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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Data Insights

What Sweden’s Quirky Food Tech Scene Could Mean for the Rest of the World

From parental leave policies to sustainability initiatives, Sweden is typically considered one of the most forward-thinking nations on earth.So it’s no surprise the country consistently pops up in food tech conversations, often for unusual projects that seem quirky at first glance but can actually tell us a lot about how tech is changing the way we eat.

Like making customers do what’s essentially a blind taste-test to see if they can tell the difference between a plant-based burger and the real deal. The famed Impossible Burger isn’t available in Europe right now, but that didn’t stop Burger King from using Vivera’s plant-based patty to create a version of its Whopper — and betting customers can’t discern the difference between it and a regular meat-based one.

To drive that point home, BK in Sweden launched the “50/50 menu” at the beginning of July where customers order BK’s signature burger and have a 50/50 chance of getting a meat version or the plant-based version. The only way to tell which is which is to scan a QR code on the wrapper.

It’s a gimmick, to be sure, but as my colleague Catherine Lamb pointed out, it’s also a way to get better data on plant-based offerings: “It will get a record of every consumer’s reaction to the sandwiches, and be able to quantify how often people are actually duped by the vegetarian alternatives.”

More data like this could give Burger King a realistic picture of how much customers actually want plant-based fast food — a useful lesson for businesses in any part of the world.

Or you could just hand your customers a picnic blanket. That’s what McDonald’s in Sweden did earlier this summer to promote its initiatives around delivering to public spaces via geofencing technologies. Customers scan a QR code on the picnic blanket to shoot their geographic information to a third-party delivery service, who will deliver a McDonald’s meal from the chain’s nearest location.

The idea isn’t specific to Sweden: companies like Domino’s and 7-Eleven also deliver to public locations rather than a numbered addresses. But there’s something more attention-grabbing about scanning a picnic blanket than simply logging into an app. PR stunt though it may be, it suggests a whole new avenue of possibilities when it comes to using everyday objects and settings in life to ramp up the food delivery business.

On a more ambitious level, come September 3, restaurant-goers in Stockholm will be able to experience what science, technology, academic research, design, and cooking look like when bundled together to form a single sustainable restaurant.

Restauranglabbet (“the restaurant lab”) will test numerous sustainability measures under one roof, from curbing food waste to cooking with more local, sustainable ingredients to measuring carbon footprint and using only eco-friendly materials in furniture design and production.

We won’t know how successful the project is until Restauranglabbet’s doors open on September 3, but no doubt there will be pieces of restaurant innovation coming out of the lab the whole world should take note of.

Elsewhere, a company in Stockholm called Diaz & Swahn is experimenting inside and outside the restaurant with how sound can affect the way food tastes to people. And a company called Local Food Node makes a digital platform that allows users to connect with local food producers by creating nodes that function as delivery and pickup spots for the food.

Will we be seeing QR-enabled picnic loot and sound-centric restaurants in the States anytime soon? Probably in part, particularly when it comes to building a more sustainable restaurant and finding new avenues for food delivery. In any case, keep your eye on Sweden one to watch for finding more innovative, scalable ways to integrate tech meaningfully into our food lives.

Eatsa Rebrands as Brightloom, Inks Deal With Starbucks, Raises $30M

San Francisco-based restaurant-tech company Eatsa dropped not one but three big pieces of news today. The company has officially rebranded as Brightloom, partnered with Starbucks to integrate the coffee giant’s tech into its own platform, and raised a $30 million Series B funding round.

The round was led by Tao Capital Partners and Valor Equity Partners, and also included participation from Starbucks licensees Alshaya Group and Alsea.

According to a press release, Brightloom’s all-in-one cloud-based SaaS platform that integrates front- and back-of-house operations will get some new bells and whistles with the relaunch and the Starbucks deal. Specifically, Brightloom will integrate aspects of Starbucks famed customer-engagement platform software, including mobile ordering and loyalty, into its own offering. In return Starbucks will take an equity stake in Brightloom and will have a seat on the company’s Board of Directors.

