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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.

Done Rising? Some Signs Indicate Quarantine-Induced Bread Baking May Have Already Peaked

For most of March, bread baking was having its moment.

Quarantined would-be bakers flooded Instagram and Facebook with photos of freshly baked loaves. Google searches jumped for break-making how-to’s. Flour and yeast disappeared from store shelves.

But now, it seems the bread may be done rising.

According to data from shoppable recipe platform Chicory, searches for the recipe for basic home made bread reached a peak the week of March 22nd at 896 thousand total views. A week later, views dropped by 26% to 661 thousand.

Are consumers over breadmaking?

I doubt it. My guess is that more consumers than ever before are baking bread.

So why the drop? One reason may be consumers realized there’s plenty of bread to be found on store shelves after an initial wave of panic buying and are mixing store purchases with home baking. Another may be that after the initial wave of searches for that first bread recipe crested, many have moved on to making more loaves with the same recipe or using one road-tested by a friend.

And then, some, like our own Catherine Lamb, may have just realized bread baking takes a lot of time. I knew she had recently taken up baking bread, so I asked her how it’s been going.

“I still do bake it, but less frequently” she responded. “It just takes a lot of time (basically 24 full hours) with intermittent maintenance, so it’s not a spur of the moment thing.

“Plus,” she said, “I had SO MUCH bread.”

I figured if Catherine, The Spoon’s most prolific home cook and a person who’s Twitter profile pic has her holding an artisanal loaf, has lost patience with act of bread baking, I can only imagine how many “one and done” bakers are out there.

Finally, it’s possible the downward trend may only be temporary. After a slight dip in early April, Google Trends showed Google searches for the term bake bread rebounded this week.

I also have to wonder if many of the first time home bread bakers are moving onto new projects (including new types of bread). While basic bread and tortillas dipped this past week, views of “how to make banana bread” and “how to make your own sourdough starter” have continued to grow every week for the last month.

One thing that is clear is consumer behavior has changed radically over the past month. Certainly, many more people are baking bread now than at the beginning of the year, even if some of those may have already decided to go back to buying loaves at the store.

The real question I have is how permanent many of the behavior shifts will be after a couple months of quarantine. My guess is it will probably take at least a year or two to find out.

The Food Tech Show: Going Off-Premise During a Pandemic

With dine-in still shut down in most places around the US (and the world), restaurants are trying to survive by going off-premise through a combination of delivery and takeout. The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht caught up with Chowly‘s Sterling Douglass to talk about the rapidly changing restaurant landscape and to discuss strategies for going off-premise.

This conversation took place as part of The Spoon’s COVID-19 Virtual Strategy Summit. If you missed the summit and would like to see some of what you missed, all the sessions are now available to watch.

You can get this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download direct to your device or just click play below.

Audio Player

Yelp Lays Off 1,000 Staff Members, Furloughs More, and Cuts Hours

This morning, Yelp announced it is reducing the size of its workforce due to the impact of COVID-19 on the company’s business. In a letter sent to employees, co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote that the company is letting 1,000 people go and will furlough roughly 1,100 more. It will also be cutting back hours for some employees.

“The physical distancing measures and shelter-in-place orders, while critical to flatten the curve, have dealt a devastating blow to the local businesses that are core to our mission,” he wrote.

Social distancing measures have closed stores, gyms, hair salons, and, of course, restaurants. So it’s only mildly surprising that Yelp, which is best known for its user-generated restaurant reviews, is feeling the impacts of coronavirus and the nationwide dining room shutdowns. In his letter, Stoppelman called restaurants Yelp’s “most popular category” and noted that interest in them on the site has dropped 64 percent since March 10. “All told, the millions of local businesses hit hardest by the effects of COVID-19 face the prospect of closing and laying off their employees, without knowing when, or if, they’ll be able to reopen.” 

Employees that receive layoffs will get severance pay and up to three months of reimbursement for health insurance coverage. Those on furlough will get unpaid leave but receive two weeks of additional pay and also keep their benefits.

