BBagel

Background:

Bagels, built for the streets of London

BBagel had a clear ambition from day one: make bagels accessible, approachable, and part of everyday life across the UK. With over 10,000 bagels flying out the door every single day — and the vast majority going to returning customers — they didn’t just have a product people loved. They had the beginnings of a genuine community.

The challenge? Capturing that loyalty in a way that was smart, scalable, and simple enough to work in a fast-moving hospitality environment. Their original solution was a paper stamp card. It did the job, but it left too much on the table: cards get lost, data goes uncaptured, and there’s no way to know who your best customers really are.

BBagel needed something better. They found it in Pepper.

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The Challenge:

Rewarding loyalty without slowing anyone down

For a brand serving thousands of customers a day across multiple sites, the loyalty experience has to work at pace — for the guest and for the team. Any friction in that process is a problem. Too complicated for the customer? They skip it. Too time-consuming for the team? It breaks down at the till.

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What BBagel needed:

• A digital loyalty solution to replace their paper stamp cards
• Zero friction for customers — simple scan, nothing more
• Minimal engagement required from busy team members
• Real data on customer behaviour to inform business decisions
• Tools to drive footfall at specific dayparts — particularly the morning

The switch to digital loyalty wasn’t just about technology. It was about preserving the warmth of a reward that felt personal, while building the infrastructure to grow something much bigger.

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“What you’re looking for is something that fits within the operations, is reliable, but also simple — for both the customer and the team members.” — Nick Brown, Operations Director, BBagel

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The Solution:

A loyalty experience that runs itself

With Pepper, BBagel made the move from paper to digital — and the difference was immediate. Customers no longer needed to carry a card that could be lost or forgotten. The app sits on their phone, it’s always there, and using it takes seconds. For the team, it’s even simpler: the app works in the background, requiring almost no intervention from staff beyond the initial scan.

“Technically, there is zero effort for the customers other than opening the app and scanning.” — Nick Brown, Operations Director, BBagel Team

That simplicity was non-negotiable. In a busy QSR environment, the last thing a till operator needs is a loyalty workflow that holds up a queue. With Pepper, it doesn’t. The scan is the job. Everything else happens automatically.

But the real transformation went deeper than ease of use. For the first time, BBagel could see exactly what their customers were doing — when they visited, how often they came back, what they ordered, and which offers drove behaviour. The portal became a decision-making tool, not just a reward tracker.

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“Having the app has really taken the guesswork out of the loyalty programme. I can open the portal and see exactly what our customers are doing.” — Rachel Price, Marketing Assistant, BBagel

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Campaign Highlight:

The Coffee & Us campaign — building a breakfast habit

BBagel identified a clear opportunity: breakfast. While lunchtime was strong, mornings were an untapped growth area. Using Pepper’s platform, they launched the “Coffee and Us” campaign — offering app users a free morning coffee as a way to build a consistent daily routine and grow breakfast visits.

The premise was straightforward: even though customers receive something free, the act of giving back creates a sense of reciprocity between the brand and its guests. It pulls them into a habit. It makes BBagel part of their morning.

Campaign results:

• 62% of app users redeemed the morning free coffee offer
• 10–15% higher average transaction value among loyalty app customers
• Daily routine built — fitting BBagel into customers’ existing habits

The results speak to something important: loyalty isn’t just about points and prizes. It’s about building a rhythm. When you fit into a customer’s daily routine, you don’t just earn a repeat visit — you earn a habit. And habits are the most durable form of loyalty there is.

“450,000 of our customers used the app to stamp during a visit — that’s a perfect example of how we’re building a community using the Pepper platform.” — Alexandra Gaunt, Head of Marketing, BBagel

Results: Data that drives decisions, not guesswork

One of the most significant shifts Pepper enabled for BBagel was the move from gut-feel decision-making to evidence-based strategy. The portal gives the team a real-time view of customer behaviour — visit frequency, time of day, ordering patterns — turning loyalty data into genuine commercial intelligence.

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“I don’t like to make a decision based just on gut feel. It’s important that you have it balanced up by the numbers.” — Alexandra Gaunt, Head of Marketing, BBagel

The numbers are compelling. App users consistently show a 10 to 15% higher average transaction value compared to non-app customers. That’s not a marginal difference — on a brand selling more than 10,000 bagels a day, that uplift compounds into serious incremental revenue.

And the community they’ve built around the app is substantial. 450,000 customers stamping via the app in a single year represents a loyalty base that most hospitality brands would envy — all engaged, trackable, and actionable through the Pepper platform.

What’s Next: Click & Collect — the next growth frontier

BBagel recently launched Click and Collect in one of their stores for the first time — and the early read is positive. The team sees it as a real opportunity to layer additional revenue on top of their existing in-venue sales, with projections pointing to a 5 to 10% uplift in sales where the feature is live.

It’s a natural extension of everything they’ve built with Pepper. The same customers who stamp for loyalty, who respond to the morning coffee campaign, who have built BBagel into their daily routine — those are the customers most likely to order ahead. The platform connects those behaviours, turning a loyal guest into a pre-committed one.

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“Pepper has turned our regulars into our biggest assets — and there’s nothing more important than that.” — Yoav Baumgarten, Founder & Managing Director, BBagel

Ready to turn your regulars into your biggest asset?

Join 200+ high street brands using Pepper to build loyalty that drives real revenue.

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