This isn’t Brightloom’s first evolution into something new. The company started out as a brick-and-mortar chain featuring quinoa bowls and a human-less front of house operations before shuttering its own restaurants to focus on licensing its technology to other restaurants. Wow Bao and Mac’d are among those customers. When we last checked in with the company, still Eatsa at the time, it was unrolling its Spotlight pickup shelf system and pondering how to better fulfill mobile orders in today’s delivery-crazed restaurant world. “Every brand we talk to is struggling with how [mobile] growth doesn’t fit within their current operational model,” Eatsa’s then-CEO Tim Young said at the time.

Clearly the Starbucks partnership is aimed at that, since the coffee giant has arguably the best mobile-order tech on the market right now. And the partnership comes just a few months after Starbucks invested $100 million into the aforementioned Valor Equity Partners, who counts Brightloom among its portfolio members, and its food and retail tech incubator, Valor Siren Ventures. As we wrote at the time of that news, “The investment in the Valor fund will give Starbucks access to new tech that could potentially be used for both food and retail aspects of Starbucks stores.”

In its own announcement today, Starbucks said it has granted Brightloom a software license that allows the latter to “select components of Starbucks proprietary digital flywheel software.” In other words, Brightloom will integrate features from Starbucks’ customer engagement platform like its mobile order and pay system, loyalty program, and personalization features. Basically all the stuff that makes Starbucks customers continue to use the mobile app.

NRN reported that Brightloom’s new CEO, Adam Brotman, called the deal historic because “it will give the industry an all-in-one digital solution that includes Starbucks’ industry leading customer engagement software.” Brotman was formerly the chief digital officer at Starbucks. He was appointed CEO of Eatsa in April of this year.

According to Brightloom’s press release, the new funds will go towards further tech development and integrating Starbucks’ software into the Brightloom platform and helping deploy that platform around the world. The newly revamped offering will be unveiled in October 2019.

The restaurant industry, once considered slow when it came to tech adoption, is now being inundated with new software and hardware. Various offerings aim for various parts of the restaurant, from organizing the back of house to saving restaurants from tablet hell to helping them maintain more brand integrity when it comes to using delivery services. Some are aiming to be all-in-one platforms that can integrate the entire restaurant into one tech solution. LimeTray, who just started operations in the U.S., and the recent Fourth-HotSchedules merger are examples.

So far, though, no one’s quite managed to integrate the mobile order and pay aspect into the process in a way that’s completely seamless. We don’t know yet for sure if Brightloom’s new offering will successfully do so, but if I were a betting (wo)man, I’d say the integration with Starbucks gives them a better shot than anyone at the moment.

Fourth and HotSchedules Merge to Form All-in-One Restaurant Management Platform

Restaurant tech platforms HotSchedules and Fourth announced today they have merged business operations to create an end-to-end restaurant management SaaS solution. According to a press release sent via email, the deal was backed by Marlin Equity Partners and Insight Partners.

Fourth has long offered a software package for restaurants that collects and analyzes various pieces of data both in and out of the kitchen to help restaurants better manage the back of house, from how much inventory to buy and staffers to keep on the floor to payroll details and invoice processing. All this is done through a web-based dashboard. Talking to The Spoon this past March, Simon Bocca, COO of Fourth, highlighted the importance of data in today’s restaurant: ““That’s where we see ourselves as being most valuable for restaurants. We bring in all the data: transaction, productivity, and put that into a really helpful package so that leadership can understand what’s happening.”

HotSchedules, meanwhile, also offers a centralized web interface that uses data to help restaurants make better decisions around workforce management — that is, training and scheduling employees, keeping in line with compliance rules around labor, and forecasting sales and labor costs.

The new combined offering merges both these companies’ strengths into a single cloud-based solution that works across devices. According to the press release, it will also integrate with most major POS systems, along with third-party apps, and accounting platforms.