Yelp will also implement 20–30 percent pay cuts for all executives, reduced server costs, “deprioritized” projects and redo the budget based on ensuring company survival (instead of growth). Stoppelman himself will not be taking a salary. 

He ended his letter saying that coming months will require the company to “stay nimble and adapt” — an idea more and more businesses across the restaurant industry are being forced to do. That’s true not only of restaurants (both large chains and mom-and-pop businesses) but also companies that provide tech solutions to restaurants. For example, earlier this week, Toast, a company previously valued at $5 billion, announced it was cutting half its staff. 

I’d like to put a silver lining on all this, but the unfortunate truth is that layoffs, furloughs, and other drastic moves to stay nimble and adapt are on the way, and the effects of them will persist long after the pandemic is under control. 

McDonald’s Slows Development on Its Tech-Forward Store Remodels

In an effort to reduce capital expenditures by $1 billion, McDonald’s is slowing the development of its Experience of the Future store remodels across the U.S., according to a press statement the company sent out today. 

The move comes in the wake of the mega-chain, not to mention the entire restaurant industry, having to adjust both operations and expectations to serve customers during a global health crisis. Restaurant sales are down 80 percent, and many establishments are having to quickly pivot to delivery and takeout models in order to stay in business. 

Unlike smaller restaurants with shallower pockets, McDonald’s isn’t a newcomer to the off-premises world or the technology that powers it. Up to now, the company was running a $4 billion digital business driven largely by delivery orders. Acquisitions in 2019 of Dynamic Yield (AI tech) and Apprente (voice tech) further enhanced the chain’s to-go-friendly business model, and Experience of the Future stores are meant to encompass all these elements under one roof. They also feature self-service kiosks, curbside pickup areas, improved drive-thru lanes, and many other things meant to make the customer experience at McDonald’s as speedy and efficient as possible.

Then came COVID-19. In addition to closing dining rooms across the U.S., McDonald’s has also halted operations entirely at many stores, including 50 in the U.S., and every single one in the United Kingdom. Those shutdowns also include drive-thru and delivery.

“We entered 2020 in a strong position, but of course the world has since changed,” CEO Chris Kempczinski told Nation’s Restaurant News. “While our January and February global comparable sales were strong, changes in consumer behavior and the various restrictions in place by governments around the world have led to a significant decline in sales.” 

To that end, McDonald’s says it plans to build fewer Experience of the Future stores, whether new locations or remodels of old ones, worldwide.  

Whether this is a sign of things to come from other similar chains depends. One of the major factors of Mickey D’s remodels is how costly they are — over $700,000 per store, in some cases. Not every chain’s digital business reinvention requires an architectural overhaul as well, especially if a brand is more interested in improving things like delivery and loyalty programs. That said, we may see fewer Chipotlanes and Starbucks Express Stores rolling out for the rest of 2020 — and possibly beyond.

With Consumers in Quarantine, Connected Cooking Companies Spring Into Action With Tailored Content

With a good chunk of the world’s population currently in quarantine, most of us are cooking at home a lot more nowadays.

Along with all this home cooking has come a massive spike in demand for information for culinary how-to, ranging from recipe suggestions to tutorials on how to do everything from making rice to baking bread. While many are simply searching Google for recipes, others are settling in to learn cooking skills to help them learn to get food on the table.

This sudden hunger for cooking-related guidance has led some tech-forward cooking startups to ramp up the content as they look to both satiate newfound interest in cooking skills while also giving quarantine bound consumers something to do with their time.

Here are a few ways in which kitchen tech startups have ramped up their efforts to serve homebound consumers:

Hestan Cue

While the Hestan Cue already walks users through recipes with step by step instructions, the guided cooking startup has launched Hestan Cue Cooking School, a series of virtual classes to help users of the connected cooking platform build up on their cooking skills during quarantine.

