How Hungry Lion Reaps 77% Efficiency Improvements with KNIME Team Plan

Hungry Lion sells chicken and chips. What sets them apart isn’t just the product but how they operate. They are one of the largest corporate-owned QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) businesses globally, running over 400 stores across eight countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Their ambitious expansion plan involves growing to 1,000 stores within the next eight years. They opened 168 stores in the last two years, with 27 launched in just two months. They currently serve 12 million meals monthly to six million customers.

“Five years ago, we had no BI stack, no reporting capabilities, and no centralized way to manage or make use of our data. It was a patchwork of Excel sheets, SQL scripts, and email alerts — a far cry from what a scaling business needed.” said Jonathan Symonds, Head of Insights (Data).

Challenge: Scale without sacrificing control

As Hungry Lion prepared for hyper-growth, their biggest challenge was unlocking actionable insights from fragmented, decentralized data. The teams needed to make real-time decisions, yet reporting was entirely retrospective. Every workflow was manual. There was no data consistency across departments, and no reliable system for scaling analytics or deploying data pipelines.

Hungry Lion had to:

• Enable non-technical teams to work independently with data
• Create centralized yet flexible reporting systems for teams with vastly different needs (HR, Operations, Finance, etc.)
• Automate data transformation processes

To achieve their hyper-growth goals they needed a scalable, affordable, and accessible solution.

Solution: KNIME Team Plan workflow scheduling, versioning, and collaboration

“Our KNIME journey began with desktop workflows, which allowed us to explore and prototype with no upfront investment. As our confidence grew, we moved to KNIME Server in 2021, which let us scale operations without having to manually trigger workflows,” says Jonathan Symonds.

“Last year, we migrated from KNIME Server to KNIME Team Plan. The impact has been significant.”

KNIME Team plan has enabled them to:

• Automate hundreds of workflows that run daily and hourly
• Version and collaborate on workflows across teams
• Deploy solutions quickly without reliance on external vendors
• Track, schedule, and monitor pipelines with built-in alerts
• Control costs, running high-volume operations for under R20,000/month (~$1,000 USD)

Results: Cost savings, time savings, and greater model accuracy

1. Up to 90% cost savings

As Hungry Lion expanded rapidly across Sub-Saharan Africa, scaling their data operations became critical, as did keeping costs under control. With hundreds of new stores coming online, the company needed a way to automate and standardize data workflows without relying on expensive external vendors or bloated software-as-a-service contracts.

That’s where KNIME proved its value, not just as a powerful platform, but as a cost-effective one.

“When I started, part of the reason why I could get the business to buy into the server deployment was we got a couple of quotes for pipelines, and it was to the value of about fifty thousand to two hundred thousand rand a pipeline,” said Jonathan, who leads data initiatives at Hungry Lion.

Jonathan’s team now builds and develops workflows with KNIME – at scale and at a considerably lower monthly cost.

“KNIME’s probably about thirty percent of our [data infrastructure] cost, and it’s well under twenty thousand rand a month,” he explained. “It’s a very, very approachable number.”

2. 77% time-savings building data solutions

Hungry Lion’s data team began building out complex forecasting workflows with an aim to gain increased efficiency. Traditionally, developing a data transformation pipeline in raw SQL or Python would be an intensive, time-consuming task.

With KNIME, that timeline was significantly shortened. Jonathan explained that the team could build, test, and refine their workflows visually rather than writing and debugging hundreds of lines of code.

“I can conservatively say that if I had to sit down and code this, it would be a good 120 hours just based on all the requirements that go into it,” he said. “Whereas KNIME, because you can at any point click on the nodes, I was able to build this… I think it was 27 hours in total. That ability to go through this information and visually track where I was and at every single point validate what I was seeing versus our existing BI stack was super, super powerful.”

This time reduction from an estimated 120 hours to just 27 translates into much faster delivery.

3. Just two months to get teams upskilled

At Hungry Lion, data enablement isn’t limited to technical experts. One of the most important benefits they’ve gained from using KNIME is the ability to build internal capability quickly, among team members without any coding background.

Instead of hiring based on certifications or years of SQL experience, we’ve focused on hiring for mindset and adaptability.

“The most important thing that I want you to take away from how Hungry Lion has leveraged KNIME is the ability to take somebody that's fresh out of uni,” Jonathan explained. “I like to hire young, dynamic people who don't have bad habits… hiring for attitude and not having to worry about technical chops and how many SQL qualifications they've got behind their name.”

KNIME’s visual, low-code approach makes it possible to bring new hires up to speed fast.

“Being able to take somebody that's fresh and getting them to an understanding of data within two months is what we've done a whole bunch of times,” he added.

4. 95% stock ordering improvement

That same accessibility extends beyond new hires. It’s also what enables operational teams like stock ordering to take full ownership of their workflows.

Previously, stock ordering was a manual task handled by store managers, but Hungry Lion saw an opportunity to streamline and standardize the process through automation. The change wasn’t without resistance at first. But the results with KNIME quickly proved otherwise.

“About two years ago, we started ordering stock for managers in stores… but very quickly we showed that we are better than ninety five percent of managers,” Jonathan said.

“The ability to take somebody who’s a demand planner, for instance, and give them a KNIME workflow… putting the control in their hands is really, really great,” Jonathan added. “And it means I can walk away from that responsibility, and my team can walk away from that responsibility so we can do the next best, greatest thing.”

Labor forecasting: A key use case

One of Hungry Lion’s most impactful KNIME use cases is in labor forecasting.

The third-party workforce management company Hungry Lion collaborates with needs structured, driver-based data inputs to forecast labor requirements across the chain’s 400+ stores.

Using KNIME, Hungry Lion built a pre-processing workflow that extracts transactional data (by store, by day, in 15-minute buckets) and transforms it into key “sales drivers” including:

• Credit card vs. cash sales
• Sit-down vs. takeaway orders
• Product category splits (e.g., wings, burgers, chicken pieces)
• Time-of-day demand patterns

This workflow feeds clean, structured data into their ML model daily.

Impact

• Time saved: Built in 27 hours vs. 120+ if coded
• Accuracy improved: Labor schedules now reflect actual sales dynamics, not historical assumptions
• Scalability achieved: Workflow runs daily via scheduled automation with alerts for any failure
• Cost savings: Despite rapid growth, we’ve reduced overall labor headcount by optimizing shift schedules.
• Adaptability: Adding new product lines (e.g., chicken wings) or optimizing the factors that influence staffing needsis as simple as inserting a few nodes

The most powerful part? Teams can adjust parameters themselves—no technical support needed.

Scaling with confidence

As the organization continues to grow — 500 stores soon, 1,000 in sight — KNIME Team Plan allows Hungry Lion to keep our data strategy lean, agile, and cost-effective.

Whether it's orchestrating complex ETL processes or empowering non-technical teams to own their analytics, KNIME Team Plan gives Hungry Lion the means to do more with less.

“KNIME has become a critical part of our strategy — not just because of what it can do, but because of how easily it enables our people to do it themselves.”Jonathan Symonds, Hungry Lion.