As restaurants large and small continue the trek to digitization, and as data becomes a more important aspect of doing business, we’ll see more and more software offerings that aim to simplify the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on data. Long-established players like Toast and Upserve already own large portions of the U.S. market for this kind of restaurant tech. And newer companies are getting attention, too, like LimeTray, an Indian company who just started operations in the U.S.

The newly combined Fourth-HotSchedules business will be headquartered in Austin, TX and London, UK, with Fourth’s CEO, Ben Hood, as CEO over the new combined entity. The press release also notes that an executive team will be made up of members from both Fourth and HotSchedules. Both companies will continue operations around their own respective platforms.

Newsletter: In-House Vs. Third-Party Delivery App Showdown, The Rise of Personalized Menus

It’s only July 9 and I feel like I’ve already written “delivery is table stakes” this year so many times it’s lost some of its meaning. But it — the phrase and the delivery model itself — is here to stay, and businesses who aren’t at least working towards a strategy in that area will lose competitive advantage as more consumers migrate towards getting their food dropped at the front door.

That’s not a brand-new revelation. Restaurant owners, tech companies, and investors alike have been saying as much for some time. What is new, however, is that there are now more ways for restaurants to do delivery than the two extremes of pay for your own fleet or sign up with a third-party service. The new middle ground starting to get more attention is powered by technology.

A lot of it’s about using tech to drive more users to restaurants’ in-house apps, rather than to a third-party service like DoorDash or Grubhub, since restaurants risk losing some brand integrity and valuable customer data the minute they ink a deal with a third-party service. Companies like ShiftPixy, whom The Spoon talked to recently, are answering this problem by building software platforms that help restaurants drive more traffic and orders through their own mobile apps, but enable them to still take advantage of gig-economy-style driver fleets. ShiftPixy provides its own W-2 drivers to restaurants it works with.

Another company, Olo, offers a similar tech platform with a slightly different model, where they essentially partner with third-party services like Uber Eats and Postmates so that a restaurant doesn’t have to. The result could be the best of both worlds. Teriyaki Madness, for example, works with Olo and says it hopes to have 50 percent of its orders coming through its own mobile app and 50 percent coming through third-party apps by year’s end.

Third-party Delivery Apps Are Still Growing
Teriyaki Madness’ goal is a wise one to strive for right now, because even with increased talk of putting control back into the hands of restaurants, it’s clear third-party delivery services aren’t going away any time soon. That fact was underscored this week by eMarketer’s latest forecast, which predicts third-party food delivery apps will see upwards of 44 million users in the U.S. by 2020.

The forecast includes the usual suspects of third-party delivery and where they stand in the market, numbers that could swap around at any time, given how competitive food delivery is and how difficult attracting and retaining customers actually is, even for the top players.

What eMarketer does make clear, however, is that giving consumers more choices will be the key to driving growth for restaurants in the future.

Restaurant Menu Personalization Is on the Rise
An avenue for creating more choice in the restaurant will be through the menu itself. It’s a topic The Spoon’s Mike Wolf discusses often, and this past weekend he picked up that thread again on a podcast with Scott Sanchez, CEO of THE.FIT.

THE.FIT uses AI to help diners comb through restaurant menus and find items best suited to their dietary needs and preferences. While THE.FIT’s business is specifically focused on those with a lot of restrictions (e.g., Keto, gluten-free), this trend of using technology to personalize restaurant menus is one we’re going to see a lot more of. Large quick-service chains like McDonald’s are already employing AI-powered tech in some stores, while others, most recently Dunkin’, hint at similar initiatives for the future.

It will almost certainly play a role in the future of delivery. What that looks like, exactly, isn’t clear yet. But companies — whether a third-party service or a multi-unit chain using its own app — which use it to offer customers not just more choice but more relevant choice will be at a competitive advantage. At least, that is, until AI and personalization become table stakes themselves.

Until next time,
Jenn

ShiftPixy’s Delivery Tech Promises Restaurant Chains More Brand Control

If the last year was was all about restaurants realizing they must do delivery, the next 12 months will be about how they’re doing it, and this question in particular: Do you go with a third-party service à la Uber Eats, or go it alone?

