Luna Grill

Mediterranean Fast-Casual65+

Driving Guest Engagement and Frequency with unPLUG Dining

68%

YoY 1P Digital Sales Increase

71%

YoY 1P Digital Orders Increase

About The Partnership

Luna Grill is a Mediterranean fast-casual chain with 50 locations across California and Texas. The brand had strong guest affinity and ambitious growth plans, but its digital channels were underperforming.

Integrations: PAR Brink, Punchh

"We have ambitious goals at Luna Grill to offer a digital experience that is just as high quality as the food we serve. unPLUG's partnership is one-of-a-kind. Through consistent collaboration, we are supported with the tools we need to optimize and adjust our digital strategies based on real time data, guest engagement, and the emerging needs of the business."
Maddie Nixon
Digital Marketing Director

The Challenge

Before partnering with unPLUG in early 2024, Luna Grill's first-party digital sales were growing at roughly 5% year over year. Their existing ordering experience had friction points that suppressed conversion. Loyalty sign-ups were lower than they should have been for a brand with this much repeat traffic. The marketing team had no deep-linking capability, limited CRM tools, and no visibility into how guests were moving through digital channels. There was no measurable ROI on digital marketing spend.

The goal was specific: rebuild the first-party ordering experience to reduce friction, make loyalty sign-up effortless, give the marketing team real campaign tools, and connect everything to Luna Grill's existing Brink POS and Punchh loyalty stack.

Within the first year, first-party digital sales grew 68% year over year. Digital orders increased 71%. Loyalty guest frequency rose 50%. And the loyalty participation rate hit 30% of all POS transactions.

How We Solved It

The strategic approach and key implementations that drove success

Custom First-Party Ordering Experience

unPLUG ran collaborative workshops with Luna Grill's marketing, IT, culinary, and operations leaders to map every guest touchpoint and identify the biggest opportunities for improvement. The priorities that emerged: reduce ordering friction, make loyalty sign-up effortless, expand SMS and LTO marketing capabilities, and give the team visibility into how guests move through digital channels.

From there, unPLUG built a custom first-party ordering experience on our cloud-native platform, tailored to Luna Grill's brand and menu. The new experience increased Average Order Value through smarter upsells, simplified loyalty account creation, added Apple Pay and gift card support, and integrated customer support directly into the ordering flow. Everything connected into Luna Grill's existing Brink POS and Punchh loyalty stack with no disruption to store operations.

The results: 82% add-to-cart purchase conversion and a 26% session-to-purchase conversion rate.

Deep Linking and Marketing Intelligence

On the marketing side, unPLUG enabled deep linking across all digital channels, so Luna Grill's team could drive guests directly into the ordering flow from any SMS, email, or social campaign. Before unPLUG, the team had no way to attribute orders to specific campaigns or measure which channels were actually driving revenue.

The platform's analytics layer gave them the guest-level data they needed to measure LTO performance, track channel attribution, and continuously refine their digital strategy. This wasn't a generic dashboard. It was campaign-specific, guest-specific visibility that the team uses daily.

Online loyalty sales grew 76% year over year. Loyalty sign-ups increased 63%. And the most frequent shoppers pool, the guests who order regularly, grew 74%.

Guest Intelligence and AI Recommendations

What separates unPLUG from a standard ordering platform is the intelligence layer. Luna Grill's experience includes AI-powered menu recommendations that adapt to each guest's ordering history and preferences. The system surfaces personalized upsells at checkout, driving higher AOV without relying on blanket discounts.

The platform also tracks signed-in guest lifetime value, giving Luna Grill a clear picture of which acquisition channels produce the most valuable long-term customers, not just one-time orders.

Signed-in guest lifetime value increased 57%. Retention rate sits at 44%, up 12 points from the pre-unPLUG baseline.

What's Next

Luna Grill is actively expanding, with new locations opening across California and new markets on the horizon. The unPLUG platform scales with them. Every new store launches with the full digital experience from day one, including ordering, loyalty, deep linking, and analytics.

The next phase of the partnership focuses on AI-powered menu personalization. unPLUG's recommendation engine is tuned to surface meal suggestions based on each guest's ordering history, dietary preferences, and trending items. The goal is to increase Average Order Value without discounting, by showing guests items they're more likely to want.

Luna Grill's marketing team is also expanding their use of the analytics layer to run more granular LTO campaigns, test regional menu variations, and measure the full-funnel impact of every digital touchpoint.