Baby Jacks BBQ is hiring cashiers, and — in an innovative approach by the owner — the workers don’t even have to leave the comfort of their homes to take your order.

In fact, they could be anywhere across the country.

Arlington entrepreneur and restaurateur Will Clem and his partner Orin Wilson have tested the cashiers-from-afar approach — called Bite Ninjas — about a year at Baby Jacks Bartlett location on U.S. 64 and Appling. The pair is ready to launch the venture.

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Bite Ninja offers restaurant owners a remote drive-thru ordering system in which employees or “ninjas” take customer orders and handle cashier duties while working from home, sometimes in other states.

“This will be for many types of restaurants. It’s a digital version of the old walkie-talkie technology,” said Clem, who owns a second Baby Jacks BBQ location in Arlington and has a third opening this spring in Oakland.

The Bite Ninja service features a 55-inch display menu board at the drive-thru where customers see the face of the person taking their order. But the employee may not be on the property. 

Baby Jacks has put the idea through a test-run in Bartlett over the past year, relying on it for up to five hours daily during the peak lunch and dinner rush.

“We like the idea of a visual impact when people come in,” Wilson said. “We’ve had people take selfies with the drive-thru kiosk. I’ve never seen that happen anywhere else.”

Innovation is nothing new for Clem. He is also a founder and partner in Memphis Meats, a startup that develops tissue-engineered lab-grown meats. Clem developed the hardware for Food Ninjas in his garage and worked with Wilson to perfect the software.

He describes the digital service as much clearer audio-wise than the current squawk boxes at many drive-thrus.

Wilson is a CPA and certified management accountant who lives in Searcy, Arkansas, and runs his business out of Bartlett. He previously worked with big data and telecom companies building out operational systems. He has teamed with Clem over the years on strategic planning for Baby Jacks.

“Originally it was thought that this was a really good competitive advantage for Baby Jacks. But then we realized it was something that could definitely help a lot of people, and it was very timely that we built a solution during everything that’s going on right now,” Wilson said.

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Clem began working on the technology pre-COVID out of necessity after several instances when employees were unable to get to work on busy weekend nights.

“So, we decided to take the orders remotely off-site,” Clem said. “It started out just my wife and I taking the orders ourselves. Then we saw it was working great, so we started outsourcing it.”

A few months after the technology debuted in Bartlett, the pandemic hit, leading to a “huge demand for this new technology,” according to Chem.

Ninjas working for the company live in places like Mississippi, Arkansas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

“These people are all taking orders for Baby Jacks from the comfort of their home or dorm,” Clem said.

The Bite Ninjas are even using filters allowing order-takers to appear as a leprechaun near St. Patrick’s Day or potentially an elf or Santa near Christmas.

The ninjas have helped reduce the number of mistakes on orders. “In the restaurant, there’s the stress of many things going on,” Clem said. “Our order accuracy is so much better with this.”

The compensation model for the ninjas is similar to an Uber or Lyft driver. The new company already has a pipeline of 3,000 potential ninjas after very limited outreach.

“With this you can more or less make the same type pay, but you do it kicked back on your couch,” Clem said.

With the glitches worked out over the past year, Clem and Wilson think Bite Ninja is ready for prime time. They expect to keep things local in the early stages of adding restaurants to Bite Ninja’s roster. The Bite Ninja service will also be featured at Baby Jacks’ new Oakland location set to open this spring. Baby Jacks is going into the iconic freestanding building on U.S. 64 last occupied by Brad’s BBQ, one of Oakland’s first restaurants.

The partnership has contacted some large franchise owner associations to gauge interest in the Bite Ninja idea.

“A national expansion is something that we’re going to pursue, but we like the idea of keeping things local at first because if there are things we can do to help Memphis that’s where we start,” Wilson said.