Those in favor of third-party delivery cite increased visibility, lower costs (you don’t have to hire your own driver fleet), and fewer technical responsibilities. Others say they will never use it because of the lack of control over service and brand integrity that happens when one signs on with a third-party service.

Over the phone last week, ShiftPixy cofounder and CEO Scott Absher seemed to agree with the latter argument: “How could a brand that has spent maybe billions of dollars over decades or generations to curate their brand suddenly surrender that brand and their customer experience and data to a kid in a red golf shirt and cap?” he asks.

He went into detail with me about how a restaurant’s choices no longer have to be the kid in the golf shirt or no delivery program at all. There’s a new middle ground afoot, and ShiftPixy is helping to establish it.

The Irvine, CA-based company makes a software stack for restaurants that was originally designed to help businesses combat high employee turnover. According to demos shared by ShiftPixy, when a restaurant signs up with the company, they are given access to a network of workers, called “Shifters.” The ShiftPixy app uses AI to rigorously onboard these Shifters, who undergo the same vetting any job candidate would, including background checks and providing proof of citizenship, driving records, and other details. Once approved, these Shifters become W-2 employees not of the restaurant but of ShiftPixy. When the restaurant needs to fill a shift, they can notify their network of nearby Shifters, who pick up work in much the same way Uber drivers pick up people to drive to the airport.

But Absher, who helped found the company in 2015, says ShiftPixy quickly became acquainted with what he calls the “dark side” of third-party food delivery: incorrect food orders, cold or poor-quality food, orders never arriving, and angry customers galore, to name a few. More importantly, users were getting frustrated with the brands themselves, though none of the ordering or fulfillment took place within a restaurant chain’s ecosystem.

“All of that anger was rolling back on those multi-unit operators,” he says, referring largely to national chains. But, he adds, these chains, “didn’t even know when a customer [was] angry so they could fix it.”

So ShiftPixy built a delivery component for its technology. For restaurants that use it, the ShiftPixy architecture works behind the scenes of a restaurant’s consumer-facing app to notify drivers of potential orders. This isn’t terribly different from the way any other third party operates the last mile of food delivery. It’s still a kid in a golf shirt picking your food up and dropping it at the door.

What is different is the slew of potential benefits restaurants — larger chains and their franchisees in particular — could reap from this arrangement. Through the deal they set with ShiftPixy, they’re not paying a fee on each and every delivery transaction made on a given day the way they would with Grubhub or Uber Eats. Most big-brand franchisees are locked into certain pricing structures and policies — having to choose a specific food distributor, for example — they can’t just dump to offset the cost of those fees. So a system that does away with them entirely could mean these restaurant operators reap the benefits of delivery without incurring the financial setbacks of working with traditional third-party services.

And while restaurants still can’t control what happens to the food when the driver picks it up, they can at least control the brand, and be aware of potential issues. When a restaurant uses ShiftPixy, customers don’t leave the brand ecosystem to order and pay for their meal, or to leave feedback or contact customer service. It all happens within the restaurant’s own mobile app, with ShiftPixy in the background, powering the last-mile logistics aspect. This, Absher reasons, could go a long way towards helping brands with their image. “The issue is brand integrity and the customer experience. As soon as that order goes out the door you’ve surrendered your customer experience,” he says.

This is a larger trend we’ll start to hear more about as delivery becomes, pardon the pun, baked into daily restaurant operations and more companies come to market with solutions aimed at national brands and their franchisees. Olo, whom Absher references during our talk, is another such company looking to help restaurants drive more delivery orders through their own in-house ecosystems and maintain more brand integrity in the process.

Absher can’t yet name these larger brands ShiftPixy is currently in talks with, though Denny’s and Carl’s Junior come up in conversation. He also says the company is “getting a lot of viral introductions” as franchisees jump onboard and encourage other nearby franchisees from the same brand to do likewise.

