From "Middleware Misery" to Sky-High Margins: How Kinetic Eats Revolutionized Operations with Intelligentic

When you think of complex operations, you might not immediately picture a restaurant. But imagine running 45 distinct digital restaurant brands from a single kitchen, operating for 22 hours a day, 365 days a year. That's the challenge faced by Kinetic Eats, a Los Angeles-based, delivery-first food ecosystem. Despite the seeming simplicity of "just flipping a burger, bagging it, and handing it to a driver," their reality was anything but.

The Culinary Chaos: A Fragmented Tech Stack and Low-Margin Grind

Kinetic Eats operates on the principle of "food at the speed of life," requiring rapid order acceptance, cooking, and delivery to maintain high customer ratings. However, their ambitious adoption of various technologies for order generation, back-office management, communications, and dashboards led to a "painfully fragmented tech stack".

They were juggling over eight disparate systems, including:

Delivery platforms: Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, EZCater

Point-of-sale (POS): Square (for payments, menus, and kitchen management)

Order aggregation: Deliverect

HR: Homebase

Dispute management/sales tracking: Loop AI

Bookkeeping/payroll: QuickBooks

Communication: G Suite/Email, Telegram, and multiple dashboards

This led to what they termed "middleware misery"—a proliferation of rigid, pre-packaged solutions that caused more friction than they solved. Senior management had to manually gather information into spreadsheets, leading to unread emails, missed actions, and ignored intelligence. This inefficiency created a "low margin grind," with projected store margins around 10% The core operational headaches were clear: inefficient workflows, manual processes, reporting bottlenecks, poor communication, and high overhead costs.

The Transformative Solution: AI-Powered Workflows with Streamline. Kinetic Eats partnered with Intellistack Streamline, enhanced by Intelligentic's innovative approach, to revolutionize their business operations. Intelligentic's mission is to deeply integrate AI and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) with Formstack Streamline workflow automation for customers. They implemented a comprehensive solution that moved beyond fragmented data and human-led management processes. Formstack Streamline became their "Operational Execution Engine," taking raw, disparate information and transforming it into unified, actionable data Key aspects of this transformation included:

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AI-Powered ETL as a "Business Brain": Scratchworks' ETL functions as a sophisticated data refinement engine. It meticulously pulls data from virtually any source, even obscure ones like "mountains of jumbled JSON" from POS systems, handling diverse formats and reconciling inconsistencies like time zone differences before the data reaches Streamline. This ensures Streamline receives only the most essential, clean, and actionable data.

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Integrated AI for Action, Not Just Insight: Advanced AI is directly integrated into the workflows built on Streamline. This AI leverages rich prompt sets specific to operational categories like sales, labor, and inventory, driving action rather than just providing insights3. It operates with "recursive intelligence," constantly analyzing the full context of daily insights to refine data and write it back into the MySQL database connected to Streamline, driving accountability and informed decision-making.

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Business-Changing Workflows: The "core of their business is workflows". Streamline facilitated the creation of an AI-powered, automated, recursive, iterative reporting matrix. This provided a unified view of operations by centralizing data securely across multiple sources. They could automate complex daily tasks, delivering pre-populated, optimized multi-step, multi-person workflows.

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Real-time Visibility and Adherence: The solution ensured adherence to processes and regulations, like vital refrigerator temperature checks, which are critical for health department compliance. "Formstack Streamline and AI never forget, and are always on point". The AI quickly spots high-impact outliers (e.g., unusually low labor costs) and prompts management to investigate.

Revolutionary Impact and Quantifiable Results

The impact on Kinetic Eats was nothing short of revolutionary, delivering rapid ROI. By transforming their operations, they are projected to increase their annual cash flow by $97,000 per location. Their projected store margins are expected to improve from 10% to a remarkable 15%.

As Alan Moore, CEO of Kinetic Eats, powerfully stated, "When you need to cook and deliver half a ton of chicken wings in under four hours for the Super Bowl, you have to rely on workflows"1.... Formstack Streamline, supercharged by Scratchworks' innovative AI and ETL, directly addressed their operational challenges, enabling them to save money, be more efficient, and offer better service. This partnership allowed Kinetic Eats to consolidate tools, empower front-line workers, and ultimately transform their "low margin grind" into a profitable and resilient operation.