Built with the virtual class platform Teachable, the initial classes cover techniques for cooking beef, eggs and vegetables. The cool thing is that while the classes suggest you use your Cue for certain steps, you can use the classes even if you don’t have the Hestan device.

According to Hestan Smart Cooking managing director John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen, about one third of the Hestan Cue users have signed up for courses.

Anova

Sous vide specialist Anova has always been active in creating cooking content for their user community, and over the past month they’ve gone quarantine cooking focused by creating content to help consumers with everything from making pantry staples to batch cooking. And for the parents with bored kids, Anova suggests enlisting them to help with the brisket.

Thermomix

Thermomix is known for its in-person sales model for the high-end multicooker, but in the age of COVID-19 they’ve gone virtual with a “quarantine kitchen” series of cooking demos and are also allowing potential customers to book online cooking demos with the TM6 sales team.

You can see one of their latest episodes of their quarantine kitchen series below:

SideChef

SideChef is also ramping up its quarantine specific content. In early March they created a quarantine cooking recipe collection. A month later, and with virtual happy hours firmly planted in the stay-at-home zeitgeist, they’ve created a guide for virtual dinner parties.

Instant Pot

The massively popular pressure cooker is famous for leaning on its Facebook community to create content for them. Still, the company seems to have recognized our new shared reality and is letting people know that Instant Pots can help you cook bread while you’re cooped up during quarantine.

Food Network Kitchen

While the Food Network Kitchen app doesn’t seem to have created any tailored content for quarantine bound consumers, they have seen a big jump in usage and consumers look for more ways to cook. Company spokesperson Irika Slavin told me via email that Foodnetwork.com has seen “double digit increases” in page views and the Food Network App, the guided cooking premium offering launched in October, has seen what Slavin describes as a “triple digit increase” in visitors.

ckbk

ckbk is a ‘Spotify for cookbooks’ app that puts pretty much any cookbook or recipe just a click away.

Since ckbk only offers access to existing cookbooks, the company isn’t creating any quarantine specific content, but they do have a good idea of what people are cooking. Company founder Matthew Cockerill told me he’s noticed most of his subscribers, and the world in general, seem to be moving in sync over the past month through what he calls the ‘seven stages of cooking grief.’

“So first of all it was about the prepping – stockpiling durable good – beans and pasta,” said Cockerill. “Then came the “staff of life” basics bread and baking. And after that, I think, there’s a need for some comfort, yes, but also some relief from the monotony. Which is where I think chocolate and dessert cravings are kicking in. It’s either that or alcohol. And in many cases both!”

“Lastly,” he continued, “we’ve also seen a trend of interest in ways to use the new found time which people see stretching out ahead of them, with longer-term projects” like baking bread.

Cockerill told me that new subscriptions are up 250% over pre-COVID times. If you want to cook your way through grief, the company is giving away 30 days free access to their app to help you cook through your pantry items.

COVID-19 Summit: How a Global Pandemic Will Reinvent the Restaurant Menu

For the last few weeks — really since states began mandating dining room closures — one of the most commonly uttered pieces of advice for restaurants has been to rethink their menus. Between a global pandemic, a looming recession, and unprecedented disruption to daily life, it seems the one piece of restaurant operations that’s pretty much never changed suddenly needs a major overhaul.

That point was reiterated yesterday at The Spoon’s COVID-19 virtual summit. In particular, two big points stuck out: the menu needs to teach consumers how to eat healthier and it needs to be redesigned for the off-premises format.

Robert Egger, the founder of LA Kitchen, talked about the need to rethink the menu in times like these and focus on trimming portions down.

“The tyranny of the plate is something we need to reject,” he said on a panel with Spoon Publisher Mike Wolf and chef Mark Brand. He was talking specifically about the four-compartment meal that represents the standard American diet, where “the big piece of meat” is accompanied by vegetables and starches.