“When you talk to the operators, that’s where it really gets interesting,” he says. “There are a lot of mixed opinions about third party [delivery]. It’s a very confusing landscape. It looks to me like we’re entering the market at the right time in the midst of confusion. We’re hopefully being a source of help and clarity.”

New Data Show Increased Consumer Interest in Online Grocery Shopping

All of the investments grocery retailers are making into robotic fulfillment, curbside pickup and even self-driving delivery hinge on the idea that shoppers will migrate from their habitual shopping in-store to shopping online. That can be a big ask when talking about a product that people often want to look at and touch before buying.

But the good news for the grocer retailers investing in those technologies is that according to two recent market studies, people are getting more comfortable with and ordering more groceries online.

Yesterday, Grocery Dive reported on a Field Agent survey of 3,342 shoppers. In the survey, 66 percent of respondents said they expect to be buying their groceries online in the next five years. Right now, 97 percent of primary grocery shoppers do so in-store, according to Field Agent, but 52 percent do buy some groceries online and 21 percent are open to the possibility.

The Field Agent survey came a day after NPD Group released its own stats around online grocery grocery. From a press announcement on its findings, NPD wrote:

The percentage of U.S. consumers, ages 18 and above, who shopped online for groceries within a 30-day period, whether for delivery or pick-up in store, increased from 17 percent in the quarter ending November 2018 to 20 percent, or about 51 million consumers, in the quarter ending February 2019…

Both of these stats reinforce a study from Coresight last month that found 36.8 percent of U.S. consumers bought groceries online over the past year, which was a jump up from 23.1 percent in the firm’s 2018 survey. That represents an increase of roughly 35 million more consumers buying groceries online.

With consumer trends showing an increase in online grocery shopping, it looks like the investment retailers are making now in faster fulfillment and logistics should pay off down the road. But in addition to looking at how people will buy their groceries, both Field Agent and NPD Group also looked at where they want to receive them.

The Field Agent survey showed that 38 percent of respondents use curbside pickup, double the 16 percent that use delivery. NPD found that of those shoppers ordering groceries online, 16 percent choose delivery and 11 percent choose to BOPUS (buy online pickup in store — ed. note: cute moniker!).

How consumers pick up grocery will be something to definitely keep an eye on as it could determine where groceries put their investment dollars. Should they explore more self-driving delivery vehicles like Kroger, or focus more on automated curbside pickup like Walmart?

Dunkin’ Hints at Its Future With Self-Service Kiosk Expansion

Dunkin’s westward expansion of its next-generation concept stores continues, with news that the Quincey, MA-based chain is testing out self-service kiosks at full-service locations in California.

The company highlighted this at the end of last week when it opened its 100th next-gen store in the state of California. Like the other Dunkin’ concept stores, this one features faster drive-thru service for mobile orders and a sizable roundup of cold-brew coffees on tap, and self-service kiosks, which are fast becoming less “concept” in QSRs and more the expected norm.

The new store, in Santa Ana, is the ninth such Dunkin’ location to test these touchscreen kiosks, which resemble those of McDonald’s in look and feel. Dunkin’s entire menu is available on these kiosks, which are placed inside the store and process ordering and payments, including payment via the Dunkin’ loyalty program. Also like McDonald’s system, a digital board by the pickup counter displays each order number and whether it’s in progress or ready to be collected by the customer.

While the kiosk itself is noteworthy, it’s what Dunkin’ will do with the device that matters more. Nation’s Restaurant News, who has some nice photos of the kiosks, noted that the kiosks allow guests to customize their drinks and food. NRN didn’t go into exhaustive detail about the level of customization, but Dunkin’s system will definitely have to go deeper than simply asking whether a guest wants a shot of vanilla flavoring in their latte (a common question if you order a latte at a QSR). As more restaurant chains adopt these kiosks and as more customers order and pay through rewards programs that store profile information and preferences, kiosks will have to get smarter about what they’re enabling in terms of making an order more personal and doing so faster.

