Nash & Smashed moves past one meal size with Qu's tiered menu tools

Nash & Smashed, a Fairfax, Virginia-based franchise whose menu centers on hand-smashed burgers and halal-certified Nashville hot chicken, has shifted its restaurants to Qu's commerce platform. The early result it is reporting should catch the attention of anyone in franchise operations. In a Business Wire release announcing the deal on Oct. 27, 2026, the brand said check averages at its new kiosk-led locations run up to 70 percent higher than at its older stores.

The more useful detail is further down the release: the point-of-sale system Nash & Smashed used before could handle one meal size and a flat add-on. Anyone in franchise operations looking at kiosks should take that seriously. A screen can only suggest an upgrade if the system behind it knows the upgrade exists.

That makes the real question bigger than kiosks versus counters. If the lift depends on menu logic as much as hardware, operators need to know what their own system can offer before they buy screens. They also need to know whether the result can hold as a young chain more than doubles in size.

One meal size and a flat add-on

Nash & Smashed calls its previous system plug-and-play. Setup was fast, but the system had gaps. Leakage and theft went untracked, menus and upsells could barely be adjusted, and reporting was thin. With Qu's menu tools, Nash & Smashed can now build tiered offers that were out of reach before, and cross-sells and upsells take less effort to set up.

A kiosk can only upsell what the menu system lets it offer, and Nash & Smashed's old one offered a single meal size and a flat add-on. Qu chief revenue officer Steve Melamed said in the release that guests are trading up on the kiosk.

Those offers came from continuing configuration work rather than a one-time setup. Chief operating officer Lamaan Malik said the Qu team responded quickly each time the brand asked for a customization, whether it involved tiered menus or the way orders reach the kitchen. The two go together for a reason. Every new tier on the kiosk creates a new order the kitchen must read correctly, so a menu change and a kitchen routing change need to happen at the same time.

More stores coming than already open

The pipeline is bigger than the chain. Kiosk Marketplace reported that the brand, founded in February 2024, has more than 50 additional restaurants under development on top of its 35 open locations. New markets in Richmond, Virginia, and Delaware are among them. Nash & Smashed has said new restaurants will open on Qu, and it is also looking at the platform for future concepts.

With more than 50 stores in development against 35 open, the platform choice could shape most of the future chain, not only the stores open today.

Qu has met that growth with hands-on support. A dedicated team was assigned to Nash & Smashed. That team built the menus, took on customization requests and walked the franchise through every launch. Franchisees used Qu's lab to try out the system, raise questions and help shape the rollout ahead of their own stores opening.

In a franchise system, every new owner runs a separate business that has to learn the tools from the start. A sandbox before opening shifts part of that learning ahead of the first lunch rush. That counts for more at a chain adding stores at this pace than at one that opens a location now and then. Melamed described the goal in similar terms: set up the platform to fit the way each operator runs its business, so that every new store is ready to perform on opening day.

There is a tradeoff here. The old system's selling point was a fast install. Malik called Qu's onboarding "the most detailed I've seen" and said the team made the experience easy. A brand choosing depth is accepting a heavier rollout for each store. The release says Nash & Smashed made that choice on purpose.

CEO M.N. Abbasi first came across Qu as a guest, liked how it worked, and told his team to skip the usual shortlist of POS vendors. After a single product demo, the team was ready to move. Malik said he stopped the sales rep mid-meeting to say "I'm sold." That was a fast decision built on a guest's experience rather than a side-by-side vendor comparison. The early store results are therefore the main evidence that the bet is paying off.

Forty percent digital, mostly first-party

At each Qu-powered location, a single connected platform handles Qu Pay, the kitchen display, self-order kiosks, front-counter POS, first-party online ordering and third-party delivery. Digital orders make up about 40 percent of Nash & Smashed's business, and most of them arrive through the brand's own website instead of delivery apps.

When most digital orders come through a brand's own site, the brand holds the order data. If counter, kiosk and web orders all land on the same platform, that data can sit in the same reports. That would address the leakage and reporting gaps in the old system.

Malik's comparison to enterprise resource planning software tells you how the brand sees the purchase: as the system that runs the whole business, with the register as only one part of it. Owners now get detailed performance reports and analytics across their stores. Melamed pointed to owners getting "a real view into kitchen performance" alongside the trade-up behavior on kiosks.

For a franchisee with several units, that cross-store view is where a menu change can be checked against results. For any multi-unit operator whose order channels feed separate systems, that single view is a practical benchmark to measure against.

Where the 70% gets tested

Read the comparison carefully. The figure compares new kiosk-led locations with the brand's older stores. It is not a before-and-after reading at the same restaurants, and "up to" marks the top of the range rather than a typical result. So the gap reflects the kiosk, the tiered menu behind it and whatever else separates a new store from an older one, all at once.

That does not make it a weak number. It makes it a bundled one. For operators, the takeaway is that the lift came from kiosks and tiered offers arriving together. Bolting screens onto a system limited to one meal size would test only half of that setup.

The bigger test is the pipeline. More than 50 restaurants under development, including Richmond and Delaware, will open on the same platform in markets the brand hasn't served before. If check averages there land near the early results, that would suggest the gain travels with the menu setup rather than with a particular set of early locations.

Operators who want to watch the setup in action can try it now. Guests can order from the Qu kiosk at Nash & Smashed in Arlington, Pimmit Hills and Virginia Beach, Virginia, with Hyattsville, Maryland, coming soon. Kiosk vendors will tell you about the screen. The tiers behind it are the part worth studying.