Egger’s suggestion is that restaurants and institutional foodservice businesses distance themselves from that format and look to menu models that create more integrated meals that are plant-forward and rely on alternative proteins for sustenance. Think of the grain bowls or falafel bowls served up by chains like Sweetgreen or Tender Greens, two companies Egger referenced in his talk. These, he says, can give customers a “robust, flavorful replacement” for the standard American diet that relies so heavily on animal proteins and gigantic portions.

Brand agreed. “If you continue to feed the beast, which is literal obesity and diabetes, you’re already part of the problem,” he said. “Why are you opening a restaurant to kill people?”

Instead of reacting to what they think customers want to see on the menu, restaurants should instead try to lead customers to choices that will be better for them. That could mean offering an alternative protein to chicken or not serving avocado toast in a region that doesn’t grow avocados. It definitely includes serving smaller portions and getting away from what Eggar called “the groaning plate.”

In many cases, it will also mean preparing food that can travel easily. With restaurant dining rooms closed for now, businesses are having to quickly pivot to off-premises models that serve delivery and takeout meals. One mantra I’ve heard often in my conversations over the last few weeks is “pare down your menu” to make it friendlier to the off-premises format.

Moving your menu to an off-premises setting is more than just a matter of uploading your existing one to Postmates et al. Restaurants have to factor in what food travels well and how they can offer variety without inducing decision paralysis, where a customer sees so many options they freeze up.  

At the event yesterday, Chowly’s Sterling Douglass said there was no magic number of menu items when it comes to offering choice without that decision paralysis. Rather, it’s a matter of simplifying the choices themselves. For example, an item called “Chicago-style Hot Dog” will be selected more than a hot dog that requires customers to take an extra step by selecting “Chicago-style” from a list of styles. 

And, of course, the food has to travel well from the restaurant to a customer’s house. That’s where Eggar’s grain bowls could prove themselves really valuable. A plate of chicken parmesan sliding around a box and getting more lukewarm with every minute doesn’t exactly make for an appetizing to-go order. A bowl of greens, quinoa, and other items that were meant to be mixed together makes a whole lot more sense when it comes to food that travels. My bet is that it’s cheaper to produce, too.

As restaurants continue building and modifying their models to fit in this strange new world or social distancing, paring the menu down to a few simpler, healthier options could prove the most beneficial thing for everyone’s health, not to mention their wallets.

COVID-19 Summit: Coronavirus Could Actually Help us Reduce Food Waste (in Some Areas)

Unpopped popcorn kernels from movie theaters. Pre-wrapped cheese plates for airline passengers. These are just a few of the unexpected food resources that, due to social distancing recommendations, are going to waste during the coronavirus pandemic.

True, reducing food waste might not be one of the top-of-mind priorities right now for many of us, including airlines and movie theaters. But as Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFed, pointed out during yesterday’s COVID-19 Virtual Strategy Summit, as the coronavirus shakes up the food system from top to bottom, our food waste patterns are shifting too. “There’s enormous volatility in the system right now,” she said.

As we shutter restaurants, Gunders explained that we’ve cut off the supply chain to half of the food system. With that outlet closed, farms, processors, and distributors that typically work with foodservice are eyeing the grocery market and trying to establish new sales channels. Gunders walked us through how each sector of the food ecosystem is experiencing change — and what that means for food waste.

Farms
Farms, many of which rely on restaurant partners to sell their goods, are trying to pivot to find new retail channels. “But it’s not that instant,” Gunders said. She explained that instead, millions of pounds of green beans, tomatoes, and cabbage are getting tilled under because farmers can’t find outlets for them. So until farmers are able to forge new partnerships for e-commerce and D2C delivery, farm waste will increase. 

Processors and Manufacturers
With retail shopping on the rise, Gunders said that processors and manufacturers, such as CPG brands, are seeing up to triple the typical demand. But they’re also trying to navigate social distancing regulations and employee illnesses, which negatively affects their production capacity. This is bad news for upcyclers — companies that make goods out of traditional waste products, like spent grain from breweries — who are suddenly having difficulty sourcing their raw materials. 

