Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Coronavirus

The Spoon team is working hard to bring you the latest on the impact of COVID-19. Bookmark this page for our full archive on the pandemic and how the food industry is embracing innovation to fight back.

On April 6th, The Spoon had a full day virtual summit on COVID-19 strategies for food & restaurants. You can watch all the sessions from our virtual strategy summit here.

You can also check out this COVID-19 resource page for food and restaurant industry.

Yelp Now Lets Restaurants List Vaccine Requirements (and Ward Off Backlash)

There is probably nothing more 2021 than Yelp announcing today a new feature that allows businesses to list their vaccine status and requirements. It is also very 2021 that in the same announcement, Yelp felt the need to reaffirm internal processes to help mitigate any online backlash listing these requirements might incur.

In a corporate blog post, Yelp wrote:

To help consumers understand how a business is currently operating as pandemic guidelines continue to evolve, today, Yelp is announcing two new, free attributes – “Proof of vaccination required” and “All staff fully vaccinated.” Users will be able to filter by these attributes when searching for local businesses on Yelp and will easily see “Proof of vaccination required” indicated on restaurant, food and nightlife businesses in search results.

These vaccine attributes adds to Yelp’s existing COVID-related labels allowing businesses to list their mask requirements.

While the vaccine rollout this past spring helped people in the U.S. regain some sense of normalcy, the Delta variant surge has rekindled health and safety concerns and resurfaced questions around the safety of eating inside at restaurants. As such, allowing businesses to detail their vaccine requirements on Yelp seems like a really helpful idea because it sets expectations and eliminates any confusion when selecting a restaurant.

However, in these times, detailing information about vaccine protocols is not an anodyne statement. As such, in that same corporate blog post, Yelp reaffirmed the measures it is taking to minimize online backlash against a restaurant as it relates to promoting their COVID protocols, writing:

For businesses that activate “Proof of vaccination required” and “All staff fully vaccinated” on their Yelp page, we are putting protective measures in place to proactively safeguard them from reviews that primarily criticize the COVID health and safety measures they enforce.

Yelp implemented similar content monitoring features when it launched business attributes highlighting Black, Latinx, Asian and LGBTQ-owned businesses.

Yelp said that since January of this year, it has removed nearly 4,500 reviews for violating content policies as it relates to businesses’ COVID precautions.

Q&A: Euromonitor’s Michael Schaefer Talks Restaurant Tech

Those with an eye on restaurant tech may remember that this time a year ago, Euromonitor predicted that the ghost kitchen market would be worth $1 trillion by 2030. 

That’s an enormous number to pin on what was then still quite a nascent sector. But Michael Schaefer, the Euromonitor analyst who made that prediction, wasn’t just talking about ghost kitchens for restaurants. He was talking about ghost kitchens that house ready-made meals and pantry/fridge staples, deliver groceries, and service other parts of the food sector in addition to restaurants. Turns out, he was right. Those lines between grocery, restaurant, ghost kitchen, and convenient store are fading as we speak, as much recent Spoon coverage can attest.

Michael is the Head of Beverages and Foodservice Research at Euromonitor International, tracking consumer trends, product innovations, and market evolution across the F&B industries. Needless to say, he’s hyper tuned into the state of the restaurant industry in 2021. Along with food tech investor Brita Rosenheim, he’ll help open The Spoon’s upcoming Restaurant Tech Summit, a day-log virtual event that will discuss the state, present and future, of restaurant tech. 

As a teaser, we recently got some high-level thoughts from Michael about where the industry is headed. Full Q&A is below. And if you haven’t already, grab a ticket to the show here.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

The Spoon: What is the biggest change in terms of the restaurant industry’s approach towards technology as a result of the pandemic? 

Michael Schaefer: There’s certainly a greater willingness to experiment in the restaurant industry. Some technologies, which were adopted out of necessity — such as QR codes for ordering — offer long-term benefits without compromising the guest experience. This will drive further experiments, particularly with technologies that can offer labor savings. 

What do you think the restaurant industry’s biggest challenge is right now? 

Labor is without question the restaurant industry’s biggest challenge in the short term. Restaurant work is difficult, demanding, sometimes dangerous and often pays minimum wage. The pandemic exacerbated these issues while extended unemployment insurance has given workers time to consider their options. This shifting cost-benefit analysis will create ongoing staffing issues. More restaurants will need to consider investing in technology that creates labor savings and makes the average worker’s job less strenuous. 

What is the biggest challenge for restaurants right now when it comes to digitization? 

Integration is the biggest challenge for restaurants when it comes to digitization, particularly among independent outlets. There are more options than ever in terms of systems and approaches to technology. This creates challenges in terms of finding the right solution and ensuring that disparate software and equipment setups can work together in a high-stress restaurant environment. 

What are you most excited about when it comes to the impact of restaurant technology? 

I am most excited to start seeing a range of new models that will reshape what traditional restaurants look like. A restaurant starting from scratch in 2022 will likely take a very different approach to staffing, tech, integration with third-party delivery and loyalty, among other strategies, than a ten-year-old business might. 

What do you think the restaurant industry will look like in five years? In the next five years, restaurants will become less synonymous with prepared food. Prepared meals will remain the primary business for restaurants, of course, and dining in restaurants will not be going away. However, the range of operators, concepts and venues for obtaining prepared meals and solving for daily meal occasions will continue to expand. Rather than a strict separation of restaurants and prepared meals on one end and grocers and packaged food and drinks on the other, we’ll see more of a spectrum, with a range of different approaches to prepared food and drinks, generally ordered via an app and often fulfilled by third-party delivery.

2021 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem: Serving Up a Digital Lifeline

In collaboration with TechTable and Culterra Capital, we are pleased to share an updated 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map, sponsored by Back of House, a community of restaurateurs to find and share top-reviewed tech solutions. Download the map here. 

