How Footprints Cafe handles a 500-item Jamaican menu on the phone with Maple

Restaurant: Footprints Cafe
Location: Brooklyn, NY
POS: SkyTab (now Shift4 Dine)

Results:

$101,000

Phone sales a year at Clarendon Road

24x

Phone sales for every dollar of Maple

7 hours

Of phone time off the team each week

Jamaican · Brooklyn, NY · SkyTab (now Shift4 Dine)

“We have over 500 and something items on our menu, and a lot of modifiers.”Errol Williams, Footprints CafeWith Maple: about 2,500 phone orders a year at Clarendon Road, taken from that menu straight into SkyTab.

Five locations, a huge menu and a phone nobody had time to sell on

Footprints Cafe serves Jamaican food across five locations, four restaurants and a ghost kitchen, from rasta pasta with oxtail to curry shrimp flatbread and jerk chicken. Maple answers the phone at its Clarendon Road restaurant in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where staff are trained to greet callers with the location’s name, because people sometimes dial the wrong Footprints.

Robert Gordon came to Maple in June wanting more from every call. “Because we’re in a high-turnover industry,” he said, “we rarely find somebody that’s dynamic on the phone that will upsell.” He did the math: “if, for example, our average ticket is $27, if we could bump that average ticket up very slightly, it would definitely, you know, pay for itself.”

Before Maple

$27Average ticket, with no one upselling on the phone

500+ itemsOn the menu, plus modifiers

High turnoverFew staff stayed long enough to sell well on the phone.

Callers dialing the wrong storeFive locations, one name.

With Maple

$101,000In phone orders a year at Clarendon

2,500Phone orders a year

About 7 hoursOf phone time back each week

Orders straight to SkyTabEach call prints like an in-store order.

Staff for the hard callsMaple passes the calls it cannot finish.

A menu and a way of talking that would test any phone system

The menu was the first hurdle. “It’s not like your regular menu,” said Errol Williams, who led the project for Footprints. “We have over 500 and something items on our menu, and a lot of modifiers.”

The callers were the second. “We have a lot of Jamaicans that buy from us... they’ll say a lot of things in what we call dialect, patois,” Errol said. Maple went live at Clarendon Road taking orders into SkyTab.

At a check-in in September, Robert said the team was “just trying to iron out some of the little kinks,” and added, “I think there’s very small limitations on what the system can do.” Strong accents are still the hardest calls, and when Maple cannot finish one, it passes the caller to staff.

About $101,000 a year in phone orders at one location

At its pace so far, Maple takes about 2,500 phone orders a year at Clarendon Road, worth about $101,000, and the calls it answers save the team about 7 hours of phone time a week.

Maple Pro costs $350 a month, so those phone orders come to about 24 times what Footprints pays for it at that location.

Yearly figures are rounded and carry the restaurant’s pace on Maple so far over twelve months; they come from Maple’s call and order records and do not forecast future orders. The multiple divides those phone-order sales by Maple Pro at $350 a month; it is sales, not profit. Quotes come from Footprints’ recorded calls with Maple between June and September 2026.

Restaurant: Footprints Cafe
Location: Brooklyn, NY
POS: SkyTab (now Shift4 Dine)