Hot Tongue grows online sales 83%

Hot Tongue Pizza has become one of Los Angeles’s most celebrated new-school pizzerias — known for its hand-stretched sourdough crust, vibey brand, and lines that wrap around the block. As demand grew, the team wanted their digital experience to match the energy and quality of their shop.

Their previous platform wasn’t keeping up. Checkout was clunky, marketing required constant manual work, and the digital ordering experience felt outdated compared to the brand they’d built. For a high-volume operation with a loyal community, the digital side needed to be faster, smarter, and more automated.

Since adopting Open, Hot Tongue Pizza has achieved:

• 83% growth in sales with their Open ordering and marketing system

• A brand new mobile app with thousands of downloads

• Thousand of dollars saved in vendor costs

• 21 hours saved per month through marketing and support automation

A frictionless ordering experience, rebuilt from the ground up

Hot Tongue partnered with Open to launch a fully redesigned mobile app and online ordering interface — fast, branded, and optimized for conversion. Apple Pay and Google Pay made checkout instant. Popular items were highlighted with smart recommendations, and reordering was frictionless.

Behind the scenes, Open connected loyalty, CRM, analytics, and support — all tied directly into their POS, removing the manual work that used to slow the team down.

Marketing and support that run automatically

With Open, the marketing team no longer has to build campaigns by hand or write every SMS. The AI identifies lapsed customers, generates personalized offers, writes push notifications and SMS, and sends them automatically.

Meanwhile, the Open support agent resolves common customer questions instantly, keeping service smooth while freeing staff during peak rushes.

An 83% lift driven by better design and smarter automation

Since switching to Open, Hot Tongue Pizza has grown direct online ordering by 83%. Their new mobile app has quickly become a favorite channel for loyal guests, and consolidation of vendors has reduced monthly costs and operational overhead.

The restaurant now runs a digital experience as strong as the food they’re known for — one that increases sales while giving their team more time to focus on hospitality.

In the words of Hot Tongue Pizza

“I’ve been in the restaurant industry for 20 years, and it feels like running a business only gets harder. One of the biggest challenges in the last five years has been third-party delivery platforms. They take your customer data, they own the ordering experience, and they pull your guests further away from you.

Open changed that for us.

Data is everything in the way I market now, email, text, push notifications. The app Open built for Hot Tongue, along with the upgraded online ordering experience, has been a complete game changer in winning our customers back. It put the relationship back in our hands.

But Open doesn’t just build an app and walk away. They create a full system of touch points, surveys, real-time chat for order issues, automated refunds, even responding to Google reviews. That alone has saved us so much time and stress.

And the marketing tools? Unreal. You can feed an AI agent a promo and it builds a fully dialed-in campaign SMS, and scheduled push notifications, ready to go. On the days or weeks where we need a boost, those campaigns have made a huge difference.

Open basically gives independent restaurants the digital firepower of a national chain, without losing your voice, your story, your hospitality and most importantly your bank account.”

- Alex Koons, Owner at Hot Tongue Pizza

Built for what’s next

Today, Hot Tongue operates on a single intelligent platform for ordering, marketing, and customer engagement. Open gives them the tools to grow predictably, build deeper relationships with guests, and own their digital future — one slice at a time.