Salata is a group of health-food franchise restaurants. At every Salata location, your meal is what you make it – with completely customizable salads and wraps. Since their founding in 2005, they have opened over 92 locations nationwide and attribute their success to the love and support of their guests, which keeps the guest experience at the forefront of what they do.

Inefficient, Tedious, and Wasteful L&D Strategies

Salata’s learning and development strategy for franchise leadership teams was outdated, tedious, and wasteful. They provided upskilling opportunities for franchise leadership when they could host an in-person training at their headquarters in Houston, Texas, delivering learning materials through binders and paper; sometimes, this meant having up to 15 versions of the same single piece of training information.

To continue to support the rapid growth and success of their franchise stores, Salata’s leadership team identified the importance of making all learning and development materials easily accessible. They needed to deliver learning content to franchise leadership teams in a virtual way, create administrative efficiencies for themselves, and have the ability to constantly update materials. They needed to give staff the tools to enhance the guest experience and improve staff’s confidence. To meet learners where they are, Salata implemented a central communications hub and leveraged technology-based solutions to propel their organizational efficiency, franchise success, and team career growth forward.

Salata eliminated the need to train franchise owners and managers strictly at in-person gatherings by going virtual. And while doing that, they opened up a world of efficiency and sustainability for themselves. For their team, this looked like implementing a learning management system – aptly named The Root – where they could upload, store, and manage all of their training materials. Franchise leadership could also complete training materials at their own pace, allowing for them to better absorb the information.