McDonald’s set the bar high earlier this year when it acquired Dynamic Yield, whose “decision technology” uses AI to recommend items based on time of day, weather, a customer’s order history, and trending menu items, among other things.

Dunkin’ hasn’t yet made any acquisition announcements of its own, though around the time it launched its first next-gen store and dropped the “donuts” out of its name, Wired pointed out that the via the company’s Innovation Lab, “facial- and voice-recognition are on Dunkin’s radar,” and that the chain was also looking at AI. So it would be in no way surprising if we soon get news that Dunkin’ is making bigger moves towards AI-powered recommendations and personalization.

Dunkin’ Is Testing Delivery, Geofencing in New York City

Dunkin’ announced this morning it is now available for delivery in all five boroughs of New York City.

Dunkin’ is already in select cities in the U.S. through partnerships with Grubhub as well as DoorDash. For the NYC test market, Dunkin’ will be available exclusively through Grubhub and Seamless (Grubhub’s NYC-specific brand).

Grubhub isn’t a surprising choice here. In major urban areas — like NYC, LA, Philadephia, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. — the company is still the leader of third-party delivery when it comes to market share.

For the Dunkin’-NYC partnership, Grubhub will integrate orders directly into each store location’s POS system, a feature that’s getting more and more important with each new delivery partnership that surfaces.

But Grubhub didn’t stop there in terms of using technology to enhance the Dunkin’ deal. It also drew a geofence around each Dunkin’ location in NYC (there are over 400) in order to monitor traffic in surrounding areas and where couriers are in relation to the store making their order.

Seth Priebatsch, the head of enterprise at Grubhub, referred to this as “our ‘just in time delivery flow’” when he spoke to NRN this morning. Thanks to the technology, Dunkin’ will start a delivery order based on how far away the courier is and how large the order is. For bigger orders, Dunkin’ starts making an them when the courier is 10 minutes away; for smaller orders, the store will probably need just a few minutes to time an order with a courier’s arrival.

This geofencing method is something we’ll see more of as restaurant chains look to improve both timeliness and quality of their delivery orders. And Dunkin’ isn’t the first — McDonald’s already uses it, and Burger King pulled a well-publicized geofencing stunt late last year that wound up highlighting the value of the technology when it comes to attracting and retaining customers.

Packaging is the other aspect of the Dunkin’-Grubhub deal that bears noting. Grubhub said all couriers are equipped with insulated bags with which to deliver drinks, whether hot or cold. But it seems time and temperature are still the two major hurdles when it comes to coffee delivery, even for a chain as large as Dunkin’ (or, for that matter, Starbucks and Uber Eats). Even Priebatsch noted that Dunkin’ is currently trying to walk the line between serving a large delivery radius without making travelers go so far that the quality of the product gets diminished in the process.

While there was no news of Grubhub using anything beyond the standard insulated bag, packaging seems an areas ripe for disruption in food delivery, especially as as more and more goods like hot coffee and frozen smoothies go mobile.

Restaurant Management Platform LimeTray Starts Operations in the U.S.

There’s a whole lot of tech nowadays promising to help restaurants manage a whole bunch of tasks: delivery apps, POS systems, getting apps to talk to the POS system, back-of-house inventory, employees schedules, customers wanting more personalization. The list could realistically fill an 800 word post and still not be complete.

Little wonder, then, that an increasingly popular tech solution to the restaurant tech barrage is the all-in-one SaaS platform — that is software that streamlines both front- and back-of-house tasks and operations into a single system that lives in the cloud and that restaurants access via a single interface.

The latest of these to hit the U.S. is LimeTray, a company based out of India who’s presence is already well established in its home country as well as the UK, the UAE, and South Africa.

According to a recent press announcement, for its U.S. venture, the LimeTray system divvies its products and capabilities into three distinct buckets:

  • Discovery offers tools to improve and manage online ordering, mobile apps, and website upkeep.
  • Engagement focuses on loyalty and rewards programs, as well as other initiatives that improve and retain customer relationships.
  • Analytics uses software to make sense of the the data these many tech-driven tools and activities produce.

