7 Leaves Cafe

7 Leaves Cafe is a Southern California tea and coffee house built around handcrafted drinks and a hospitality-first café experience. The company has grown to 32 corporate locations across three states, with plans to continue opening new cafés.

Growth created a problem that most multi-unit operators recognize. Store teams knew their jobs. Leadership could not see whether those jobs were getting done. Everything that mattered operationally lived either on paper in a back office or in a tool that only the field team touched.

The operations team was clear about what they did not want. The goal was not to lock store teams into a rigid system that told them exactly how to work. It was to gain real visibility across locations while keeping enough flexibility to fit how the cafés actually run.

Paper was the immediate obstacle. Each store had accumulated its own set of checklists, roughly 34 of them, and they drifted. A manager might refresh one sheet in a given month and leave the rest. Nothing was tracked digitally, so there was no way to compare one café against another or to spot a store that had quietly stopped doing something.

Temperature control was the sharper risk. Health code required readings every four hours, and those readings lived in binders. A cleaning sign-off could be marked complete at 11:59 and again at 12:01 by someone walking out the door. So even when the record existed, the work behind it was unverifiable.

The team evaluated the landscape and chose Xenia for the combination of audits, daily execution, corrective actions, temperature monitoring, photo verification, reporting, and hardware support in one place, without the restrictive user model they were trying to avoid.

Configured before anyone logged in

Xenia digitized 7 Leaves' existing checklists and forms into their workspace ahead of the kickoff call. Rather than handing over an empty platform and a training deck, the implementation team walked the operations leads through their own forms on day one, with conditional logic and automations already in place.

One template, every café

Rather than building a separate checklist for each location, 7 Leaves uses location attributes and conditional visibility. A store with a drive-through sees the drive-through section; a walk-up store does not. One template serves every café, and when it changes, it changes everywhere at once. Twelve templates now cover work that used to take dozens of paper forms.

Built so a checklist cannot be clicked through

This was the operations team's priority from the first conversation. A checklist a team can race through teaches them the checklist does not matter. Temperature steps are set to Bluetooth-only, so a reading has to come from the thermometer rather than from memory. Walk-in and display units require a photo of the unit thermometer. Out-of-range readings trigger a follow-up question and, where needed, a corrective task assigned to the store manager with the district manager watching.

Reporting that reaches the person who can act

Completion data is emailed to district managers on a schedule rather than sitting in a dashboard nobody opens. Leaders can compare cafés, drill into a single submission, and see photo evidence from any store without visiting it.

Expanding into audits and evaluations

Brand standard audits are being rebuilt in the platform with weighted scoring and automatic corrective-action routing. A 14-page paper performance evaluation is being digitized next.