Restaurant chain uses Oracle Cloud to address changing tastes of hungry patrons
Mexican chain serves over 240 locations with a tasty mix of Oracle solutions that span both traditional and cloud native applications.
“With OCI Container Instances, we do not have to hassle with installing, provisioning, or managing infrastructure.”
Business challenges
Grupo Restaurantero Gigante is the restaurant arm of Grupo Gigante, a large publicly-traded Mexican holding company with retail businesses ranging from Office Depot and Petco to Panda Express. The company’s largest restaurant chain, Toks, offers fast casual Mexican cuisine. The restaurant group serves over 30 million customers annually and employs more than 10,500 employees across 240-plus locations.
As the size of operations grew, the IT team became strained. The organization began to look for ways to accelerate the development of new features for its website, mobile apps, ordering systems, point of sales, and more. Company leaders also wanted to deploy application updates faster and more economically.
Why Grupo Restaurantero Gigante chose Oracle
As a longtime Oracle customer, Grupo Restaurantero Gigante recognized that adopting Oracle Fusion Cloud applications and cloud infrastructure from Oracle would be a logical decision.
The company selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to create a development environment for software engineers, IT operations, and system administrators. Running OCI, the team could build, test, and innovate using the full range of cloud services Oracle provides.
“With OCI, we did not have to limit ourselves to just one type of architecture or to other requirements from the cloud provider,” says Fernando Vasquez, the company's cloud administrator and senior DBA.
Results
Grupo Restaurantero Gigante decided to host a customer loyalty program for the chain restaurant Toks on OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE). Toks’ loyalty plan serves more than a million members via a mobile app, website, and point of sale.
Toks developed a menu administrator application so that it can publish menu and price updates to websites and food delivery platforms, where guests can order. Toks originally deployed its menu application on OCI virtual machines. This year, the organization containerized this application and now uses OCI Container Instances to run containers in a serverless way, without having to manage infrastructure.
From a security and compliance perspective, Grupo Restaurantero Gigante makes frequent use of OCI Container Registry due to the built-in vulnerability scanning. Similarly, the firm uses OCI Functions as a key component to trigger identity and access controls.
About the customer
Grupo Restaurantero Gigante is part of the Grupo Gigante consortium. It is made up of five restaurant brands: Toks, El Farolito, Shake Shack, Beer Factory and Food, and Panda Express.