It is an understatement to say that the restaurant industry went through a massive shift since we published our 2019 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map. The pandemic’s economic toll on the industry has been grave, though notably, the toll was not evenly distributed. A higher level of digital maturity was a clear success indicator for most restaurants that survived the crisis (as detailed by McKinsey here). 

Thus, in a year that was challenging for all, we did find one bright spot from the pandemic: many of our past predictions around tech adoption were significantly accelerated, shrinking from years to months. 

In fact, in the past 18 months, technology solutions across the restaurant and hospitality industry evolved at such a fast pace that keeping up with changes proved challenging, even for those of us who work in the space. This rapid rate of adoption in the industry caused even the technophobes in hospitality to rapidly embrace tech solutions. 

The most notable growth areas were in the areas of Ordering/Delivery and On-Premise Ordering/Payments Tech, including kiosks, mobile ordering and payments, and cashierless checkout. In addition to the acrobatic feats from restaurant operators, we also saw tech companies reinventing themselves to stay in business during the pandemic.

With that in mind, we are pleased to share our 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem, which serves as a current heat map of the broader ecosystem (and is clearly not exhaustive). 

Click to Enlarge

In order to help operators, entrepreneurs and investors continue to understand and digest this quickly evolving landscape, we also highlight some of the essential shifts and sector themes below, plus a few predictions for the year to come.

Help Wanted

Finding and securing hospitality staff has never been so challenging. As thousands of hospitality workers were left unemployed by the pandemic, or stymied by the risks of the frontlines, many have moved on to find work in other fields, leaving a huge gap in talent. 

As a result, the urgency to leverage robotics, automation, computer vision, and voice technologies will continue to increase as the hospitality industry aims to do more with less staff. And while discussions around robots within hospitality have always been cautious — because we don’t want to put people out of work — we believe we will continue to see more opportunities in the near-term for human-assisting robots (versus human replacement by robots). 

For example, as restaurant operators seek to offset workforce challenges, there are numerous opportunities for specific task automation of repetitive, dangerous or mundane tasks like dishwashing, precision preparation/cooking, food waste management, bar/food inventory, and quality control.

Another area ripe for automation via AI-driven voice tech includes drive-thrus and digital ordering. When people think of a traditional drive-thru, they likely picture a garbled voice and screaming the order into a speaker, hoping their order is correct. But we are seeing many of the larger chains replacing human voices with automated voice assistants to speed up service, order accuracy, and upsell rates. We’ve seen estimates that drive-thru automation can reduce customer wait time by 10 to 25 percent, which is compelling given that the former CEO of McDonalds previously declared that for every six seconds saved at a drive-thru is equal to an increase of 1 percent in sales.

Ghost Kitchens: It’s Complicated

While many restaurant operators were broadly familiar with the concept of ghost kitchens and virtual brands before the pandemic, these formats are now prevalent in most discussions on the burgeoning post-pandemic restaurant industry. 

Whether part of an existing kitchen or a separate commissary kitchen, the ghost kitchen’s purpose is to fulfill online orders for delivery or pick up. Ghost kitchens have the potential to solve real challenges for their restaurant customers, and there are tremendous variations on the economics, setup, and ideal use cases.

So then what’s so complicated about ghost kitchens? 

The rapid growth in consumer demand for restaurant delivery and the high usage of third-party ordering/delivery apps pushed restaurant operators to explore different avenues to expand their access points and footprint beyond their existing restaurants. 

However success (a.k.a. profitability) within the confines of a ghost kitchen business model is primarily driven by volume of daily orders, average order value, and percentage of direct channel sales versus third-party sales. This is why ghost kitchens are primarily well-suited for larger brands, as most local restaurants simply do not meet the average requirements to warrant a ghost kitchen endeavor. (If you are curious to crunch the numbers, check out this excellent ghost kitchen calculator created by Kitchen Fund.)

Further, the lines are beginning to blur between delivery and ghost kitchen platforms. We are entering a world where these platforms are increasingly supporting their own virtual brands and/or next-gen food courts, oftentimes by using the ordering/menu data captured from current restaurants using their platform. Thus local operators will be battling for market share against larger chains which are using ghost kitchens to extend their reach and volume, as well as additional competition from ghost kitchen platforms themselves.

Enter the The Mobile-Only Experience

Stateside, we’ve increasingly been adopting mobile-first ordering and marketing strategies, but the mobile-only approach (often seen in Asia) wasn’t widely embraced before the pandemic. Now, whether via QR codes, apps or mobile web, there has been a huge shift towards mobile-optimized menus, ordering and payments which eliminate or reduce most employee/customer contact. This can help to improve the guest experience via increased speed and fewer errors. For fine dining, this also saves time/costs in printing and sourcing supplies for paper menus. 

Successful operators will prioritize their tech strategy to capture as much digital data as possible in order to personalize offers, segment customers and influence behavior, and a mobile-first/mobile-only approach creates a compelling opportunity to increase both first-party and third-party data capture.

As it can be dizzying for operators to decide how to best leverage their digital data, we predict high growth for the tech partners which are helping operators utilize customer data to better uphold their brand, funnel customers into more profitable channels, and make better decisions about merchandising, pricing, and promotions.

Aggregators Will Continue to Disrupt the Customer Journey

While many of the technologies we discuss here are more operational, we also want to address the customer search and discovery experience. While this was an important topic in pre-COVID times, it is all the more so now, when disruptions and uncertainties are pushing customers to regularly search for what nearby food options are actually open, and whether they offer delivery, curbside, or takeout options. 

We have also reached a point where Google/Google Maps have become the defacto top of the funnel for a majority of restaurant consumers. Thus it is increasingly critical for restaurant operators to proactively manage their full digital footprint, and provide up-to-date information that customers can trust — especially across all third party platforms. 

