you know making sure we're talking to the people that shop breakfast differently to those that you know don't know about our breakfast.
Katie Grundy
Asked what had surprised her in the data, she said she would not call it a shock. Customers range from finance workers in the city to families in the suburbs, and she has created customer personas for the business. Fletcher recalled a previous job as an operations director, where the office referred to two personas by name. Grundy said itsu links its personas to people in the office. Annabelle, the marketing director, lives in Wimbledon with her family and uses the Wimbledon shop; colleagues in the finance team who live in central London stand in for city customers.
9. A Phone Call For Regulars
Fletcher read out UK research that he said found loyal regulars can generate up to five times more annual revenue for a local business, and asked how itsu balances rewards between its most frequent customers and the rest.
Grundy said the answer is the split between transactional and emotional loyalty. For infrequent customers, the scheme does the work of driving early visits until they reach the free meal. CRM programs in the back end handle the steps in between, such as a first visit to a second, or a download with no visit.
For the most frequent customers, the approach is personal. She said "our customer services manager she like phone calls customers up and asks like oh how was your experience in the shop". Fletcher said he could hardly believe it.
Competition winners meet the shop manager
You know, and like if we do a competition, we'll get the person into the shop and like have a picture with the manager of that shop.
Katie Grundy
itsu also surveys customers often to learn what they think. Fletcher said he dislikes engagement as a metric at his own company, and suggested that the product and the local shop team drive half of engagement before the marketing team does anything.
The shop teams do most of the work
They're doing the leg work. We're just kind of keeping the momentum going behind the scenes really.
Katie Grundy
10. Pushing The Tech Vendor
When technology fails, Grundy said, the team stays in close contact with the shops and with the operations managers who connect head office to them, and its agencies keep itsu informed. She said itsu has not had many incidents.
The app runs on Pepper's platform but is fully branded as itsu. Other quick-service chains use the same platform, she said, and a customer would have no idea.
The supplier's platform is simple to run
Yeah, it's a really straightforward interface.
Katie Grundy
She said itsu works with Pepper strategically and challenges it to develop the app further. The app has come a long way in her two years, and itsu shares its plans with the supplier early; the team is already discussing next year with Pepper so the two road maps line up. Fletcher said too many operators buy technology off the shelf and accept the supplier's road map, and he urged them to get as much out of their technology as they can.
When itsu asks for a feature, Grundy said, Pepper often replies that "several other people have asked for this already". She said there is a lot of overlap between what itsu wants and what the supplier's other brands ask for.
11. Menus Tailored To You
Asked what loyalty looks like in three years, Grundy returned to personalization.
Interest-based offers could reach quick-service restaurants
You kind of put in what you're interested in and they give you offers targeted on what you're interested in. I think that could come into the QSR.
Katie Grundy
She was describing the Marks & Spencer loyalty scheme. Fletcher compared it to Amazon, which shows him what he has already been shopping for, and said restaurants will get there. Grundy said she can picture a customer scanning the app at an itsu kiosk and seeing a menu and offers tailored to them, which is where she would like itsu to be.
12. AI In A Lean Team
Grundy has worked in loyalty for about eight years. When she started, the tools were a CRM system and physical loyalty on the shop floor. She raised AI herself.
AI is changing the tools she uses
It has to creep in, but like you can't deny the impact it's having on I mean our CRM platform.
Katie Grundy
Fletcher asked whether she can now query itsu's data through the CRM using an MCP, a protocol that connects AI models to software tools. She said yes.
AI suggests uses for the data the team would miss
And you know like using AI to sort of recommend ways to use your data that perhaps we wouldn't think of or just you know we're as I say we're a lean team so you know it's so makes things much more efficient.
Katie Grundy
Fletcher said speakers at a conference he attended had said no one can yet prove a return on AI, and that he thinks the return shows up in small teams that lack the capacity to do everything they want. Grundy said a person would still be needed: "there always will need to be the human input to you know I hope". She added that she sees AI coming into her role more and more as a tool.
Bonus Insights
Her first podcast
Fletcher welcomed Grundy to her first podcast appearance. He said the Pepper team had been sent out of the room for the recording.
Nobody in hospitality escapes a shop shift
When Grundy mentioned itsu's shop days, Fletcher said shop-floor work is something nobody in hospitality escapes, and that he had recently seen Ruth Carpenter working in a kitchen at Caravan.
Download the app
Fletcher closed by telling listeners to download the app, and Grundy said its name, itsu rewards. She was going back to work that afternoon.
Grundy's bottom line is that the stamp card gets infrequent customers into the habit, and what keeps the most frequent ones is personal contact from itsu's staff, supported by a supplier that builds what itsu asks for.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
itsu (Grundy's employer, a chain of about 80 shops, mostly company-owned; its app is now called itsu rewards)
Pepper (The platform behind itsu's app, branded fully as itsu; the source of the three-times visit figure the host cited)
L'Oréal (Grundy's previous employer, where she also worked in CRM and loyalty)
Tesco (The scheme Grundy dated the wider interest in loyalty to)
Marks & Spencer (Its loyalty scheme lets members choose their interests and receive targeted offers, which Grundy thinks could come to quick-service restaurants)
Amazon (Fletcher's example of showing customers what they have already shopped for)
Watch the full interview
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