A beloved hot chicken restaurant replaced chaotic lines with a seamless self-ordering experience — built around their unique two-line kitchen operation.
When Pretty Bird opened, demand far exceeded expectations. Lines stretched 100 people deep, with up to 30 tickets flooding in every minute. The restaurant's priority had always been two things: great food and great customer service. With that volume, maintaining both was nearly impossible without a system that could keep up.
What made Pretty Bird's operation especially complex was its kitchen structure. Two entirely separate production lines ran simultaneously — one dedicated to fried chicken sandwiches, the other to tender rolls and three-piece tenders. From the outside it sounds simple, but anyone who's worked through systems integration knows the nuances that come with routing orders correctly across separate workflows.
Pretty Bird's Square account manager referred them to several kiosk companies that integrated with Square. Flash Order stood out from the first conversation.
"When I reached out to Flash Order, they really wanted to understand Pretty Bird — who we are, what we do, and why we need them. They really listened, and they showed up."
Rather than pitching a one-size-fits-all solution, the Flash Order team came in, observed the layout, mapped the order flow, and designed an experience around how Pretty Bird actually operates.
"It changes everything to be able to see the layout, understand the order flow, and then design an experience around them. It was kind of our ideal situation — everybody orders from the kiosk."
The two-line kitchen structure required careful thought on the technical side. Orders needed to route correctly through Square's Orders API, with item and variation IDs flowing through cleanly to the Square KDS so each station only saw what was relevant to them. What initially seemed like a complex problem turned out to be well within Flash Order's capabilities once the integration was mapped out properly.
"We're extremely technical in our systems and our processes. But the beauty of that from a customer's point of view — they don't see any of that. They just get something that's delicious, humbling, and familiar."
The end result was a single platform handling everything — all orders flowing from the kiosks through Flash Order into the Square backend. Square handled reporting and forecasting on the back end; Flash Order handled the customer-facing experience up front.
Bringing in four kiosk registers transformed operations. The chaotic single-line experience gave way to a smooth, distributed ordering flow that could handle the volume Pretty Bird was seeing. Staff could focus on food and hospitality rather than managing a queue. The kiosks became the default — and customers adapted quickly.
"Bringing in the kiosk systems has been a life saver. Now we have four registers."
See how Flash Order can simplify your operation — in under 5 minutes.
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