For example, even though Google profiles include a link to a restaurant’s own website, that little link is eclipsed by the amount of ad-driven real estate that the third-party aggregators/marketplaces get within each profile. 

Growth Categories to Watch in 2022

  • Voice / Bot Technology
  • Robotics / Automation
  • Shared / Ghost Kitchens
  • Food Safety / Quality (a new category for the 2021 map)
  • Ordering and Payments will continue to evolve
  • Marketing Analytics / CRM, and Order / Delivery (both B2B and consumer-facing marketplaces) will continue to consolidate.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and reactions, and look forward to continuing to follow this sector together in the coming years.

Hear Brita and other restaurant tech leaders at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Virtual Summit on August 17th. A limited number of complimentary tickets are available, so register today!

Report: Over Half of U.S. Consumers Are Comfortable Dining in Restaurants

More than half of U.S. consumers (60 percent), are comfortable with the idea of dining out at a restaurant, according to new data from tech intelligence firm Morning Consult. The new data is part of a Morning Consult series on when consumers “will return to normal activities” put on hold by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Restaurants, of course, have weathered some of the biggest disruptions to “normal activities” of any business type over the last year. That includes full shutdowns of indoor dining (and outdoor dining, in some cases) and a lowered confidence from consumers that restaurants are safe places to eat. Morning Consult notes that in 2020, the number of consumers who said they felt safe dining out never rose past 42 percent.

The latest report’s finding that that number has jumped to 60 percent suggests more consumer confidence in the restaurant dining room. Meanwhile, 15 percent of those surveyed said they “think they’ll feel comfortable within two to three months” and 73 percent said they will be comfortable dining out in six months. 

For now, there is still at least some reservation. Comfort with dining outdoors (e.g., patio) is still much higher than comfort with indoor dining — 69 percent versus 57 percent, respectively. 

Eating in restaurants took the number seven spot on Morning Consult’s list of activities consumers are eager to try once the pandemic is under control and the economy reopened. Going on vacation, resuming a “normal routine,” and going to the movies were among the activities that clocked in ahead of restaurants. 

However, of these top seven activities, eating in restaurants has the largest share of people already partaking. Twenty-four percent of respondents already dine in restaurants, compared to 10 percent going on vacation or 6 percent going to the movies. Morning Consult notes that excitement around restaurants in particular spans generations. 

Worth thinking about for the future is how much tech will play a role in providing higher comfort levels at restaurants. For example, will QR code-based ordering/payment technology, which lessens the amount of server-to-customer interaction, actually make people feel safer? Or will technology’s job be more about making operations more efficient and accurate? For at least a while, it will do a little of both. As more consumers grow comfortable with eating out, it’s main role will likely be around efficiency of the business, rather than simply making people feel more at ease in the dining room.

The Next Big Tech for the Virtual Food Hall

Here’s a concept that seems stupidly simple but is actually a technologically complex feat: letting customers order from multiple virtual restaurants with a single digital transaction.

As ghost kitchens multiply, the idea of housing multiple restaurant concepts under one roof grows ever-more commonplace, be it Kitchen United’s Mix platform, Crave Collective’s virtual food hall or individual restaurants cooking up more than one menu in their kitchens.

Until recently, customers wanting to order from such facilities had to do so through third-party delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash, making a separate transaction for each brand they ordered from, despite those brands being physically housed under the same roof. While that’s not the biggest problem the world has ever faced, it does add the so-called friction to the customer ordering experience. And these days, the restaurant biz is all about getting rid of friction.

It follows, then, that some are working to change this siloed ordering process for customers. In the first place, more ghost kitchen/virtual food hall organizations have their own digital ordering properties. Kitchen United has its Mix platform where customers can order from several different brands via the KU website. Crave Collective has 16 different brands available via single app. Restaurant tech company Lunchbox is powering C3’s virtual food halls, making all choices accessible from a single interface.

In addition to letting customers ditch the third-party delivery services and order directly from the ghost kitchen or virtual food hall, these digital properties (and others) also let customers mix and match meals from multiple different restaurant brands.

Speaking to me for a Spoon Plus report recently, Kitchen United’s Chief Business Office Atul Sood called this idea “multi-concept ordering,” and suggested many more virtual operations will soon offer it.

The idea is simple: Take a bunch of different virtual restaurants housed in a single ghost kitchen and make them all available via a single interface (e.g., an app or website). Consumers can mix and match orders from different businesses, pay for them with a single transaction, and get all the food delivered at once.

The execution of this idea is less simple. As Sool explained, “bundling” different concepts is a technologically complex feat and therefore an expensive and time-consuming endeavor for businesses to attempt.

Imagine a family where one person wants a burger, another wants Chinese food, and another prefers pizza. They want to order all their items at once and have them arrive via the same delivery driver at the same time.   

To do that, there are a few different considerations. First of all, the concepts have to be under one roof — hence the rise of ghost kitchens and virtual food halls a la Kitchen United Mix. Additionally, the fire times need to be coordinated across those different concepts. A poke bowl and a rack of ribs don’t take the same amount of time to prepare, and coordinating those pieces is “a technological challenge,” according to Sood. 

KU Mix has solved for these and other challenges by building out its own in-house technology system. The company has even launched a version of it outside the walls of its own facilities. At Westfield Malls, it is installed to enable a more digital and off-premises-friendly food court experience, for example. “It doesn’t make sense for a restaurant to develop this type of technology [themselves],” said Sood. “It just makes sense for for them to license it from from somebody else.”

Kitchen United Mix is one example of this technology at work. It also seems to be an obvious opportunity for restaurant tech companies in general, since there aren’t many platforms yet specializing in this type of functionality. I doubt the playing field stays empty for long, though. Demand for digital ordering is only going to increase, and even outside of the virtual food hall, there are plenty of relevant contexts for this multi-concept ordering: sport venues. airport food courts, the aforementioned mall. Those areas of life may not be back in full swing quite yet, but when they return, they’ll include many more digital processes, including how we get our food items. 

The Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, a kind of automat for the 21st Century, has inked a franchise deal to bring eight new units of its concept to the state of New Jersey. The first location will open this summer in Hoboken.

Pizza Hut has added drive-thru lanes to more than 1,500 of its U.S. restaurants. Dubbed “The Hut Lane” option, it’s available for orders placed through the chain’s website and mobile app, and over the phone in select locations.

Speaking of pizza, restaurant tech company Slice recently launched a POS system exclusively for pizzerias. According to a company press release, this “will put the same tech tools and data insights that Domino’s franchisees receive directly into the hands of independent pizzeria owners.”

Brightloom’s Adam Brotman on the Vital Role of Data in Today’s Restaurant Industry

“Ordering was becoming something of a commodity,” Adam Brotman, CEO of Brightloom, told me over a recent video chat. Data, he said, is “a bigger, more interesting opportunity than just ordering, so we decided to focus on just the opportunity to design an easy to use affordable data science as a service.”

But information about customers is only one type of data restaurants need to be concerned with nowadays. In this video Brotman also talks about the overall role data will play in advancing the restaurant industry and how smaller businesses can better harness it.

You watch our full conversation below and read along via the transcript. Note that the transcript has been very lightly edited for clarity. 

The following interview is available for Spoon Plus subscribers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Tracking the Next Generation of To-Go Concepts for Restaurants

This shift towards delivery and other off-premises formats was already underway. Back in 2019, the National Restaurant Association predicted that by 2030 off-premises would drive most of the growth for restaurant sales. 

Suffice to say, the pandemic sped that timeline up. In the words of Ordermark’s cofounder and CEO Alex Canter (whose family also owns famed L.A. restaurant Canter’s Deli), “10 years of progress maybe happened in a couple of months, not out desire, but really out of necessity.”

Out of that progress have come many different ways and tactics to approach delivery and takeout formats, from iterating on the virtual restaurant concept to altering the cooking process of the meal itself. This intelligence briefing for Spoon Plus will look at some some off-premises success stories to come out of the pandemic-era restaurant industry.

This content is exclusive to Spoon Plus. To learn more about membership, click here.

iKcon Raises $20M to Expand Its Ghost Kitchen Network

Ghost kitchen provider iKcon announced over the weekend that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Mohamed Yousuf Naghi Group, AlTouq Group, Derayah Ventures, B&Y Venture Partners, AbdulMohsin Al Houkair Holding Group, and Nazer Group. and brings iKcon’s total funding to date to $32 million.

Dubai-based iKcon, which was founded in 2019, says it will use the new funds to expand the company’s ghost-kitchen-as-a-service model to new markets, starting with Saudi Arabia. Currently, iKcon operates 15 cloud kitchens across the United Arab Emirates; it plans to grow that number to 50.

The iKcon model differs a little bit from many ghost kitchen operations in that it handles everything for restaurants, from staffing to cooking to actually delivering the food. In the company’s own words, it “acts as a franchisee” on behalf of the restaurant, and provides services for both brick-and-mortar brands as well as virtual ones. (Kitopi is another notable example of a ghost kitchen network using this model.)

Its proprietary tech stack is another important selling point of iKcon’s business. Part of the company’s funding will go towards further building out the technology side of the ghost kitchen, focusing specifically on those tools that can automate more processes and in doing so ensure better quality and consistency of the food as well as faster speed of order times.

Those elements are important for a ghost kitchen that’s acting as a franchisee for the restaurant. Under this model, restaurants part with a lot of control over their food and brand, since they’re not the ones actually cooking and fulfilling the orders. Being able to assure those restaurants that a high-quality, consistently good product will arrive to customers on time will be an important point for iKcon to get right as it expands into new markets.

Taco Bell Will Expand To-Go Centric Concepts for Future Stores

Taco Bell today became the latest QSR brand to unveil plans for digital-centric store formats that emphasize off-premises meal formats like takeout, curbside pickup, and delivery, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The biggest forthcoming development for Taco Bell store design is a major expansion of the brand’s Go Mobile concept, which launched last year. Go Mobile stores feature things like multiple drive-thru lanes, “bellhops” for curbside pickup orders, and minimal space for dining in. The concept, unveiled last summer, when cases of COVID-19 were high in the U.S., seems a direct response to the restaurant industry’s seismic shift towards both digital ordering and off-premises meals. “While the brand will continue building destination restaurants, it will simultaneously prioritize digital elements to maximize efficiency for on-the-go customers,” the company said in today’s press release.

Besides GoMobile, Taco Bell also cited a kiosk-only concept set to open in Manhattan, as well as new iterations of its drive-thru Cantina. In 2020, Taco Bell merged its traditional drive-thru concept with its Cantina concept at a location in Danville, California run by Taco Bell franchisee Diversified Restaurant Group. The restaurant offers the full Taco Bell menu along with a full bar for dine-in customers (when they can actually dine in), an outdoor fire pit, and a games area. More such locations are planned for the future.

Revamping store formats has been one of the major trends to come out of the last year for QSRs. From Burger King to McDonald’s to Sonic, there are many different iterations on the concept of retrofitting the QSR for the pandemic era. All share some common denominators, including more curbside pickup, less dining room space, and lots and lots of drive-thru lanes.

Taco Bell is no exception to this, as the above concepts underscore. The company did not provide any specific timeframes for these developments, saying only that it plans to have a total of 10,000 locations — including old and new — open globally in this decade.

Ghost Kitchens! Fee Caps! Igloos! Tracking the Restaurant Biz’s Changes Over the Last 12 Months

For the majority of restaurants around the U.S., last week marked the one-year anniversary since stay-at-home mandates initially forced dining rooms to close down. What’s followed has been 12 months of great uncertainty, loss, and struggle. But it’s also been a time of astounding resilience and creativity, with restaurants and restaurant tech companies alike have pivoted and shape-shifted to survive the times. 

