In this episode of the Running Restaurants podcast, host Jaime Oikle interviews Jodi Boyce, CMO of Teriyaki Madness. Jodi shares her unique career journey, from driving the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile to leading marketing at major restaurant brands. She discusses Teriyaki Madness's rapid growth to 215 locations across 41 states, their data-driven marketing approach, and loyalty program of 1.2 million members. The conversation also covers AI integration, franchisee partnerships, digital ordering (64% of orders), social media strategies, and app-based employee training, offering valuable insights for restaurant operators and marketers alike.
Links: https://teriyakimadness.com/ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodiboyce/
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How Teriyaki Madness Is Scaling Fast Without Losing Its Scrappy Roots
Most restaurant brands slow down as they grow. More locations usually mean more layers, more caution, and less room to take a swing on something unproven. Teriyaki Madness has taken the opposite path. The custom-bowl concept has grown from under 30 locations a decade ago to 215 today, with a pipeline that points toward 250 by year's end, and its CMO says the brand's small budget has been an advantage, not a limitation.
Jodi Boyce joined Running Restaurants host Jaime Oikle to talk through how a 99% franchised brand with no outside investors has built a marketing and technology engine that punches well above its size, and what independent operators can borrow from it regardless of how many locations they run.
An Unconventional Path Into Franchising
Boyce's restaurant career started about as far from a corporate office as possible: driving the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile around the country for a year straight out of college. The job doubled as a crash course in food marketing and public relations, and it launched a career that ran through Quiznos during its explosive growth years (she joined when the chain had fewer than 1,000 units and left at 5,500), Einstein Bros. Bagels, and agency work with Smashburger, Village Inn, and Baker Square before she landed at Teriyaki Madness ten years ago.
That range across brands and business models is part of why she leans so heavily on data now: she has seen what works at scale and what doesn't, across very different budgets.
The Differentiator Nobody Planned For
Teriyaki Madness serves custom bowls built on grilled, marinated chicken, steak, tofu, and salmon over a choice of rice, fried rice, or yakisoba noodles. The dish that keeps coming up in customer research, though, isn't the protein. It's the vegetables.
Every bowl includes fresh vegetables, chopped daily, steamed, and tossed in a house stir-fry sauce so they keep some bite instead of turning mushy. Boyce said brand research has repeatedly shown that the vegetables function as a real differentiator, something the founders didn't fully anticipate when they built the menu. For guests eating plant-based or simply trying to eat lighter, that consistency matters: it removes the awkward back-and-forth of asking a counter to modify a bowl and hoping it comes out right.
The lesson for independent operators is one worth sitting with: sometimes the thing customers value most isn't the item you'd lead with in an ad. Understanding that requires actually asking, not assuming.
Growing Through Referrals, Not Just Ad Spend
Teriyaki Madness now operates in 41 states and is almost entirely franchised, with corporate holding only a handful of test locations. Roughly 40 to 50% of new growth comes from existing franchisees, either opening additional locations themselves or referring friends and family into the system.
Getting there required a deliberately lengthy vetting process on the front end, built around one question: can this person actually follow a system? Boyce noted that experienced operators may not need every resource the brand provides, but first-time owners who follow the playbook tend to do very well. That vetting discipline is a big part of why the brand can add locations quickly without the consistency breaking down between, say, a Denver shop and a new one in North Carolina.
For growing independent brands weighing whether to franchise or open company-owned locations, the referral rate is a useful data point: your best growth channel may already be sitting inside your current operator base.
Data-Driven Because It Had to Be
Teriyaki Madness's marketing budget comes entirely from franchisee ad fund contributions rather than outside investors, which forced a startup mentality even as the brand scaled well past 200 units. Boyce said that constraint pushed the team toward data-backed decisions instead of throwing ideas at the wall, and she credits it for smart, sustainable growth rather than growth for growth's sake.
That data discipline now extends to a genuinely ambitious AI project. The company is working with tech partners to pull operational and marketing data into a central warehouse, then using AI to generate specific, actionable guidance for individual franchisees: labor and inventory notes, profitability breakdowns, and even benchmarking against nearby locations. Boyce described an in-development app that could tell a franchisee not just how their week went, but how many new loyalty members they signed up compared to neighboring stores.
There's a clear line the brand won't cross, though: creative. Boyce said AI-generated content for social posts or ads tends to render logos incorrectly or show ingredients the brand doesn't even serve, so the human creative process stays intact. AI earns its place on the operations and benchmarking side, not the brand voice side.
That same appetite for calculated risk showed up publicly in a fully AI-generated commercial the brand released, at roughly a quarter of the cost of a traditional shoot with agency talent, music, and production. Rather than aim for realism, the team leaned into the absurdity (a man riding a bear, another getting thrown from a building), matching the brand's self-aware, playful personality rather than trying to hide the medium.
Loyalty Built for Speed, Not Just Volume
Teriyaki Madness's loyalty database has grown from an initial 12,000 emails collected by the founders to 1.2 million members today, all opted in. Boyce said the program intentionally avoids leaning on deep discounts: instead, guests earn a free bowl (food cost around $12) after $150 in spend, an exchange she called an easy one for the brand to make repeatedly.
Message frequency runs about four to six touches a month, calibrated against unsubscribe rates so cadence pulls back if guests start opting out. The team also segments messaging based on visit recency, treating a guest who hasn't ordered in 90 days differently than a weekly regular.
The broader takeaway for any loyalty program: structure the reward so guests feel real progress early, not just at the finish line. A payoff that takes too long to reach loses guests before it ever pays off.
Training in Two-Minute Bites, Marketing With Guardrails
With hiring and training handled at the franchisee level, corporate's role is building tools that scale. Training has shifted almost entirely to short, app-based modules, sometimes as brief as 30 seconds, built around the reality that younger employees' attention spans top out around two minutes.
Social media follows a similar logic of freedom within structure. Individual locations run their own Facebook and Instagram pages, but every post routes through an approval platform before it goes live, protecting a consistent brand voice across more than 200 franchisees without slowing local teams down to a crawl.
The Digital Numbers Behind the Growth
The operational picture backs up the brand's tech-forward reputation: 64% of all orders originate digitally, whether through the branded app, online ordering, or third-party delivery, and roughly 80% of food leaves the building as takeout. The ordering platform also makes smart, cart-based suggestions, recommending an appetizer to a guest who ordered a bowl and a drink but nothing else.
Asked for a closing piece of advice, Boyce didn't reach for a business book. She credited her mother: don't waste time on regrets. Fix what you can, then move forward. It's a fitting note for a brand that has grown fast by testing, adjusting, and refusing to get too precious about any one decision.
For independent operators, the specifics of Teriyaki Madness's scale may not translate directly. But the underlying habits, treating vegetables as seriously as protein, vetting for the right fit rather than just capital, building loyalty rewards guests can actually feel, and drawing a clear line around where AI helps versus where it hurts the brand, are lessons any restaurant can put to work today.
