Cooking Mama, the food-prep simulation video game series that debuted on Nintendo consoles in 2006, was among the inspiration for the new kitchen display system rolled out across more than 2,500 Wingstop U.S. units over the course of 10 months. Michael Wallace, a former game developer, is CEO of Perfect Company. That’s according to Michael...
How a Nintendo Game Inspired Wingstop’s Kitchen Tech
Cooking Mama, the food-prep simulation video game series that debuted on Nintendo consoles in 2006, was among the inspiration for the new kitchen display system rolled out across more than 2,500 Wingstop U.S. units over the course of 10 months. Michael Wallace, a former game developer, is CEO of Perfect Company. That’s according to Michael Wallace, a former game developer and the CEO of Perfect Company, the foodservice-focused technology firm behind Wingstop Smart Kitchen. After a brief pilot program brought the system to 25 locations, the aggressive 10-month rollout concluded in 2025, spanning the Dallas-based brand’s entire domestic footprint. “Cooking Mama was a great game, and it’s a bit repetitive, but it also makes it interesting,” Wallace said, adding that the fast-growing chicken wing chain’s new system also bore similarities to BurgerTime, the arcade game released in the early 1980s. Prior to the Perfect Company partnership, Wingstop kitchens relied on paper tickets to keep track of orders. The highly visual, intentionally simple KDS integrates with the brand’s AI-driven demand-forecasting tools to display real-time, step-by-step instructions to improve kitchen efficiency. The technology’s interface uses images of each kitchen station and order type to guide staff through step-by-step processes for cooking, assembling and packaging menu items. Wingstop Smart Kitchen is a customized version of Perfect Company’s KitchenPro Suite “We’re very focused on each thing, if you think about it, because there’s a task on your screen, and one of the rules was we’re not going to show the crew any more than what they need to see,” Wallace said. “That’s actually one of our constant battles as we go into local brands, because they’re used to seeing all these texts and all these orders, and now it’s been simplified.” Wallace said Wingstop Smart Kitchen is a customized version of Perfect Company’s KitchenPro Suite, which had previously been deployed at restaurant brands at a scale not exceeding a few hundred units, making Wingstop’s rollout the technology’s largest to date. With a system that took team members less than a full shift to learn, the technology quickly spread across Wingstop’s U.S. restaurants. When reflecting on her initial thoughts about the 10-month rollout, Sarika Attal, Wingstop’s vice president of restaurant technology, corporate systems and enterprise architecture, recalled, “As a technology leader does, I said, ‘Yes, sure, why not?’ And then internally, I was like, how is this gonna happen?” Sarika Attal serves as Wingstop’s vice president of restaurant technology, corporate systems and enterprise architecture. Attal said brand leaders and tech partners worked closely with franchisees to gather their feedback and ensure the KDS rollout went smoothly. “A lot of times, we see the problem, we think we know the solution, and it’s not just the tech [teams]; it’s the operators as well,” Attal said. “They think we should just move one button to do this, and that will make their lives seamless. There is one feature request they keep asking us for, and we, as product leaders, have been holding the line that that is not what you actually want. So, having that conversation about what you need versus what you think you need is a big one.” Brent Sides, vice president of sales at Kitchen Armor, the restaurant technology firm tasked with serving as the primary hardware infrastructure provider for the rollout, said the biggest challenge came early in the slew of site surveys. “We understood all the locations, what each location is and then tried to figure out a repeatable and scalable mounting solution to do it within the restaurant, and then put that into manufacturing,” Sides said. “Once we got through about 25, our pilot, I had a really good idea of what I was dealing with.” While the rollout completed last year represented a major accomplishment of scale for Perfect Company’s technology, the 2,500-location figure is anticipated to grow significantly. Wingstop previously publicized its goal of reaching 10,000 global units —a more- Brent Sides is vice president of sales at Kitchen Armor. than-200 percent increase from the brand’s current global restaurant count. Digital orders accounted for 73.2 percent of Wingstop’s systemwide sales in the fourth quarter of 2025, and the company saw 11.2 percent sales growth and 19.2 percent unit growth in 2025, according to Franchise Times’ 2026 Top 400 franchise ranking report. “Order readiness was a main aspect of the solution,” Attal said. “Since there are so many pickups happening with either delivery drivers or customers with an off-prem order, it’s important for them to know where their business is behind and where it’s ready. And for the team members to know that the customer is here.” While the simple design of Wingstop Smart Kitchen earned the technology a spot in Wingstop’s complete domestic portfolio, Wallace said Perfect Company will continue to lean further into gamifying kitchen technology. “In fact, we’re going to gamify it more,” Wallace said. “We’re going to put some levels. We’re going to tell you how well you’re doing. We’re going to give you some rewards, achievements. I mean, there’s potential here.”
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