We’ve been checking in with individuals from both spheres to see where these businesses are now and what’s most useful in terms of tools and tactics as dining rooms slowly reopen and the world goes back to some version of “normal.” 

But to better appreciate how far we’ve come and how much work has gone into this industry’s survival over the last year, I’d like to pause and take a brief look back in time at some of the major stories from these last 12 months.  

March 2020

  • States across the U.S. mandate dining room shutdowns. Restaurants large and small scramble to make the overnight shift to delivery and takeout formats.
  • Restaurant tech companies start offering software and services free of charge to restaurants. Third-party delivery services like Uber Eats and Postmates waive some fees — though not without some controversies.
  • Restaurants like Canter’s Deli, Wahoo’s Fish Tacos, and Torchy’s Tacos discuss strategies for going off-premises. Some include paring down menus, prioritizing takeout meals, and going DIY when it comes to the drive-thru.

April 2020

May 2020

June 2020

  • Some restaurant chains, including Panda Express, start to launch their own in-house delivery services.
  • Restaurants get really creative with their ideas on how to safely reopen dining rooms.
  • This Latin American startup teaches us how to run a restaurant from a mobile phone. (Hint: everyone will do this in the future.)

July

August

September

October

  • The in-house delivery versus third-party delivery debate further heats up, with many encouraging restaurants to take back control of their digital orders.
  • Crave Collective and others put a fine-dining spin on the ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant concepts.

November

  • California passes Proposition 22, which lets third-party delivery services classify their couriers and drivers as independent contractors and keeps these companies from having to pay workers comp, health insurance, and other benefits.
  • Investment in back-of-house technology grows as both restaurants and restaurant tech investors realize the foreseeable future of the industry is in the kitchen, not the dining room.

January 2021

Feburary

March

Obviously this brief timeline isn’t comprehensive, since there’s no way to really capture the true scope of the last 12 months in a single newsletter. It is meant to be a snapshot only of the change and turns the industry took over the last year.

Which is where you, readers, come in. Whether you’re part of an eating establishment, tech company, or an avid foodie, we would love to hear your restaurant experiences over the last year. Drop us a line at tips@thespoon.tech.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Nation’s Restaurant News has a new gallery showcasing stories “from the front lines” of the restaurant industry — that is, the restaurants themselves. NRN has compiled first-hand accounts of owners, managers, brand executives and others about their experiences from the last year.

Restaurant Dive has an ongoing analysis of the state of restaurants one year later across a number of U.S. cities. Available so far are in-depth looks at Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle. More to come.

Grubstreet looks at lessons the New York City restaurant scene has learned over the last 12 months, and what comes next.

Video: Alex Canter on the Evolution of Restaurant Tech Before, During, and After the Pandemic

Among the things in the restaurant industry COVID-19 changed forever, businesses’ relationship to technology is a big one.

Historically, many restaurants have been slow to adopt much, if any, technology for their day-to-day operations. That worked so long as the bulk meals served were going out to dining rooms. When the pandemic shut those down, businesses were suddenly scrambling to accommodate the sudden demand for takeout and delivery formats as well as the industry-wide shift towards digital ordering. 

Of restaurant tech’s evolution over the last year, Ordermark cofounder and CEO Alex Canter says, “10 years of progress maybe happened in a couple of months, not out desire, but really out of necessity.” 

I recently got the opportunity to chat with Canter over Zoom. A longtime restaurant industry veteran (his family owns Los Angeles’ famous Canter’s Deli), he’s no stranger to the concept of either running a restaurant or improving its operations and margins through technology. Ordermark, meanwhile, was helping restaurants manage their delivery orders long before Covid-19 hit, and NextBite, the newest entrant to the family, assists businesses with launching virtual restaurant concepts.

All of which is to say, if you want a glimpse into the concepts and technologies that will matter moving forward for restaurants, Cater’s brain is a good one to pick. Below you can watch our full conversation, and also read along with the transcript.

The Spoon Interview: Alex Canter of Ordermark from The Spoon on Vimeo.

Jenn Marston
Hi, everybody, I’m Jenn Marston with The Spoon. I’m here today with Alex Cantor from Ordermark and NextBite, and we’re going to talk some restaurant tech today.

About the middle of March in 2020, restaurants had to close because of state regulations and health and safety concerns. Over the last year, we’ve seen the most incredible shift towards new technologies towards new dining formats. Alex and I are going to have a conversation about that evolution and specifically, what’s the technology driving these changes? What can we really expect to be around for the long term? So, Alex, thanks for joining me today. And before we get into all that, why don’t you give us a little bit of what happened and what it’s like now for you and your companies.

Alex Canter:
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I’m happy to share my thoughts here. And I think everything is moving so quickly that, you know, it just feels like we’re in this the fastest changing market we’ve been in as a restaurant industry. And I want to start by just saying this has been a devastating year for restaurants. There’s no denying how challenging this has been for restaurants, from mom and pops to large chains and everything in between. We’ve already seen over 120,000 restaurants go out of business in the last 12 months, which is a crazy large number.

There are a lot of predictions around what was coming over the next 10 years in terms of technology and advancements shifted digital ordering. And COVID really accelerated a lot of that shift forward. I think, you know, 10 years of progress maybe happened in a couple of months, not out desire, but really out of necessity. And it was because restaurants had to really scramble to figure out, How am I going to keep up? How am I going to have to change my business to accommodate this new reality where dining rooms are shut down, and cities are going into lockdown. There are a lot of restaurants that were set up well for [that]. Think the Wingstop world that already had so much of their digital tech stack figured out and already had a very solid plan in motion and team members dedicated to the digital experience.

