Bonchon + Opus Training

Bonchon is a Korean fried chicken franchisor scaling from 150+ US restaurants toward 500, most run by independent owner-operators. 20% of team members trains in a non-English language.

The problem

Before Opus, Bonchon’s training lived across paper in some stores and a legacy LMS in others. That LMS was a document repository, and it gave L&D no signal into whether any of it impacted performance in stores. Each restaurant also ran on a single, shared login, so the L&D team could see that a store logged in, but not who logged in or what they did once they got there. With roughly 30 new restaurants opening every year, that visibility gap only compounded.

“The information went out one way. It wasn’t engaging, and it wasn’t actionable. The problem wasn’t the content. It was how we got people to actually use it in their work.” Ashley Helkenn, Sr. Director of L&D and Ops Services

What they did

Bonchon rolled Opus out over a year in three phases, franchisee buy-in first.

Earned trust before pushing programs: Bonchon centralized key resources and let operators come to them voluntarily, watching for lever moves like operators returning unprompted and owners adding their own team members. Those signals came well before a single required program.

Ran the high-priority launches through Opus: the Korean Comfort LTO was built in 3 to 4 hours, the fastest Bonchon had seen, using one course adapted for front- and back-of-house instead of separate materials for each. Usage spikes line up with LTO launches.

Built it into every new restaurant: Bonchon University delivers pre-arrival training for franchise owners, and new restaurant opening task lists begin during setup, so teams work in Opus before the first guest walks in.

Underneath all three, tasks, training, resources, search, and messaging auto-translate into 7 languages with text-to-speech built in, so L&D no longer runs a separate translation cycle per language. Individual logins replaced the shared one, so L&D and owners can see who is training and who is running line checks.

The results

• Food scores increased 22%.
• Double-digit traffic and sales growth y-o-y.
• Quality-assessment improvements track directly to Opus usage.

“When we visit stores we run a quality assessment, and the improvements we see are directly related to their usage of Opus. When the information gets used, the training happens, and the stores perform better.” Suzie Tsai, CEO