Photo: ReFed

Distributors
When foodservice entities are forced to shut down and cancel their orders, distributors are the ones stuck with extra product. Distributors are seeking new retail channels to find an outlet for these leftover foods — but Gunders pointed out that the food is not often packaged for retail sales (e.g. the aforementioned popcorn kernels and cheese trays). 

Grocery and Retail
If you read The Spoon on the reg, or have gone shopping for toilet paper over the last month, you know that grocery stores and retailers have been experiencing a huge boom. At the same time, grocery stores are having difficulty forecasting how much to stock, since demand is so volatile right now. And as Gunders pointed out, volatility leads to challenges in purchasing, which could actually lead to more food waste on the grocery level. 

Restaurants and Foodservice
As we know, restaurants and foodservice establishments have been one of the hardest hit by the coronavirus epidemic. Forced closures over the past few weeks led to an initial spike in donations to food banks as restaurants tried to avoid throwing away food — the donations were too much for the system to handle in some cases, said Gunders. But as restaurants stay closed, these donations are now dropping off. There are also challenges around logistics; transporting food donations the last mile can be tricky when restaurants have laid off employees and volunteerism is down.

Consumer
One of Gunders’ biggest takeaways from the summit is that COVID-19 is forcing us all to be a lot more conscious about what food we’re buying and how we’re using it. When going to the grocery store means standing in line for an hour, you’re forced to be more strategic about how to use up food you already have at home — and that means less food waste. At the same time, Gunders pointed out that hoarding behavior at the grocery store can lead to more food waste when people discover they didn’t actually need that 6-pack of brie cheese wheels.

As more people cook at home, we’re also gaining kitchen skills. These could serve us going forward; consumers will learn how to freeze, preserve, and make use of their food, instead of just throwing it away. Gunders also said that people might begin to eat food that’s past its “sell by” date, which is notorious for being confusing and overly conservative. It’s also an opportunity for the adoption of smart kitchen tech which helps use up food, like IoT-connected containers or meal planning resources.

The majority of food waste right now happens within the home. If we start being more conscious about our food, and how we consume and preserve it, the COVID-19 outbreak could actually be a significant opportunity to cut food waste. But only if we all do our part.

You can watch the full session with Dana Gunders below or check it out on Crowdcast.

The Spoon COVID-19 Summit: Dana Gunders on COVID-19's Impact on Food Waste.

COVID-19 Summit: Restaurant Owners Need to Act on the Paycheck Protection Program Now

Struggling restaurant operators in this country have a lot to worry about right now. And not to add one more thing to that list, but if you are a struggling restaurant owner, you need to stop what you’re doing and go learn about the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that was put into place as part of the federal response to the chaos the COVID-19 pandemic is causing.

Don’t believe me? Then listen to Ryan Palmer, a lawyer and partner at Lathrop GPM who specializes in restaurant law. He joined us as a featured speaker during our COVID-19 Virtual Strategy Summit today and had a lot of great advice for restaurant owners trying to weather this storm.

Paramount among that advice was the need to learn about the PPP, a loan program devised to help small businesses keep workers employed. These are loans that are made by your lender (not the Small Business Administration), but you need to act quickly to get one. There’s $349 billion dollars for relief in there but when it’s gone, it’s gone. So if you are looking for federal relief you need to get your application in now.

In addition to being fast, restaurant owners need to be smart. As Palmer explained, the whole situation is very fluid and changing by the day. It would behoove people to call up their lawyer to help them navigate all of the ins and out of the program.

You can also use your lawyer to help you negotiate new terms in contracts that pre-corona were probably off the table. Palmer said a good place to start would be with your landlord because, as he said, “A landlord wants tenants in its spaces and a tenant wants to be in the space.” The landlord may want to keep that space occupied instead of having the space go dark or need to be re-rented and therefore be more flexible in terms of when rent is paid, etc. If you’re a franchise, Palmer said you can talk with your franchisor about continuing fees and advertising fees.

