Case Study: Café Rio achieves 25X bandwidth and seamless omnichannel ordering with VMware SD-WAN

Utilizing SD-WAN in Restaurant Hospitality to Elevate the Customer Experience

Café Rio, a fast‑casual Mexican restaurant chain headquartered in Salt Lake City with over 100 locations and sustained year‑over‑year growth above 20%, needed to deliver a true omnichannel experience (mobile and online ordering, in‑store kiosks, tablets, VoIP and guest Wi‑Fi). Its legacy network could not support the bandwidth, reliability or QoS required — causing outages that prevented orders and poor VoIP quality that frustrated customers and staff.

Café Rio deployed VMware SD‑WAN (Orchestrator, Gateways and Edges) with active‑active dual Internet links, centralized management, PCI‑segmented traffic and a phased roll‑out. The new design delivered a 25× increase in available bandwidth, clearer VoIP and reliable POS transactions, faster new‑store deployments, roughly $264,000 projected annual communications savings, and about $10,000 in initial CAPEX avoided per new restaurant.

Cafe Rio

Kevin Masterson

VP of Information Technology