— Little Kitchen Academy

About Little Kitchen Academy

Little Kitchen Academy (LKA) is a Montessori-inspired cooking academy for kids. They provide a safe and empowering space for children to identify and refine their senses. They live to create a more educated and healthy society through healthy eating choices, from scratch to consumption!

LKA believes in changing lives from scratch.

Striving to become a “best-in-class” franchise concept, finding a registration solution that could evolve and scale with LKA was essential.

Challenges

Prior to Amilia, LKA struggled with their registration system because it couldn’t grow with them as their needs grew. With a strategic plan to grow to 400+ locations in the next 5 years, they needed a platform to grow with them while offering clients an online registration experience that reflected their student-first approach.

On top of this, with more than 4,000 students per year, manual processing of payments wasted valuable staff time -- that could be reallocated to giving students the best experience!

Solution

To scale while offering students the best experience possible, Little Kitchen Academy would have to find a partner that was built for their vision of tomorrow.

Amilia’s eCommerce approach to registration -- combined with an integrated payment solution -- was what LKA needed to take their online experience to the next level.

Amilia made an impact with LKA in 4 major ways

1. Integrated payment meant that manually invoicing each student was a thing of the past and they now had access to scheduled payment plans like installments and subscriptions, one-click failed payment retries, and flexible payment options.
2. Email marketing is a big driver for repeat business and an open API and native integrations meant that LKA could connect Amilia to marketing tools, like Constant Contact, to automate their email workflows.
3. Making sure that classes are always full without staff intervention is made possible through the Waitlist feature that informs parents (in chronological order!) when a spot opens up.
4. Student safety is a top priority, so access to up-to-date student info is essential for staff to have at their fingertips. Amilia’s configurable forms make it easy to collect information like allergies, special needs, emergency contacts during the registration process and later add them to class roll reports to access during the class.

Results

The results of their student-first approach to everything they do can be seen in their success so far: in growth, repeat business, and referrals!

So far, LKA has onboarded one location and is in the process of onboarding five more. The LKA team continues to work with Amilia customer experience team to leverage the platform to the fullest, collaborate on building new features, and even provide insight into the day-to-day of running locations.

More about Little Kitchen Academy

In May 2020, Little Kitchen Academy announced its plans to open more than 400 global locations by 2025 and is currently seeking like-minded multi-unit franchisees and development partners based exclusively in AZ, CA, CO, FL, IL, MS, NC, OR, TX, WA, WI. Internationally, LKA is focused on expanding further into Canada, as well as Australia, India, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, MENA region, Singapore, Spain, and the U.K.

LKA is also committed to supporting their community and helping their students develop into the people they’re meant to be.

True to its mission, LKA wants to continue changing lives. Part of that mission includes empowering students to learn how they can make the world a better place through How Can I Help by Little Kitchen Academy, LKA’s signature philanthropic program, supporting Chefs for Humanity, The Global FoodBanking Network, Kids Help Phone, and PHIT America.

If you are interested to learn how SmartRec could help you and your organization succeed like it helped Little Kitchen Academy, just reach out to our team. We would be happy to discuss it with you!