But for the majority of the industry and particularly most of the mom and pops, it feels like it was an all-out scramble to try to very quickly get creative, figure out new ways to reach customers rethink menus, rethink technology in general. And that has been a very fascinating thing to watch happen in such a short amount of time because there’s so much to learn for a lot of these restaurants that were newer to this experience.

We started Ordermark four years ago to help provide technology solutions to restaurants to be able to adapt to this new digital off-premise diamond world that we live in. And Ordermark has worked with thousands of restaurants to aggregate all of their incoming online orders, giving restaurants the single device in their kitchen to power orders from Doordash and Postmates and all the channels that they’re utilizing.

But since Day One, Ordermark has always been in the business of helping restaurants drive incremental orders into their underutilized kitchen. And we at the end of 2019 we started developing and bringing to market a newer product offering that we launched called NextBite, which is our portfolio of delivery-only turnkey brains, virtual restaurant brands. So we’ve basically created [the platform] from scratch based on you know data of what’s performing well in which markets and what time of day. We’ve really built these menus that are designed for an off-premise experience and we’ve been working with restaurants to to basically train them on how to become a facility partner for for additional menus and drive an extra 10, 20, 30 orders a day. [Many of] these kitchens are underutilized. They have extra capacity [and] fixed costs already running. Like, the rent is fixed, the lights are already on, the staff is already in the kitchen of these hundreds of thousands of restaurants across the U.S. Why not do more out of one kitchen by launching three to five additional virtual restaurant brands.

That was really the premise for NextBite. We built it with a with a in a pre-COVID world with full dining rooms in mind. And the operational complexity of running the restaurant is already very challenging that we knew when we were building these concepts and these menus, we didn’t want to build anything that was going to come in and disrupt the restaurants existing operation. But rather, you know, be incremental and additional in a way that that’s lighter for the restaurant to adopt.

In a post-COVID world, there’s been a massive adoption of restaurants who need these additional orders more than ever. And as a company, we’ve been able to make a very big impact for these restaurants when we come in and layer on top of their existing business a couple extra $100,000 a year in annualized gross sales. So we you know, we’ve been really focused as a company on what can we be doing right now to help make sure that our restaurant customers and partners that we’re working with can make it through and come out even stronger. And you know, we have gotten love letters, restaurants saying these orders really [make the difference of] keeping the doors open or not. And I think that’s really been motivating for our team specifically. And it’s helped bring a lot of business into our company and attract a lot of investor attention, which is why we at the end of last year, we ended up raising a Series C led by SoftBank, which was $120 million financing to do what we’re doing on a much bigger scale. I’m trying to really advance more restaurants forward into this new digital era.

So it’s been a roller coaster of a year, we’re incredibly grateful that as a business, we ended up on the right side of all of this, to be in a position to really help these restaurants. Because I know that there, there are a lot of restaurant technology companies that, you know, unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of this as well. And a lot of what was happening from you know, in-store applications like reservations and catering businesses that that just became irrelevant overnight in such a short amount of time with no notice. It’s really hard when things are moving so fast. But we did see a lot of new technologies emerge such as the QR code making a massive comeback in the restaurant industry. Just just a lot of experimentation with curbside and restaurants turning their menus into grocery shops, which are like restaurants that offer groceries and obviously the old versions of virtual restaurants. It’s been a really crazy last 12 months. So there’s so much to talk about. I have a lot of ideas for where things are headed as well. But but that’s that’s basically an overview of what what we’ve seen happen over the last 12 months.

Jenn Marston: I’ll echo that it’s been really devastating for a lot of restaurants out there. To me, one of the really attractive things about what you all are doing with NextBite is it, it seems like you’re in some way showing restaurants that there can be digital options, there can be strategies for doing delivery, and takeout and virtual restaurants without them having to go off and invest a bunch of upfront capital or sign, you know, really long leases with traditional commissary kitchens. But this seems like a, for lack of a better word, a more frictionless way for your average restaurant to be able to introduce another revenue stream without having to really overhaul what they’re already doing.

Alex Canter: I think you’re thinking about it correctly. When I think about what’s happening right now I see these vacant dining rooms that are that are way too large. You think about fine dining restaurants, full service restaurants. I felt this way even pre-COVID, but I felt like the restaurant market in general was already very oversaturated and very difficult to even be successful. First place because there are so many options. And as more and more people enjoy the convenience of delivery, the need for those large seating capacity diminishes over time. And the need for larger kitchen spaces actually is even more in demand than ever.

In order to produce food for both in-store and takeout, you need to have the means to have more kitchen space to have more staff to be able to produce work in the back of the house from the front of the house. And so I think over time, we’re going to see dining rooms getting smaller with a bigger emphasis on the size of the kitchen, which I think we’re starting to see a little bit with these new ghost kitchen facilities and commissary kitchens that are designed specifically for an off-premise and delivery and takeout experience.

But the desire to dine out at restaurants will never go away. People will always want to enjoy restaurants and hospitality, in the experience of celebrating a birthday going on a date, going out to eat with friends, that’s something that will never go away. But it’s tough for restaurants to even hit three to 5 percent margins on an annual basis. And that’s why a lot of restaurants fail in their first or second year. Even in a pre-COVID world, there was there were too many options. And now, you know, I’m hoping that this, this is somewhat of a market correction that’s happening, we’re coming out of this, the restaurants that do survive and make it out will be stronger. And, you know, it’s hard to know how long that’s going to take. But there’s still a very exciting restaurant market ahead of us that, you know, is gonna just be a little bit more advanced for from a tech perspective, from a digital family perspective. We saw a lot of restaurants, resisting off-premise and delivery for a long time. And now, you know, it’s their lifeline. It’s where more than 50 percent of their orders are happening. And even as they open up their dining rooms and make shift back a little bit, [off-premises] will be a strong part of the off the experience. I don’t see there being many restaurants who don’t have some sort of off-premises experience coming out of this.

