Plein Air has launched Big Colony, a mobile app and website platform for restaurant brands, aimed
at bringing commerce-forward digital ordering to operators across every segment.

At launch

The platform supported close to 10,000 restaurants on day one, including Cold Stone Creamery,
MrBeast Burger, Razzoo’s Cajun Cafe and goop Kitchen. It targets pizza, ice cream, QSR,
fast-casual, casual, virtual and multi-brand operators.

Plein Air, founded in 2016 and led by co-CEOs Jason Abelkop and Paul McEnany, employed around 80
people across 22 states at the time of the announcement.

An agency launching a platform

The launch client list is the strategy, and it is a deliberately awkward one. Cold Stone Creamery
and MrBeast Burger have almost nothing in common operationally — one is a decades-old franchise
with physical scoop shops, the other was a virtual brand built on delivery kitchens. Shipping both
on the same platform is a claim that the underlying model generalises.

That is also the hard part of the bet. An agency building a platform inverts its own economics:
project revenue is replaced by licence revenue, and the incentive shifts from billable hours to
reusability. Most agencies that try this end up with a framework their own teams use and nobody
else does. The distinction is whether the thing can be operated by people who did not build it.

Judged three years on, the answer appears to be yes — the platform passed 15,000 locations and
became the basis for an outside investment. But that was not knowable in 2023, which is what makes
this the interesting entry in the archive.

Sources

Distributed by wire and carried by
RestaurantNews.com,
Restaurant Magazine,
24-7 Press Release
and Digital Journal.