Brewing loyalty at speed: How Scooter’s Coffee redefined its rewards strategy

Scooter’s Coffee has built its reputation on speed, consistency, and a guest-first mindset. As one of the fastest-growing drive-thru coffee chains in the United States, the brand lives up to its promise of “Amazing Drinks. Amazingly Fast” every day, across thousands of customer interactions.

But as Scooter’s Coffee continued to scale, the team saw an opportunity to rethink how loyalty showed up in the guest experience. Beyond convenience and price, they wanted to create moments that felt personal, rewarding, and worth coming back for.

That meant evolving loyalty from a simple transaction into an ongoing relationship. One that recognizes real behavior, adapts in real time, and keeps pace with a business that moves fast.

To make that shift possible, Scooter’s Coffee set out to build a loyalty strategy that connects data, incentives, and experimentation into one seamless experience, without slowing down the teams behind the counter or behind the screen.

Scooter’s Coffee worked with Talon.One to rebuild its loyalty program around a unified platform that connects customer data, messaging, and incentives in one place. To complement running broad national offers or franchise-specific campaigns, the brand can now deliver relevant, behavior-based rewards that reflect how guests actually engage.

The drive-thru specialty coffee chain is now able to design personalized reward logic at scale. For example, they can now view each customer’s points balance on a one-to-one basis and automatically “top off” balances to reach the next reward threshold, turning near misses into meaningful moments of delight. 

With real-time data powering decisions, the brand has embraced gamification as a key engagement lever. While most systems can manage a standard “Visit Challenge,” Talon.One enables Scooter’s Coffee to automate these experiences entirely, removing the need for teams to manually build and broadcast campaigns every month. Each challenge now runs seamlessly in the background, with full visibility into performance. It’s an automation layer that personalizes, protects, and simplifies their loyalty operations at scale.

Fraud prevention is also built directly into their incentives strategy. When the team launched a free welcome drink for new app users, suspicious accounts were automatically blocked from redeeming the offer. By embedding fraud rules within the same promotion logic, Scooter’s Coffee ensured that only legitimate new members benefited, protecting both the customer experience and the bottom line.

Scooter’s Coffee also uses Talon.One’s Rule Builder to run dayparting promotions. For instance, a guest who stops by in the morning might receive a personalized invitation to return in the afternoon. Unlike traditional systems that require post-segmentation and manual follow-ups, they are now able to issue these offers in real time, targeting the right guest at the right moment to maximize engagement and repeat purchases.

Scooter’s Coffee story underscores a broader lesson for QSR leaders: loyalty can’t be static. It has to move as quickly as the guests you serve. Whether you’re a drive-thru coffee chain, a casual dining brand, or a delivery-first business, the playbook for loyalty success increasingly depends on:

Loyalty is no longer about being the fastest or the cheapest. It’s about being the brand that remembers your order and rewards you for coming back.

This article first appeared in Restaurant Dive in November 2025.