Guide

Ahsan Jiva on Mellow Mushroom, Fewer Screens and Fast Fine

By Wilson K Lee, updated October 2026 · How I get these numbers

Peachtree City, Georgia, is a town where people get around by golf cart. So at the Mellow Mushroom there, they made the host stand out of a golf cart sawn in half. That one detail says a lot about how Ahsan Jiva runs strategy for a pizza brand with about 160 restaurants: the sign outside should be easy to read, and the room inside should belong to its street.

Ahsan’s title is EVP of Strategy and Transformation. Mellow Mushroom started in Atlanta in 1974 and now operates in 19 states. He joined in 2019 straight from a consulting career, without ever having run a restaurant, and his work today runs from the data behind the brand to its newer, smaller format.

Our conversation happened in Atlanta, at On the Clock 2026. I built 720 Sweets to seven shops and sold it, so I listen to big brand strategy for the parts that still work at one or two stores. With Ahsan that turned out to be most of it.

The moments that stood out

The consultant who went to the restaurants. He had loved Mellow Mushroom since college, and the executive team wanted help with digital and the guest experience, so he made the jump. His first push was better analytics, and franchisees told him he had never been inside a restaurant. “Maybe you’re right,” he answered, and he started spending real time in the stores. He still uses the data, because it either confirms or denies what is really happening, but he says nothing replaces being in the field with guests and teammates.

A hippie brand that had to grow up. “They were just hippies,” he said of the founders, who wanted to be their own boss and not work for anyone else. For its first 35 to 40 years every store looked different on purpose. Over time that made the logo hard to recognize, and focus groups shown the old marks could not say what the business was. So the rebrand made the outside of every store match, while each dining room stayed tied to its town.

“It’s my Mellow.” That is how he says guests talk about their local restaurant, and some believe their Mellow is the only one. He set it against the giants: no one says they are going to their McDonald’s. He sees that attachment as what creates long term loyalty, and he puts it down to rooms built around their own communities, like the golf cart host stand in Peachtree City.

Fast Fine, built as one big test. After Covid, labor costs, build out costs and a slowing pipeline pushed the team toward a smaller box. The full service restaurants run 4,500 to 5,000 square feet on average, so they went back to the brand’s counter service roots, with no servers. 1851 Franchise reports that Fast Fine targets between 2,400 and 3,000 square feet and runs on almost 40% fewer hours than the full service model. Rather than run separate tests for two or three years, they changed many things in one restaurant at once, and kept the name because of the brand’s 50 plus years of equity in it. Full service stays too: he says both formats have legs.

Less technology on the floor. He calls his AI goal contrarian. He wants team members “using technology less,” because a manager stuck between a dashboard here and a report there is not with guests. After seven to eight years of work on its data, the company builds tools in house, with just two people doing it. One is a new app for general managers that suggests the next action and then leaves room for the manager’s own judgment, so they can get back to talking to guests.

Open partners, careful names, curious people. His test for any tech partner is whether they are open, can grow and change with you, and listen. He has ended relationships with vendors that showed no urgency about fixing a problem. He is just as strict about how a data field is named, because badly named data is useless to the AI models reading it. And he hires for curiosity and work ethic over a specialist title. On whether restaurants are a people business, he was blunt: anyone who says otherwise, “that’s a red flag to me.”

Taking his ideas back to a small group

You do not need 160 restaurants or a data team for any of this. Here is what I would do with it.

Watch the first hour of a shift. Stand with your manager for the opening hour and tally every time they look at a screen instead of a person. Then pick one report or one app nobody acts on and stop using it. One less login is worth more than one more feature.

Ask two questions before you sign with any tech seller. First, can I get all of my data out, any time, in a file I can open? Second, the last time a customer like me reported something broken, how fast did you fix it? Ahsan drops partners who fail the second one, and at two shops you have even less time to wait.

Give everything one name. Pick one spelling for each menu item, each role and each shop, and use it everywhere: the till, your order sheets, your accounting. Make a one page list of those names this week. It takes an afternoon now and saves a painful clean up later, when you want a computer to read your numbers.

Write down what regulars would miss. Before any refresh of your sign, cups or menu, ask five regulars what they would miss if the shop disappeared. Write their answers on one page. Change the parts that confuse new guests, and leave everything on that page alone.

Test the new idea in one place, all at once. If you are planning a second concept or a smaller shop, try the whole thing together, in one spot, for a set number of weeks, then decide. A slow drip of small changes across both stores can take years and still leave you guessing.

If you are weighing a smaller, counter service model of your own, my guide to low labor restaurant concepts breaks down the fast concept and QSR options.

Where to read more

For Workstream’s blog I turned this interview into two longer pieces, each following a different thread.

• Why Mellow Mushroom Wants Its Teams Using Less Technology goes deep on the tech side: fewer dashboards, the seven to eight years of data work, the team of two, choosing open partners, and naming data so AI can use it.
• 5 Moves Ahsan Jiva Made to Grow Mellow Mushroom Without Turning It Into a Chain covers the brand side: time in the field, the logo fix, local dining rooms, Fast Fine, and planning on the same timeline as a franchise agreement.

Keep going