Due' Cucina Italiana

About Due' Cucina

What happens when you combine an engineering Ph.D. and an economics/business administration MBA? You get an authentic Italian restaurant known as Due’ Cucina Italiana!

The founders, Davide Macchi, who studied economics and business administration at MIT, and Filippo Fiori who studied engineering and obtained a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University, are two high-school friends from Tuscany, Italy who came to Seattle to share their passion for authentic Italian pasta. Opened in 2017, Due’ Cucina has offered fresh pasta, prepared daily in-house, as well as 100% of their dishes. The restaurant’s menu combines Italian classics with experimental recipes with a healthy twist. At Due’ there is a dish for everyone!

Making a fast-casual authentic Italian restaurant from scratch

The idea behind Due’ was to create a brand that offered an authentic Italian experience in a modern language which was the fast-casual scene.

“We wanted to turn the Italian cuisine that is generally difficult to create because of cost, time, serving style, and most often a fine dining experience, into a quick and affordable experience without sacrificing the authenticity of the food,” said Davide Macchi, CEO, and Co-founder of Due’ Cucina.

In developing Due’ Cucina, from the business to the culinary side, the founders always knew they wanted to scale their restaurant brand. They set out building the authenticity, atmosphere, and experience of Due’ Cucina for their first location, taking around two years to ensure their brand was perfect before scaling.

“To scale you need technology and from day one we spent more energy and money on investing in restaurant technology than we would have if we only stuck with one restaurant. We want to make the same pasta that would normally cost $25 or more at a fine-dining restaurant for $10-12 instead at Due’ Cucina and match that level of efficiency in our technology,” said Macchi.

When Due’ Cucina opened its first location, online ordering was available but not nearly as popular as it is today. Originally online ordering was used to fill in guest orders during a restaurant’s slow hours. At the beginning of Due’s tech journey, the restaurant was connected with third-party delivery services like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub, while also using the online ordering website through their POS system, Revel.

“We started with that and every day we would see the third-party services grow along with our online ordering. Our off-premise dinging kept growing, but we saw more and more of our revenue going to those third-party services. Then the pandemic came and we knew we needed more sophisticated online ordering. It was at this time we realized that off-premise dining was going to accelerate and we needed to find technology that could work effectively and stay with us for the long term,” said Macchi.

Due’ Cucina started researching options and was very strict in choosing restaurant software. The restaurant brand spent several weeks on calls with different companies because online ordering was extremely important for them. 

“After discovering Incentivio, we compared features, UI/UX, and the customer experience and found that they’re by far the best choice that also worked with Revel POS and we’re incredibly happy with the choice we made,” said Macchi.

Investing in all-in-one restaurant engagement platform to elevate off-premise dining

“There are some things you don’t know you need until you hear about them. I knew we needed the CRM engine and we needed to do more with that. Our Revel POS stores a lot of customer information and there are a lot of restaurant software that solely does CRM. Online ordering was our priority and we found that with Incentivio, but we found that the platform also had an entire CRM and marketing suite,” said Macchi.

“Incentivio is truly all-in-one and the number of features and triggers they offer to actually incentivize behavior and control the off-dining experience is incredibly powerful. The fact that marketing, CRM, loyalty, and more came with the platform makes it even more valuable,” said Macchi.

Before, Due’ Cucina didn’t have loyalty accounts. Since implementing Incentivio, the restaurant brand has over 24,000 loyal customers via the app and web ordering while only just starting their brand between 3 locations and their loyalty offers have over a 63% average redemption rate with more items added to the customer’s basket on top of the offer.

Within one year of using Incentivio, during the height of the pandemic, Due’ Cucina’s digital revenue via the mobile app increased by 69%, and their revenue from online ordering (web) increased by 72% with an overall average in a digital revenue increase of 72%. Customer average spending in the app and online increased by 7%!