MAX Burgers Puts Data at the Heart of Dining

With over 190 restaurants in five markets, almost 8,000 employees, and a turnover of roughly €450 million, MAX Burgers is Sweden’s favorite burger chain — easily eclipsing the popularity of global brands like McDonald’s in its home country.

Like most industries, today’s restaurant chains are largely data driven, and the right insights can provide an important advantage in a competitive field. That’s why, in 2021, the company started to place a greater emphasis on bringing data to its various business lines — from marketing and HR to business control. 

However, MAX’s existing data infrastructure, built on a popular lakehouse architecture, had various shortcomings. 

“Making a simple extension to our data model could take us up to eight hours,” says Oscar Björhn, Head of AI, Data and Analytics at MAX Burgers. “We realized that if we were going to stick with this model, we would have to hire a lot more data engineers than we had anticipated, so we decided to make a change to our platform.”

In a previous role at another company, Björhn had spent time evaluating the industry’s leading data solutions and was well aware of the advantages Snowflake offered in terms of speed, scalability and simplicity. 

“I knew we could save a lot of time by switching to Snowflake,” he says. “So we began looking at migrating our entire data environment.”

Within just two weeks, the company adapted its existing code and shifted its data warehouse over to Snowflake. And a few months later, MAX moved its data lake onto the Snowflake platform too — a more complicated process that still took just a couple months. 

Today, these two components are central to all of MAX Burgers’ analytics operations. The company ingests data from a variety of sources into Snowflake for its data lake workload, where data scientists can access the information in line with strict GDPR regulations. This data is also used for data warehousing purposes, where it is transformed, optimized and made available to business users. These users then use their preferred tools to uncover new business insights quickly and easily.

With Snowflake, MAX Burgers explores data in new ways — expanding the level of insight its business users have.

Perhaps most importantly, as Snowflake is a fully managed platform, the company accomplishes this with a much smaller data team. And it can even redirect its existing data engineers to more value-adding tasks — like working through ticket backlogs or developing new business features. 

“We’re about to add a third data engineer, but I’m sure we would have needed six or seven at this point with our old setup,” says Björhn. “And I don’t even dislike our prior solution. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s just that Snowflake performs so much better.”

Now with a simple, secure data platform, MAX Burgers has democratized data access across the organization, giving non-technical users the freedom to experiment and explore. The organization benefits from a variety of advanced features, such as Snowflake’s Zero-Copy Cloning.

“Whenever a developer is going to build a new feature or work on a bug, they can just clone the production database for whatever they’re working on,” says Björhn. “That’s something I haven’t seen in any of the latest solutions, and it’s going to be a huge time saver for us. Our main database is roughly 7TB and we can replicate that in around ten seconds.” 

This means users can freely experiment with data without the risk of impacting the production environment or bringing other, more important processes to a halt.

This benefit extends to external users too, with MAX Burgers now sharing data in a simpler, more intuitive way. “Snowflake has reduced the complexity of some of our data-sharing scenarios,” says Björhn. “We have a couple of external partners that we’ve been able to set up data-sharing accounts for, and we can make sure they are able to access the data they need — and only the data they need — really easily.”

After a couple of years, MAX Burgers is still in the relatively early stages of its Snowflake journey, but Björhn can already see the future possibilities. For one, it now has a platform that can support the company’s ambitious growth plans — without incurring extra work for its engineers. “I’m not worried about how it’s going to scale or what it will look like when we add new users, which I always was before,” he says.

Going forward, the company plans to explore further Snowflake features like Streamlit, Snowpark and Data Clean Rooms to simplify sharing, provide more detailed reports and accelerate exploration across the business. And Björhn is always on the lookout for new developments.  

“I always like reading the Snowflake release notes,” he says. “They always seem to be working on the kind of features that could fix a problem or let us do something we couldn’t before. And it’s never hidden behind a new cost, which is really important.”

As it stands, the company has a platform that can help Sweden’s favorite burger chain continue to lead the market — and more easily expand into new ones. “Snowflake really just cuts down our time to value when doing anything data-related,” Björhn says. “It lets us simplify everything and focus on the most important thing: delivering business value.”