Another suggestion from Palmer, which is actually pretty evergreen, is to check your insurance. As restaurants are pivoting to delivery or even curbside pickup, make sure that your business and employees are properly covered. As a good follow up, you should also check your local ordinances and lease to see what types of conveniences (drive-up window, curbside drop off, etc.) that you can actually provide for your customers.

The whole chat was actually very illuminating and filled with solid, boots-on-the-ground type advice; you should watch the whole thing (select Legal Considerations & Strategies for Restaurant Operators During COVID-19 from the drop down menu in the upper right of the embedded player below). We may not know what the long-term effects of COVID-19 will be on the restaurant industry, but learning about the PPP is something every restaurant owner should be doing right now.

You can watch the full session with Ryan Palmer below or check it out on Crowdcast.

The Spoon's COVID-19 Summit: Ryan Palmer on Financial Relief For Restaurants During COVID-19 Crisis

COVID-19 Summit: For Struggling Restaurants, the Key Terms are “Shapeshift” and “Break Even”

“It’s really f***ed up right now,” That’s how Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen, summed up the current restaurant situation on our COVID-19 Virtual Strategy Summit. “I’m sorry dudes, but there’s no other way to put it.”

There’s no doubt that the coronavirus epidemic is wreaking havoc on the hospitality industry, decimating restaurant sales and forcing massive layoffs. So how can restaurants, bars, and catering services innovate to make it to the other side of the pandemic?

We tackled that question during today’s socially-distanced summit. In one of the first panels of the day, Mark Brand, a chef, B-corp owner, brewery manager, and professor (okay, overachiever), spoke with Egger to The Spoon’s Michael Wolf about how restaurants can innovate to stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic. Here are a few takeaways for restaurants that came about from the conversation:

Prepare for an uphill battle
Surviving as a restaurant, even in better times, is damn hard. Brand said that — in the very best of times — restauranteurs are making a maximum of 15 percent revenue on each transaction. “Folks think we have more money than we do as restauranteurs,” he joked. Therefore the vast majority of foodservice organizations don’t have a lot of padding to fall back on when their main revenue source, like in-house dining, suddenly goes away.

To survive, you must adapt
One of the biggest challenges facing restaurants is that there’s no blueprint to go off of. “A lot of people are making this up as we go,” Egger told the summit audience. That said, Egger and Brand had a few tips to help foodservice businesses survive the crisis. “The words of the day are ‘shapeshift’ and ‘break even,'” Egger said.

In short: restaurant operations will have to pivot to stay afloat, perhaps branching into new sales channels. Some foodservice spots are also offering purchase incentives, like a 1-to-1 donation where for each meal you purchase, one is donated to someone in need or a healthcare worker fighting COVID-19.

But no matter how many initiatives or pivots restaurants make, all they can really hope to do, Egger says, is break even. Hopefully that will be enough to help them make it to the other side of the coronavirus pandemic.

Another thing to look out for? A smaller menu. “I think there’s a lot of money to be made in a modest menu,” he said. Not only in terms of selection, but also pricing and serving size.

An opportunity for change
The panel wasn’t all doom and gloom. In fact, both Brand and Egger agreed that this crisis could actually help us transform our relationship with food for the better. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to reevaluate the restaurant structure,” Brand said.

Egger agreed, noting that COVID-19 could catalyze us as a society to prioritize our food more highly. “We can make sure that our food is sourced locally, workers are paid, and we can put together a healthy meal,” he said. “We’ll have a great sense of respect for food again.” 

Here’s the full video below.

COVID-19 Summit From The Spoon: Mark Brand and Robert Egger

COVID-19 Summit: How to Get Up, Running, and Efficient With Restaurant Delivery/Takeout

At today’s jam-packed yet socially distanced COVID-19 summit, we’ve been exploring the different strategies food businesses can take to survive the sudden changes brought about by coronavirus, a stopped economy, and massive disruptions to daily life. And no other sector in food has been hit harder than the restaurant industry, thanks to mandatory state closures of dining rooms that are forcing businesses to reach for off-premises ordering formats as a lifeline or die trying. 

