When Jennifer and Tim McLaughlin set out to open a new brewery in their hometown of Vienna, they wanted to fill what they saw as a community need. “It was scratching our own itch,” Jennifer says. “We wanted to have good beer and good food walkable to our house. It didn’t exist at the time, so we built it with no experience in the restaurant industry.”
Two separate successful ventures came out of their efforts: Caboose Brewing Co., with locations in Vienna and Fairfax, and GoTab, a mobile ordering and point-of-sale system that helps streamline restaurant operations around the country.
It began in 2015, with the opening of Caboose Tavern in Vienna. Tim, with an entrepreneurial background, started looking for ways to make operations more efficient. He came up with a system that let customers skip the line at the bar and order from their phones using a QR code.
GoTab officially launched in 2018, at the same time as the brewery opened its second location, Caboose Commons. While mobile ordering is commonplace today, it was virtually unheard of before COVID-19.
“Nobody really knew that that was a thing that could be used for looking at menus or ordering or anything,” Tim says. With time — and a lot of customer feedback — many people got on board with the convenience.
When the pandemic hit and mobile ordering took off, GoTab gave the brewery an advantage. Although the Vienna location briefly closed (they used the site to distribute groceries for those in need), the Fairfax site remained open, with customers seated on the large outdoor patio and ordering through the platform.
GoTab has since expanded to become a more comprehensive food service system, including a POS system, a kitchen display system, self-order kiosks, and more. Tim stepped away from the brewery to run GoTab, and Jennifer manages all the operations at Caboose.
And the two businesses work to inform each other: Caboose can test new GoTab offerings and let the company know when there are problems. “I hear a lot of stuff directly from my client, stuff that might not make it through the customer service grid,” Tim says. “It does make it a little easier to do customer research and understanding where the pain point is.”
Today, about 1,500 businesses, primarily breweries and food halls in the U.S. and Canada, use GoTab. And, nearly 10 years later, Caboose thrives as a go-to place for people to gather, chat, and drink beer — without waiting in line. “It’s become a real … community gathering place, which I absolutely intended it to be,” Jennifer says. “It’s cool to see that happen.”
Feature image courtesy Caboose Brewing Co.
This story originally ran in our January Issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