LimeTray also integrates with a handful of third party products and services, including those from Google, India-based delivery service foodpanda, and online payments company Razorpay, among others.

Plenty of other solutions like LimeTray exist right now the U.S. restaurant scene, from Olo to Square to Toast, who seems bent on taking over every last molecule of the restaurant management process.

While there are slight variations from one system to another, they all tout the following benefit: by digitizing and automating much of the day-to-day work at the restaurant, they’re freeing up operators’ time to focus on customer service and experience.

For now, LimeTray, which was founded in 2013 by Akhilesh Bali and Piyush Jain, seems especially focused on the customer engagement and retention aspect of restaurant management. The company website notes that 6 in 10 restaurants shut down less than a year after starting not because of they fail to reach and retain enough customers. Those numbers are backed up by an oft-cited Ohio State University study that found 60 percent of restaurants fail within the first year, and that poor customer service is a key reason for those closings.

Tech solutions from LimeTray and others offer two ways to tackle this problem. The first is with that aforementioned benefit of freeing up restaurant owners’ and operators’ time to actually focus on the hospitality aspect of the business. The second is data, which can help restaurants find out more about customer preferences, praises, and complaints, as well as flag any worrying patterns, like repeatedly comping checks. And as co-founder Akhilesh noted in the recent press release, there’s room for growth in this area: “Further machine learning and data tech would change how these restaurants acquire and retain customers. These are exciting times for us, and we look forward to what comes next.”

With the U.S. markets, LimeTray now serves over 4,500 restaurants, including names like Burger King, California Pizza Kitchen, and Krispy Kreme. and has to date raised two funding rounds with Matrix and JSW Ventures (further details of the rounds are undisclosed).

OpenTable and Upserve Partner to Better Personalize the Restaurant Experience for Guests

Restaurant reservations platform OpenTable announced this week it has partnered with restaurant management platform Upserve for a “two-way data flow” between systems that will share data about guests and help restaurants create a more personalized experience for customers.

OpenTable’s GuestCenter operating system will integrate with Upserve’s POS system to give restaurant servers real-time information about guests’ needs and preferences. For example, if someone with a gluten allergy books via OpenTable, they can note their dietary restriction during the booking process. OpenTable’s system will then “talk” to Upserve to make sure the server has that information when they take the guest’s order at the restaurant. Servers can also see things like past orders from that particular guest, and any information the customer chooses to hand over when they book a table (e.g., “I’m from out of town”; “No parsley ever”)

The integration also makes it easier for front and back of house to coordinate and communicate on orders, so the kitchen can prep ahead of time. A press release also touts “automatic check creation” and “real-time table status” as benefits of this integration.

“Personalization” is a buzzword restaurants soon won’t be able to escape. Some large restaurants, McDonald’s and its Dynamic Yield acquisition being the poster child here, are setting a high bar in terms of how restaurants can leverage tech to better meet guest needs and preferences.

As Restaurant Dive pointed out yesterday, POS integration is particularly effective, since it “provides a high-level view of the customer journey from the time they make their reservation through OpenTable to the time they cash out.” And as personalization gets more accurate to the individual guest, the hope is that restaurants will find more loyalty among customers and in that way drive better customer retention.

Upserve is one of several POS integrations OpenTable currently has in restaurants. Others include Toast, Aloha, and Heartland Dinerware.

Will More Artificial Intelligence Lead to Fewer Foodborne Illnesses at Restaurants?

Chick-fil-A is now using AI to monitor social media feedback from customers in order to detect and prevent foodborne illness, QSR reports.

At last week’s ReWork Deep Learning Summit in Boston, Chick-fil-A’s senior principle IT leader of food safety and product quality, Davis Addy, explained how this tech works.

For most QSRs, gathering feedback from social media is key for getting insights into what’s working and what isn’t with the business. That includes spotting any mentions of food safety issues or potential foodborne illnesses like norovirus, which on average causes 19–21 million cases of acute gastroenteritis annually in the U.S. Restaurants and catered events are one of the most common settings for norovirus, according to the CDC.