So how exactly to you grasp that lifeline to keep your business from going under? Today, The Spoon’s Managing Editor Chris Albrecht talked with Sterling Douglass, co-founder and CEO of POS integrator Chowly to find out. Chowly’s platform simplifies (and automates) the process of a restaurant taking orders from multiple sales channels, so Douglass knows a thing or two about restaurants and off-premises orders. Here, I’ve broken his advice down into three different steps restaurants can take in order to get up and running faster and more efficiently with their own off-premises strategies. 

The Spoon's COVID-19 Summit: Sterling Douglas & Building an Off-Premise Business

1. Prepare your staff.

Douglass mentioned that Chowly is currently working with a lot of restaurants that are implementing delivery and takeout strategies for the very first time. And the very first thing he tells them has nothing to do with software or delivery services. Rather, he recommends restaurants examine and prepare their staff for the changes necessary to operate right now.

Consider what roles your workers will play now that there is no more dining room? That doesn’t change much for those in back of house, but what about servers? Can you afford to keep them and, if so, how can they be used to help the off-premises business along?

One thing that changes for everyone is scheduling. Right now, for example, many workers have children at home because of school closures. A workers’ normal schedule might need to be adjusted. Restaurants need to work with their staff to try and accommodate the different situations brought on by social distancing and shelter in place orders. 

2. Get set up with delivery companies. All of them.

Setting up a delivery program isn’t simply a matter of plugging DoorDash into your POS and getting some takeout boxes. Accounts with third-party delivery platforms can, especially now, take weeks to set up — a hardly ideal scenario right now. Chowly, along with other integration companies like Ordermark and Olo, compress a lot of this timeframe so that restaurants don’t have to go through the set of moves for each different delivery partner.

Those decisions include which platforms to work with (all of them, for now), how they want to be integrated (tablets versus the pricier but more efficient direct POS integration), and, once up and running, what food they’ll serve.

There’s also menu pricing to consider. Right now, independent restaurants and smaller chains without the deep pockets of, say, Starbucks, don’t get much negotiating power when it comes to commission fees they must pay delivery aggregators. Douglass suggested in the session that higher priced items on third-party marketplaces. That puts the burden on consumers, which could be risky in a recession-bound economy but does shift some of the financial stress off the shoulders of restaurants themselves.

Unless you also run your own driver fleet, the process for setting up delivery and takeout is fairly similar. Douglass said Chowly encourages potential customers to do both.

3. Get virtual.

Virtual restaurants have gotten more popular and more numerous over the last year. Imagine al of the above steps — delivery integration, a smiple menu, etc.—applied to a restaurant concept that doesn’t have a dining room and relies on delivery and takeout to reach customers. 

In today’s session, Douglass pointed out a few such concepts, most notably those Grubhub has been doing with restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You and non-restaurant food brands like Bon Apétit and Whole30. The rise of ghost kitchens has also led to many more virtual restaurants, and even virtual restaurant networks like Keatz.

This is not a step most restaurants are even in a position to consider right now. But it doesn’t but it doesn’t hurt to think about long term strategies, particularly since we don’t yet know what the restaurant industry is going to look like when we all finally emerge from our houses again. Right now, getting your operations ready for delivery and takeout and getting on delivery platforms should be the number one priorities for restaurants for the foreseeable future.

NPD Group: Restaurant Customer Transactions Are Down 42 Percent

Restaurant customer transactions dropped 42 percent during the week ending in March 29 compared to the same time period one year ago, according to new numbers from The NPD Group. 

