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How Tortilla and Pho turned their data problem into a commercial advantage

I used to sit in menu development meetings where every decision came down to what someone in the room liked.

Dishes added because a senior person enjoyed them. Dishes cut because of feedback from a couple of sites. That was just how it worked.

I’ve spent over 20 years in hospitality across operations and finance, and that pattern showed up in every business I worked in. Good people, making calls without the full picture.

What Tortilla and Pho both found is what happens when you give those same people data they can actually trust, and act on. The quality of the call doesn’t just improve, the speed, and outcomes improve too.

Reporting is a decision-making problem, not an admin one

Wayne Dejager is the CFO at Pho, with 50 sites across the UK. He described what the start of his week used to look like before getting a data platform in place:

“I wake up on a Monday morning. The first thing I would look at is last week’s sales, because that’s the very first thing we need to figure out what happened during the week.”

What that meant in practice was pulling figures manually from multiple sources before any performance conversation could begin. Then the board called wanting answers. Then investors called wanting to know why.

He was candid about the process. Even as CFO, even knowing the stakes, spreadsheet errors crept in. “They break all the time. Doesn’t matter how good you are.”

When a figure goes out wrong it doesn’t just create a correction. It creates doubt about every figure that follows. Boards start hedging decisions. Investors who’ve seen one wrong number question the right ones. Gradually, without anyone announcing it, the data becomes something people argue about rather than act on.

Wayne described what that pressure felt like at the sharp end: “They don’t just want the information, because they immediately ask two seconds later: why is this? If you’re just relying on spreadsheets, you’re in trouble.”

The question investors and boards are asking isn’t new. What’s changed is how long it takes to get a good answer.

What mistrust in data costs a business

Andrew Brook joined Tortilla as Technology Director three years ago. He was open about what he walked into:

“It wasn’t that we didn’t have data. We just weren’t doing anything with it. We weren’t making decisions based off data.”

The finance team was spending hours every week rebuilding reports that kept going out with errors. “Spreadsheets built upon spreadsheets, sending out with errors. There was no trust in the data at all.”

The consequence was practical. With 65 restaurants in the UK and 13 in France, investment decisions, project sign-offs and operational calls were being made without a reliable evidence base. Not because people weren’t capable, but because the data they had couldn’t be trusted enough to stake a decision on.

Wayne described the same feeling from a finance perspective. “You need to trust that what you’re looking at is real.” When that trust isn’t there, the conversation shifts from what to do, to whether the numbers are right. And that conversation is expensive.

What both operators actually changed

Both Tortilla and Pho started by getting the data they already had into a single view that updated automatically, without anyone having to build it each week.

At Tortilla, daily sales, weekly labour and margin packs became automated outputs. Andrew described the result: “It’s changed things from an administrative task to a value-add task.” The finance team’s hours didn’t disappear. They went somewhere more useful.

At Pho, the data started surfacing things the weekly rebuild had always obscured. Wayne’s team could track upsell performance by individual member of staff, across every site, over time. Identifying who was consistently driving spend per head, understanding what they were doing differently, and feeding that directly into training across the estate. “That’s actually starting to move the needle on the average spend per head.”

Once data is trusted and visible in one place, operators find things they weren’t looking for. I’ve seen a dish removed from a menu because five sites flagged negative feedback. It turned out to be one of the best-performing dishes in the business. The loudest voices won over the full picture, and a margin-positive product disappeared because nobody had the data to challenge it.

That kind of decision happens in hospitality all the time. Fixing the reporting process doesn’t just improve what you already measure. It changes what you’re able to see.

The clearest measure of what that makes possible is Tortilla’s kiosk rollout. Andrew used live performance data to build the internal case, updated week by week and site by site. The board had hoped for 20 sites in the first year. “As soon as I put it in front of our CEO, it was: how quick can we go with this? We’ve got 50 sites live within one year.”

The data didn’t make that decision. It removed the doubt that had been slowing it down.

About Ometis

We’re a data consultancy specialising in hospitality. We’ve worked with 250+ businesses including PizzaExpress, Burger King, Butlin’s, Flat Iron, and many more.

Our product, Tahola-AI, connects every system an operator already runs into a single view that updates automatically. EPOS, labour, stock, bookings, finance, guest feedback. No manual reporting. The right data, in front of the right people, when they need it.

All for a monthly subscription starting from £95 a month.

Find out more here.