Jenn Marston: Yeah, I would I would agree with that. Let’s talk for a minute about those big dining rooms that are currently sitting empty, because we were seeing some, there is some trickling back to the dining rooms, I mean, different states have different relax different regulations. At the same time, obviously, vaccines are slowly but surely getting distributed. So at some point in the near(ish) future, the option to go out and eat at a restaurant is going to be less less scary for folks, basically. But where do you see? And you could you kind of already alluded to this, but you don’t see this need for delivery, and takeout and curbside, and all these other formats going away.

Alex Canter: You know, I think I think the ordering demographic has really shifted over the last year. It used to be a lot of 18- to 34-year olds who were using these apps and placing orders on Doordash. That has really expanded to all generations, from teenagers to you know, my grandparents [use] Doordash because they can’t go out and don’t feel safe going to restaurants anymore. But now that they’ve gotten used to this platform, they have the Dashpass they have their address saved on file, their favorite order restaurants are order history. This is a convenience that’s not going away anytime soon.

That larger demographic is naturally going to mean that a larger percentage of orders volumes can happen [off-premises]. Also with business travel changing. You know, many offices have committed to hiring remotely and not going back to centralized workplaces. And therefore I think, you know, opportunities with catering are going to permanently shift. And I foresee more of the happening through delivery and takeout. Restaurants have to adjust and get used to that. There were so many restaurants that were that were largely dependent on big catering orders. I think the event spaces will return your weddings, large parties, stuff like that will start to open back up again, but probably not the same levels that we’ve seen in the past.

Depending on what type of business you are, you’re probably coming out of this a little bit different. You have to rethink the consumer experience. And you see companies like Sweetgreen implementing drive-thru [and] examples of restaurants understanding that their customer base wants to interact with them differently than maybe before. And that that’s where it’s really hard to adjust and make those changes, I think, you know, many, many SMB operators and mom-and-pop restaurants don’t have digital teams. People have marketing teams, traditionally, sometimes maybe the owners do need some of the marketing themselves. But there’s so much technology that’s available now. And it’s up to the restaurants to figure out, to experiment and figure out what works and what doesn’t work in a very quick way. And we’ve seen some really, really impressive restaurants, you know, very quickly understand that they can’t just sit around and wait for things to get better and change. But they have to go out and make the really hard adjustments. So their business models to their staffing to their to their tech stack to really embrace what’s happening rather than sitting idly by hoping that things are gonna get better.

Jenn Marston: I know you and your family obviously are in the restaurant industry. I don’t think we’ve mentioned that yet. But, and I know Canter’s was already pretty savvy before the pandemic, you all were doing the ghost kitchens and the off-premise and things like that. But just from your own personal experience and your family’s experience, you know, what is Cantor has had to kind of deal with in terms of this adjustment you’re talking about?

Alex Canter: Yeah, so Canter’s is one of the largest and oldest restaurants in Los Angeles. And we had a very devastating start to this whole COVID experience where we had to lay off almost 90 full-time employees, from from waiters, the busboys, dishwashers, some that have been working in the restaurant for 30, 40, 50 years. It was, you know, incredibly challenging to make that that common decision and we as a, as a restaurant, we knew that this was not going to be a sustainable operation in a delivery-only format. Until, you know, until we start to get more creative. Luckily, funding definitely helped, we probably would not be open today without it. But that’s kind of a short-lived solution.

We ended up having to rethink many reasons pricing rethink the the entire physical experience when you walk in, to cater to an off-premise-only demographic and, and you know, we luckily were able to make those pivots and changes very quickly. LA did allow outdoor dining, but we decided not to invest in converting our space to accommodate that because it was quite an investment for so much uncertainty of like, how long is this gonna last? And luckily, we didn’t because shortly after outdoor dining became that thing, they actually pulled it back again. And it’s it’s been an emotional roller coaster for all these restaurants trying to figure out how to make this work.

Especially in the beginning, there was so little notice [around when] these changes were going to go into effect. From an inventory standpoint, we prepared for full dine in service and then we’d get a notification tonight at midnight [about closing].

Luckily, you know, Canter’s is a very big name that has a big following in LA. And so we’ve done very well on a delivery only capacity. But it’s because we’re getting a couple 100 orders a day through these third party marketplaces. Not every restaurant has that kind of volume to be able to generate enough through these platforms to sustain a delivery-only operation. And I think, the sooner that more of these cities will open up person, even if it’s just for outdoor dining, 25 percent capacity, the more likely restaurants will come out of this. But I think there’s also something to be said for, you know, the staff and feeling safe. And I’m glad that I think as of today, people who work in the food industry, at least in LA County, can now get the vaccine, which I’m sure is happening more and more cities. And I’m, I’m hopeful that that will happen. That rollout will happen faster than anticipated. Because, you know, if if these restaurant employees were showing up every day and putting themselves at risk, aren’t feeling safe at work, it’s a very hard situation to navigate for an owner to try to, you know, keep the doors open. Restaurant staff is like family, and you don’t want to put anyone at risk or expose anyone to any dangerous situation. So even even in the beginning, when we wanted to stay open for delivery and takeout, there was some hesitation.

It’s been a journey to get to this point. But for my family’s restaurant, I think we’ll come out stronger again, just like we have for the last nine years, we’ve survived wars and recessions. It’s all because of this mentality of like, we have to adapt or die, we’ll have to make changes, embrace change, embrace new technology. And, you know, I think that’s been the key to our success over the years.

Jenn Marston: I think that’s a great point. What would you say to restaurants out there in terms of what are some of the most important things that they can do for themselves right now, to continue adapting, or if they haven’t done that much to get the ball rolling?

