This blog is drawn from a live webinar we ran with the crew from HTT. Watch the full conversation here: brighttalk.com/webcast/19922/653165
When you talk to the folks at High Touch Technologies, you get a sense of warmth and practicality that’s rare in the world of software. Their flagship restaurant management platform, Nigel, isn’t some flashy startup experiment — it’s the product of decades in the restaurant trenches, where downtime ruins nights and grease somehow gets on everything, including the switches.
In a recent conversation with Spectro Cloud’s Justin Barksdale, Nigel's director of operations Roger Somers and enterprise solutions architect Hugh Christiansen, that mix of real-world experience and unpretentious innovation came through loud and clear.
Roger remembers the bad old days: “I grew up in IT, like most people, on the help desk first. Someone on the other end of the phone pulling a hard drive out of a running system that’s not hot-swappable — that’s a bad day.” Hugh nods knowingly. “Restaurants barely had internet service 15 years ago. Now they’ve got digital systems that have to be up 100% of the time.”
That shift — to always-on, digital-first, automated — has transformed the business of serving food. But it’s also created new kinds of complexity. And that’s where Nigel comes in.
Why Nigel? And why a penguin mascot?
There’s a story behind the name. “We wanted a name that sounded helpful,” says Roger. “Someone polished, maybe a little formal, like a butler. Nigel just fit. In America, that name makes you think of someone reliable who’s there to help.”
Apparently, that reliability is in high demand. “We get offers every week from people in the UK who want to buy the nigel.com domain,” Roger laughs. “It’s not for sale.”
The penguin mascot? That came naturally, too. “He’s wearing a tuxedo, so he fits the butler vibe. Plus he’s cool under pressure — just like we try to be.”
And the company name, High Touch, still matters in a world obsessed with automation. “We never want to lose the human side,” Roger says. “Restaurants are about people — staff, guests, community. Our tech should make that connection smoother, not colder.”
Building for the edge
Most restaurant management systems are cloud apps. That means they’re great when the Wi-Fi’s working, not so great when a backhoe cuts through a cable. Nigel flips that model. It runs locally in every restaurant, on a three-node Kubernetes cluster, syncing to the cloud for management and analytics.
“We built Nigel for uptime,” says Hugh. “The restaurant keeps running even if the internet goes down. All the business logic happens on-prem, then syncs up when it can. That hybrid model gives the best of both worlds.”
It also happens to make them early adopters of a growing trend: edge computing. As Justin Barksdale from Spectro Cloud puts it, “processing data where it’s meaningful is everything. Whether it’s a restaurant, a ship, or a satellite, you can’t rely on always-on connectivity. You have to be able to survive.”
Partnership in practice
Managing hundreds or thousands of Kubernetes clusters across different restaurant locations is no small feat. That’s where Spectro Cloud’s Palette platform comes in.
“We were looking for a way to manage on-premises clusters at scale,” Hugh explains. “Kubernetes changes all the time. Palette lets us roll out upgrades, package profiles, and keep everything consistent across restaurants without having to build our own tools.”
Justin’s seen the benefits firsthand. “At the edge, it’s all about scale and consistency. If restaurant A drifts too far from restaurant D, troubleshooting gets painful. Palette keeps them aligned. And it cuts down on truck rolls — no need to send engineers all over the country just to update software.”
Roger adds, “We have this ‘store-in-a-box’ concept. We pre-stage everything at headquarters — tablets, kitchen displays, cluster nodes — and ship it ready to go. When it arrives, the manager just plugs it in. No command lines, no kubectl. They’re online in minutes.”
Restaurants, automation, and the AI buzzword
Inevitably, the talk turns to AI. “There’s a lot of hype,” says Roger. “Everyone’s suddenly an ‘AI company.’ But the useful stuff is purpose-built. Like using cameras to recognize a returning customer’s car, so you can drop extra fries because they’ve got kids in the back. That’s where it gets interesting.”
Justin agrees: “Most edge AI today is computer vision — seeing, detecting, understanding the physical world. It’s not about chatbots. It’s about making the restaurant more efficient.”
The trio laughs about “AI bingo” at conferences, where every vendor feels obliged to mention it. “It’s like when everyone said they were ‘going to the cloud’ 15 years ago,” Justin says. “We’ll see the same normalization. The winners will be the ones who make life better for staff and guests, not just for their marketing slides.”
Frictionless dining, frictionless ops
Underneath the tech talk, there’s a simple philosophy: remove friction everywhere.
“You want the least friction possible at every point of entry for an order,” Roger says. “That means faster service, fewer mistakes, less waste. And with the system running locally, even if the network hiccups, the experience doesn’t suffer.”
It’s easy to forget how much that matters until you’ve been on both sides of the table. “I worked my way through college in restaurants,” says Justin. “When you get slammed and the systems slow down, you feel it. When the tech just works, the guests feel it too.”
Where it’s all heading
Automation, computer vision, predictive AI — the restaurant of the future might look different, but the human priorities won’t change. Diners still want good food, fast. Owners still want stable systems and to protect their slim margins. And for companies like High Touch Technologies, it’s about bringing both together with thoughtful design and solid engineering.
Nigel might sound like the name of a posh butler, but behind it is a team that understands the grease, the chaos, and the grind of restaurant life — and builds technology to make it all a little smoother.
To learn more, check out the full webinar, visit Nigel.com, and explore Spectro Cloud’s restaurant edge solutions and other customer stories from the world of restaurant chains.