Better-For-You Cuisine

Cava is a rapidly expanding fast casual restaurant

and CPG brand focusing on delivering a healthy and

customized guest experience. Cava’s culinary-driven

brand has fresh and better-for-you cuisine offering

smart choices for each customer.

The Challenge

In an industry not normally entrenched in data,

delivering insight to the management team in an

easy to consume and secure way can be difficult.

Josh Patchus, the Chief Data Scientist at Cava Grill,

knew that he needed to be powerful, secure, easy to

navigate and easy to change approach. “Over the

years I’ve learned a tool can be very powerful, but if

it doesn’t look pretty and is hard to use; adoption

rates will be terrible.”

Josh wanted to deliver a curated, intuitive data

experience where parameters for models could be

changed easily by managers. Not only did the

visualization of the data need to be stunning and

provide insight, it had to let Josh control access.

The Solution

“When I found the dashboard examples page I

literally said to myself: ‘This is what I’ve been looking

for’. The customizability was truly amazing.

Being able to have dashboards within dashboards

was very helpful to Cava. “We want our analyst to go

to one page and only worry about one set of

dashboards. Shiny makes this easy”.

User authentication was a critical requirement for

Cava. With RStudio Shiny Server Pro authentication

features, each application provides the customized

data access employees need for their job. “We are

able to slice our dashboards into several user levels,

allowing Managers to have their own set of

dashboards, and control access to subdomains like

‘Finance’, ’Stores’, ’Marketing’, and ’Supply Chain’.”

“The other rare feature we needed in an analytic tool

which RStudio helped address is the ability for a user

Open source & enterprise-ready professional software for R

to explore amongst multiple variables. With the

packages dpylr, tidyr and ggplot2 this process is

practically seamless. We can optimize our data any

way we want”.

Why RStudio?

Cava appreciated that the RStudio team contributes

code and creates many R packages to help make

data connectivity, exploration, and manipulation

very easy. Shiny, especially, provides a framework

Cava’s data analysts use to create unique

dashboards.

The Payoff

People adopt new tools when they enjoy using

them. Visualizations and insight compel them to

come back to Cava’s new dashboards. Using R,

RStudio, Shiny, and Shiny Server Pro has allowed

Cava to deliver on the promised curated experience.

It allows people new to the data to see a static view

(the default load). While allowing the more powerful

data savvy people to explore interactively. “Our

Shiny app allows people to play around with the

data to create findings of their own,” says Josh.

About RStudio

RStudio provides open source and enterprise-ready

professional software for the R community. We are

inspired by the people who use our products to

understand and improve the world through data

analysis.

RStudio® and Shiny™ are trademarks of RStudio, Inc. All rights reserved rstudio.com 844-448-1212 info@rstudio.com

“Shiny is in this rare space of being very functional, while still being very customizable. A lot of tools limit the user to a set of graphs and a set of data manipulation tasks. Shiny on the other hand provides a framework that a user can work with to create extra features.”

Josh Patchus, Chief Data Scientist at Cava Grill