While dismal, to say the least, those numbers aren’t surprising. With most states now mandating restaurants keep dining rooms closed for the foreseeable future, many businesses have lost their primary sales channel. Full-service and casual dining restaurants (think Olive Garden or your local Mexican restaurant) that still rely on foot traffic for the majority of their sales are having to quickly pivot to off-premises models that offer delivery and takeout orders. Restaurants designed for an in-dining room experience are having trouble making this transition smoothly and quickly.

Reflecting that issue, NPD notes that while QSRs (e.g., Wendy’s) saw a transaction decline of 40 percent, full-service restaurants shouldered the burden of a much larger drop, at 79 percent.

“The transaction declines partially reflect the struggle of on-premise restaurants to pivot to off-premise models,” NPD industry advisor David Portalatin said in a statement. “Many restaurants that are attempting to make the move are doing so with limited menu offerings and without the benefit of drive-thru lanes. Anecdotally, some operators are giving up the cause and closing altogether.”

Some of those closures are temporary; others, sadly not. Recent numbers from The National Restaurant Association show that 3 percent of restaurants have closed permanently and another 11 percent are expected to this month.  

Some restaurant-tech companies, like Allset and Presto, have shifted their focus to providing products and services that could make to-go operations more efficient. Others, like Ordermark and Chowly, are waiving certain fees for restaurants that want to get quickly up and running with delivery. Meanwhile, a number of charities, fundraisers, and other initiatives are working to provide relief to impacted businesses and their workers.

It’s too soon to tell how effective any one of these solutions is in terms of saving more businesses in the long term. Given that major restaurant chains as well as the smaller businesses are now struggling financially, even cautious optimism feels naive right now.

For us average consumers who can afford it, the best course of action right now is to keep ordering takeout from local restaurants and contributing to relief funds, virtual tip jars, and other online initiatives. Soon enough, the numbers will tell us if these moves can make a big enough difference.

Restaurants Can Now Sell Impossible Foods’ “Beef” Directly to Customers

There’s a new silver lining to the coronavirus pandemic: more of us can now get our hands on Impossible Foods’ plant-based beef. The startup announced today on Linkedin that the FDA will now allow all of Impossible’s restaurant partners to sell the Impossible Burger directly to customers in 5 lb. bricks, 1/4 lb. patties, and 1/3 lb. patties.

In order to sell the burgers, the restaurants must give customers a printed out copy of a PDF outlining the ingredients and allergens in the Impossible Burger. Pricing is at the discretion of the restaurant itself.

Admittedly, this initiative is probably not going to radically alter the course of any foodservice establishments. Restaurants are struggling to stay afloat after COVID-19 has forced the vast majority to shutter their dining rooms and pivot to takeout and delivery only. The numbers are sobering: over 3 percent of restaurants are already permanently closed, and NPD reports that restaurant customer transactions declined by 42 percent in the last week of March, compared to the same time period the year before.

Depending on how they price the uncooked Impossible Burger, restaurants are still likely able to make more money selling a finished Impossible product (i.e., a cheeseburger) than the raw material. But if they can’t sell enough of those, selling the raw product is a good way to get rid of inventory — especially if the restaurant is preparing to shut its doors, either temporarily or permanently.

In the end, this move might be more of a boon for consumers. According to NPR, sales of plant-based meat were up roughly 280 percent over the first two weeks of March. However, Impossible Foods’ ground “meat” is only available in select grocery stores in California and mid-Atlantic states. At the same time, over 15,000 restaurants sell Impossible Foods. If they do choose to sell to customers, that will dramatically increase the number of people who can buy uncooked Impossible “meat” to cook at home.

In Seattle, I have been sadly unable to get my hands on the plant-based “bleeding” burgers (outside of restaurants). Impossible’s new initiative will give folks like me, who love Impossible burgers and want to find ways to support their local restaurants, another opportunity to do so. It may be a relatively small silver lining, but in times like these we’ll take what we can get.

You can search for nearby restaurants that sell Impossible Burgers here. Give them a ring to see if they’re selling the raw plant-based burgers, and how much it’ll cost you to get your heme fix.