Alex Canter: First and foremost, if you have extra capacity in your kitchen, you should absolutely be experimenting with creating virtual brands, licensing other people’s virtual brands, but really trying to maximize the output of your kitchen. That’s a very low-hanging fruit in my opinion, which we’re seeing a lot of the chains starting to embrace now. We’ve seen announcements from everyone from Chili’s to Bloomin’ Brands to Applebee’s. Denny’s have experimented with luxury, several different menus, several different concepts running out of their kitchens, and those incremental orders are so critical right now. And you know, whether you try to do a virtual restaurant brand yourself or you partner with a company like NextBite or any others in the space, I think that is that is such an obvious way to to drive more orders into your restaurant every single day. So if you’re not doing that, or you’re hesitant for any reason, I highly suggest you try it and just see what happens. You know that there is a big learning curve to understanding how to get it right. And how to, you know, create the right menu and price it and promote it and optimize the placement within the platforms. It’s not as simple as just lighting up a menu on these platforms. But you know, start that process of understanding what works and what doesn’t work, because there’s a lot of opportunity just sitting there. And if you’re not, if you’re only running one, your own restaurant, every kitchen, I think you’re probably you probably have a lot more need for growth, unless you’re in and out of alignment your door every moment of every hour of every day. I think virtual restaurants can benefit everyone who doesn’t have that situation.

Jenn Marston: Any any thing else in terms of I know, we’ve talked in the past about? Also, it’s not a matter of just taking your existing menu and plunking it online, right? It’s, you know, maybe thinking about scaling it back or thinking about which foods might be best suited to this, these kind of newer formats and things like that.

Alex Canter: Yeah, well, you know, one, one strategy that I think every restaurant should be focusing on is shifting as much of your order volume from off-premise from third-party delivery to your own website or your own app. It’s easier said than done, for sure. But at a baseline, you should have an ordering button link on your website, whether it’s powered by ChowNow or Lunchbox or any of these companies that that allow restaurants to take orders directly. It is, you know, every order that’s happening on those platforms, you don’t have to give up as much of a percentage is it’s better. But the reality of the situation is that a disproportionate amount of the volume will still happen on third-party marketplaces. But there are a lot of companies focusing on restaurants creating their own digital strategy to get people to convert through their own service platform. So that’s something that everyone should be looking into as well.

Jenn Marston: I wanted to end just by asking a question, you put it really well, at the beginning of this conversation, we you talked about the just the sheer pace of acceleration and how we’ve, you know, in, what did you say we basically did 10 years in two months, in terms of just adoption and these changes. So as we move away from these widespread lockdowns and dining room closures and things like that, do you see this pace of tech adoption and delivery and takeout adoption slowing down significantly in the near future? Do you think we’ll kind of continue quickly for some time?

Alex Canter: Well, from pace perspective, I don’t think the percentages will remain the same. Look at the third-party marketplaces, all the ordering channels, they grew their businesses in some situations three to 5x last year. I don’t think any of those companies will experience the same kind of growth in 2021, just because so many restaurants were scrambling to implement delivery last year. But I see all of these these companies continuing their growth, just not the same pieces as maybe what happened last year.

You think back maybe 15 years ago, most restaurants didn’t even have a point of sale system. There was like maybe a credit card terminal and a cash register. And, you know, the, the evolution of this space has historically been slow. But now, it’s not a choice anymore. It’s something you have to really embrace and take on and and experiment with. And luckily, there are hundreds of great restaurant-tech companies out there that are helping businesses in different ways. And I think it’s really important right now to be experimenting with, with as much as we can handle from a bandwidth perspective. Because there’s a lot [of technology], as a restaurant owner, I probably was pitched by over 500 different restaurant tech companies trying to bring in new services. And some some of those technologies were game changing for us way back in the early days of Groupon or Yelp, or even a third party marketplaces themselves, these were companies that really carried a lot of volume for us. And, you know, without them, I don’t know if we would have made it this far. So it’s really, really hard to navigate this space, because there’s so much happening. It’s like drinking from a firehose and when you think about your tech stack and your strategy, especially as it’s moving so quickly, but I definitely am encouraging as many restaurants to embrace that experimentation.

Jenn Marston: Excellent. Well, thank you for chatting with me, Alex. And for those of you watching and listening, hope this has been helpful and we’ll be running quite a few of these videos and pieces over the next couple of weeks on the spoon. So thanks again, Alex. And Take care everybody.

Video: Just Salad’s Sandra Noonan on Prioritizing Sustainability During a Pandemic

Start a conversation about sustainability in U.S. restaurants nowadays, and Just Salad will almost inevitably turn up in the talk. The New York City-based fast-casual chain has long been known for its efforts to make the restaurant experience a more environmentally responsible one, leading the charge on initiatives like reusable containers and carbon labels for menu items.

Like any other restaurant in the country, Just Salad, which now operates locations in several major cities, had to halt or restrict dining room service at all locations throughout 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. For some restaurants, this disruption might have also meant halting any sustainability initiatives. Just Salad had the good fortune to be able to do the opposite and increase its work of making the restaurant experience — in the dining room or off-premises — better for the planet.

“My focus was on navigating the pandemic with planetary as well as human health in mind,” Sandra Noonan, Just Salad’s Chief Sustainability Office, told me recently. 

Over a Zoom chat, Noonan and I discussed Just Salad’s sustainability work in 2020, including the chain’s new waste-free meal kits, the expansion of its famous reusable bowl program, and the complexities of bringing carbon labeling to restaurant menus. Our conversation, which you can watch in full below, also looks at sustainability issues and opportunities affecting the entire restaurant industry, including the concept circular delivery and the ever-growing trash problem plaguing today’s off-premises restaurant experience. Noonan also provided a wealth of insights and practical tips for restaurants looking to easily and affordable make their operations better for the planet and better for their budget in the process.

Watch the full video here: