From One Chip Shop to Domino's — The Story Behind ServeMate
It started with a chip shop called The Nippy Chippy
Brad-Lee grew up working in his father's fish and chip shop — The Nippy Chippy in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire. From a young age he was behind the counter, learning the rhythms of a busy takeaway: the chaos of peak time, the pressure of getting orders right, the exhaustion of a long Friday night service. He never planned to build software. He planned to make great food and run a great shop. But the more time he spent in the industry, the more frustrated he got with the tools available to owners like him.
Every system we tried was either built for big restaurants with big budgets, or it was cheap and fell apart the moment things got busy. Nothing was built for how a real takeaway actually works.
The till system was one company. The online ordering was another. The rota was a WhatsApp group that fell apart every other week. The website was a template from 2015 that nobody had touched since. And when the phone rang during Friday evening rush — more often than not, it went unanswered. Each of those problems cost money. Together, they were costing a lot of money.
Building it on the counter
Brad-Lee started building ServeMate the only way he knew how — practically. Not by hiring a development team or raising investment, but by sitting down with a laptop on the chip shop counter and figuring it out himself. The working pattern became a rhythm of its own. When the shop was quiet, the laptop came out. When customers came in, the laptop went away. Order the chips, serve the customer, back to the code. Repeat until closing.
"I built it on my laptop, on the counter, between orders. When it got busy — laptop away, back to frying. When it went quiet — back to building."
The first version was rough. But it worked — and it worked specifically for the way takeaways actually operate, because it was built by someone who was operating one in real time. Every feature that went into ServeMate came from a real problem Brad-Lee or his team had experienced firsthand. Not from user research documents or product roadmaps, but from actual Friday nights where something went wrong and needed to be fixed.
Sophie — the AI that made national news
The missed calls problem was one of the hardest to solve. At peak time, with staff fully stretched on the counter and in the kitchen, the phone was always the first thing to be ignored. Every unanswered call was a lost order — and there was no easy fix. Hiring someone specifically to answer phones wasn't practical for most independents. Call answering services were impersonal and unreliable. So Brad-Lee built Sophie — an AI voice assistant designed specifically to answer phone orders for UK takeaways. Sophie wasn't the first AI voice product in the world. But she was the first purpose-built AI phone ordering system for UK takeaways — trained on real menus, real accents, real ordering patterns. When she launched, the response was immediate. BBC News covered it. Fry Magazine covered it. The Daily Star, the Nottingham Post, Gloucestershire Live — the story spread because it tapped into something that resonated with takeaway owners across the country. Finally, someone had actually solved the missed calls problem.
From one chip shop to Domino's
The growth of ServeMate from a one-shop experiment to a platform trusted by over 100 UK takeaways happened largely through word of mouth. Owners talked to other owners. The Facebook fish and chip groups. The trade shows. The industry publications. But the milestone that really changed things was Domino's. Domino's franchise operators — running some of the busiest takeaway sites in the UK — started using ServeMate's AI for voice ordering and shift management. A global franchise with entire tech teams evaluating software had looked at what was available and chosen Sophie.
The same AI that was built on a chip shop counter in Stonehouse is now running in Domino's franchise stores across the UK. That still feels surreal to say.
Where ServeMate is now
What hasn't changed
ServeMate is a proper company now — registered, structured, growing. But the thing that made it work in the first place hasn't changed. Brad-Lee still runs a takeaway. He still understands what a busy Friday night feels like from behind the counter. And every feature that gets built into ServeMate still has to pass the same test it always has: would this actually make a takeaway owner's life easier? Most 'built for hospitality' software is built by people who've never worked a service in their lives. ServeMate is different — and that difference shows up in every part of the product, from how the POS handles peak time pressure to how Sophie sounds on the phone. We built it for the people behind the counter. Because we are the people behind the counter.
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