But to find these mentions, Chick-fil-A (or any QSR, for that matter) has to sift through hundreds if not thousands of customer reviews every day, many of them written with poor (or no) grammar and what Addy called “mixed sentiments and off-topic musings.” In other words, references to legitimate foodborne illness issues are often hidden amid hyperbole, misspellings, and other facets of modern communication.

Hence, more AI. Chick-fil-A has developed a custom AI platform that’s hosted on Amazon’s AWS Comprehend, a natural language processing service that will check data from Chick-fil-A’s social media channels every 10 minutes and filters for over 500 related keywords like “nausea” and “food poisoning.” The system can then uses machine learning to check the sentiment of the feedback and determine its legitimacy. In the case of legitimate issues, the system notifies store managers.

At the end of 2018, researchers at Google and Harvard unveiled a somewhat similar model called FINDER that uses machine learning to scan anonymous and aggregated data on searches that indicate food poisoning (e.g., “stomach bug”) from users who save location data onto their phones. It uses that information to pinpoint restaurants which are potential sources of foodborne illness, then notifies the city’s health department. FINDER is still in pilot mode; tests have so far taken place in Chicago and Las Vegas.

Chick-fil-A says its system currently operates on 78 percent accuracy and that the company is working with Amazon to improve those numbers. Since machine learning is a type of AI that learns over time rather than needing to be programmed, the hope is that it can gradually improve its ability to both detect keywords and also determine if they come from legitimate complaints about food illness.

Once it’s done that, AI’s job ends. Restaurant operators and managers have to take that information and decide how to act on it, at least for now. With humans and robots/AI starting to work side by side in an increasing number of restaurant settings, AI could not only track down foodborne illnesses, but also help to prevent them in the first place.

Agrylist Raises $8M Series A for Data-Driven Indoor Farming, Rebrands as Artemis

Artemis, formerly known as the indoor-farming company Agrylist, announced today an $8 million Series A round. According to a press release via email, the round was co-led by Astanor Ventures and Talis Capital, with participation from New York State’s Empire State Development Fund and iSelect Fund. The latter two companies are existing investors. The new funding round brings Artemis’ total funding to $11.75 million.

As well as raising new funds, the company has retired the Agrylist moniker and rebranded as Artemis. A new website and new corporate branding are slated for June 2019, according to the press announcement.

Artemis, which was founded in 2015 and is based in Brooklyn, NY, helps indoor farmers better manage the lifecycle of their crops through a proprietary system it refers to as an “enterprise cultivation management platform.” In one interface, which can integrate with existing software tools, the system will help farmers create planting schedules, control the indoor climate, track crop health, detect food-safety issues, and manage labor costs. The system also comes packaged with basic project-management capabilities like to-do lists and daily reminder features.

Increasingly, indoor farmers are turning to these kinds of “one-stop-shop” products to help them make large-scale indoor farming economically feasible and in doing so ensure more consistent production and higher crop yields. Some systems, like those from Liberty Produce and Freight Farms, also bundle hardware like LEDs and the actual grow panels into their end-to-end systems.

Artemis, for now at least, seems more focused on the data aspect of large-scale indoor farming. Gathering useful data on crops and farming operations can help companies not only better monitor crop health, but also help them measure productivity and labor costs, and ensure they’re in line with certain compliance standards.

Even more important, more data could tell us where indoor farming could stand to be more efficient, if indeed it’s efficient at all right now. As Paul P.G. Gauthier explained to me last year, the indoor farming industry tends to claim things that aren’t necessarily backed up by data at the moment. We need more information that can tell us, for example, how much water something like hydroponics actually uses, and where the waste water from those types of operations go.

These are no doubt questions Artemis is tackling, too, as it continues to build out its product. According to the company, the new funding will go towards expanding the Artemis team in product, marketing, engineering, and sales areas, as well as towards scaling sales.