The Channel Play
Slim Chickens, the 300-plus-unit fast-casual chicken franchise based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, is testing a new off-premise ordering channel that lets Samsung Smart TV viewers place delivery orders directly from their television remote — no app download, no QR code, no third-party marketplace. The pilot launches in Northwest Arkansas, the brand's home market, before any broader rollout.
The mechanic works through a tri-party arrangement: klyq, the shoppable streaming marketplace built on NBTV's patented BuyBar™ platform, surfaces a Slim Chickens advertisement on the Samsung Smart TV home screen. Viewers select the ad, watch short-form brand content, and add tenders, wings, sandwiches, and sauces to a cart using the BuyBar™ interface — all via remote. Checkout completes on the TV. The order then flows through Gett's First Party Everywhere (FPE) network directly into Slim Chickens' own first-party ordering system, the same infrastructure behind the brand's app and website.
Why Margin Matters
The first-party routing is the operationally significant detail. Because no third-party marketplace sits between the consumer and the restaurant, Slim Chickens avoids marketplace commission structures — typically 15% to 30% of the order value — that have pressured restaurant-level margins across the fast-casual segment for years. Guests pay Slim Chickens' own menu prices rather than marketplace-inflated rates. No new point-of-sale equipment is required, and kitchen workflow is unchanged, since orders enter the same queue as app and web tickets.
Ben Turner, vice president of brand performance at Slim Chickens, framed the initiative as a customer-relationship play as much as a margin one. "We're not just renting space on the biggest screen in the house," Turner said. "We're turning TVs into Slim Chickens counters. And because every order runs through our own platforms, we maintain control over the guest relationship and the Slim Chickens experience our customers know and love."
Competitive Context
The move positions Slim Chickens at the leading edge of what Gett calls "agentic commerce" — the emerging practice of embedding restaurant ordering natively into high-traffic consumer environments such as AI assistants, gaming platforms, and connected TV. Gett's FPE network currently includes more than 40,000 partner restaurants. The klyq platform is live across more than 80 million U.S. Samsung Smart TVs, with expansion planned on Vizio, Apple TV, and Google TV — giving the channel meaningful reach if Slim Chickens scales beyond the Arkansas pilot.
For the broader fast-casual segment, the test reflects intensifying operator interest in reducing third-party delivery dependency as a margin-recovery lever. Major chains have invested heavily in proprietary apps and loyalty programs over the past three years for the same reason; connected-TV commerce represents a next frontier in that strategy. The chicken segment in particular — where competitors including Raising Cane's, Zaxby's, and Wingstop have all expanded digital ordering infrastructure — is acutely sensitive to delivery economics given the category's strong off-premise mix.
Northwest Arkansas serves as a logical proving ground. Slim Chickens opened its first location in Fayetteville in 2003 and operates more than 300 restaurants across 34 states and four international markets, with a stated goal of reaching 600 units over the next decade. Franchise development momentum in the "better chicken" segment makes the operational simplicity of the Gett integration — no new hardware, no retraining — an important selling point for area development agreement holders evaluating incremental revenue channels.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
