Laying the foundation for restaurant innovation at scale

Sworn to secrecy

This organization is a Fortune 500 restaurant chain, headquartered in California and operating thousands of sites nationwide.

This story is shared anonymously at the customer’s request — but it’s a real-world example of how a household-name restaurant brand is using Spectro Cloud Palette to simplify operations and power innovation at scale.

We’ve kept identifying details confidential, but the facts are true.

At a glance

• Industry: Multi‑unit / quick‑service restaurant (QSR)
• Footprint: Several thousand locations across the US
• Objective: Accelerate innovation across store operations
• Key use cases: In-store edge Kubernetes for applications and process automation
• Solution: Spectro Cloud Palette Dedicated SaaS

The challenge: bringing innovation to life

This leading restaurant chain is all about innovation. It was an early pioneer in automating its restaurant makelines, using AI for its supply chain management, and in digital store experiences for customers. 

With mobile and online orders booming, and constant expansion of in-store applications, the company’s director of infrastructure knew it was time to lay a new foundation for managing and scaling all this innovation to the restaurant edge.

Each of its thousands of stores  needed a lightweight but reliable infrastructure to run local workloads, based of course on Kubernetes — a modern application platform fit for a modern organization.

Leadership knew that managing and updating manually at nationwide scale would be unmanageable, especially with the company’s pace of innovation only accelerating. Already there are pilot projects underway for robotics-assisted food prep, computer vision for quality control, and smarter analytics to keep stores running efficiently.

They set out to look for a consistent, automated, and scalable platform — one that could make managing thousands of edge Kubernetes clusters as simple as managing in the cloud.

The solution: a platform fit for scale

After evaluating several options (including Azure Arc Local Kubernetes and Rancher) the restaurant’s infrastructure team selected Spectro Cloud Palette in summer 2025.

Palette’s proven ability to manage Kubernetes at scale, with support for full lifecycle automation and policy control, made it the clear fit for their edge environment. The team was especially confident after seeing Palette’s performance in large-scale, distributed use cases (such as those featured in our 10,000 clusters blog).

With Palette, the chain’s central infrastructure team has a single dedicated SaaS interface to define the software payload that will be deployed to each edge location. Palette’s decentralized policy enforcement keeps each local cluster running smoothly, even in the event of a network outage.

Software deployment and updates are handled through GitOps with Flux, ensuring consistency and reducing manual effort. The company’s preferred system integrator, CDW, contributed professional services support to help the team move quickly from pilot to rollout.

The results: a clear path to the future

With an agreement signed in late 2025, the chain has moved with typical speed into rolling out Palette-managed edge Kubernetes clusters across an initial 100 stores, on track for rapid scaleout across thousands of US locations in 2026. 

New versions of the company’s kitchen application, and other software, can be pushed out seamlessly to every store without disruption or risk of downtime, or need for manual effort and field engineering visits. The automation and consistency have given the team confidence to innovate faster, rolling out new digital experiences with ease.

Beyond efficiency gains, the new architecture lays the groundwork for the next wave of transformation: robotics and AI-driven automation that will reshape kitchen operations like ingredient prep, keeping costs low and customer satisfaction high. 

Explore more

Learn how Spectro Cloud is helping restaurant and retail brands deliver innovation at scale:

• Explore our restaurant edge solutions.
• Read how we’re helping one global restaurant chain end the cost of truck rolls.
• Join our webinar with restaurant software platform Nigel about the challenges of Kubernetes at the edge.
• Download our Edge Kubernetes Checklist for a head start to your own project.