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Here’s Your Handy CES 2020 Food and Kitchen Tech Preview & Walking Guide

Heading to CES?

Make sure to wear comfortable shoes, bring some Tylenol, and get ready for lots of food and cooking tech!

Having gone to the world’s biggest consumer tech show for well over a decade, I’ve gotten pretty good at finding new products that are of interest to me. That said, even for someone like myself who’s spent more than his fair share of shoe leather getting around the ugly carpets of Vegas, finding the latest in food tech has always been something of a challenge at a show where entertainment, robotics and car tech news usually steal most of the headlines.

The good news is that all started to change last year with the debut of Impossible Burger 2.0, and, based on my pre-show planning over the past couple of weeks, I expect to see a whole bunch of food and kitchen tech news at this year’s CES.

I figured I’d share some of my research by putting together a guide to what’s going on in food tech and smart kitchen at CES 2020 to help you make the most of your time in Vegas. I’ve even added booth numbers for most of the products to help you get there.

During the next few days, I’d also suggest you check back in here at The Spoon for stories, videos and interviews from The Spoon editor team. And, if you plan on making foodtech news at CES with a cool product you think we should check out, drop us a note at the tip line.

So here we go! Check out these food and kitchen tech products at CES 2020:

Robot Pizza: Back in October, attendees of the Smart Kitchen Summit got to sample pizza made by the Seattle based pizza robot startup Picnic. For those of you who couldn’t make it to Seattle, now’s your chance: Picnic’s pizzabot will be serving pizza at CES. Lines for food are long at CES, and I expect the pizza-robot lines at the Las Vegas Convention Center to be even longer.

Robot Ramen: If pizza isn’t your thing, you might want to make your way over to the Taiwan Tech Area in the Sands Eureka Park (Sands 51411) to check to another Smart Kitchen Summit alumni Yo-kai Express, which will be dishing up noodles from their robot ramen vending machine.

Beerbots: You’re gonna need something to chase the pizza, so you might want to check out a beerbot like PicoBrew (Sands 41518) or stop by Treasure Island for FoodTech Live (ticket needed) to see MiniBrew or BEERMKR. Also, while I haven’t hear anything out of LG yet about their beerbot, I am waiting to see if they’ll have an update on their beer brewing appliance they debuted at last year’d CES.

Drinkbots: If you’d like something a little stiffer (I’d suggest to wait til after noon, but this is Vegas and you are an adult), try out a cocktail robot like the Drinkworks (Sands 42546 and FoodTech Live) or Bartesian (Sands 40852).

Wine Tech. Oh, so you’re a wine snob, are you? Don’t worry, you can find that too. Earlier this week Chris wrote about the Albi from Albicchiere (Sands 52722), a cool countertop appliance that stores and serves your wine. Invineo will be showing its connected wine dispenser off as well (Sands 50863).

DNA-Driven Food Choices. Food personalization is moving beyond simple suggestions, and in the future it will get downright personal by creating diet plans based on a person’s biological makeup. If you want to check out a couple of companies looking deep inside your body to make food recommendations, check out DNA Nudge (Sands Booth 44316) or Sun Genomics (FoodTech Live – ticket required for entry).

Smart Countertop Cooking. There will be an array of different countertop cooking appliances that are powered by smart software and cook in new and interesting ways. CES will be the first chance to see a working version of the long-promised Anova smart oven (see our post here), which you can see in the Sands (booth 40946) . The Julia, which is a multicooker reminiscent of the Thermomix, features guided cooking videos delivered via a touchscreen interface. You can find the Julia at in the Sands at booth 41367. Speaking of Thermomix, they’ll be showing off the TM6 at FoodTech Live (ticket required). If you’re the smoothie type, check out the cool next-gen Millo blender (Sands 40346), who will also be showing off a smart table with wireless power.

Intelligent Surface Cooking. I expect some interesting news in terms of smart cooking surfaces. One cool demo I plan to check out is the GHSP concept that is both an induction cooking surface and a touch interface (North Hall 3111). I also expect the Wireless Power Consortium to be showing off their Ki cordless kitchen platform at their usual spot in the Las Vegas Convention Center at on the walkway near the South Hall (South Hall SL-2).

Smart Home Gardening/Vertical Farming Systems. I’ve been following smart gardening systems for years at CES, but this is the first year we’ve seen big appliance brands jump in. As Jenn wrote earlier this week, LG will be showing off a new indoor gardening system at CES (Central Hall 11100). Not to be outdone, GE will be coming with its own home gardening kitchen concept called “Home Grown” which it will be showcasing at the Haier/GE booth in the central hall (Central booth 16006).

Home Food Robots. We’re not sure how fully fleshed out the Autokitch cooking robot concept is, but they’ll have a booth at CES (Sands 53034). And while it’s not quite a fully robotic kitchen concept or bread making robot, the Tigoût is a pod-based baking machine from Argentina that’s is worth checking out. Drop in a pod, out spits a souffle or a raspberry muffin. You can see the Tigoût in action at Sands 52768.

Coffee and Tea, Please. If you’re looking for a nice cup of tech-powered tea, you should check out the Teplo tea maker, which will be at the Panasonic booth in the Sands (Sands 42711). If you’re more of a coffee person, then you’re in luck if you have a ticket to FoodTech Live: A production line version of the grind and brew Spinn will make its debut after a long-anticipated wait. The Terra Kaffe – which grinds, brews and steams milk – will also be in attendance at Food Tech Live.

Alexa, Give Me a Coke. Sure, this one is kinda gimmicky, but we are talking CES after all. Amazon and Coca-Cola are teaming up for a voice-powered Amazon Alexa “Coke Energy Wall” where attendees will be able to ask Alexa for a coke and a smile (delivered via what the PR describes as a “one of Alexa’s witty responses”. You can find the Amazon Alexa Coke Energy Wall at Sands booth #40934.

Smart Fridges. Smart fridges have been debuting at CES for years, and this year they are more evolved than ever. LG will be showing off its new InstaView ThinQ refrigerator, which uses computer vision and AI for real-time inventory of what’s inside (Central Hall 11100). Samsung will be back with its latest edition of the Family Hub smart fridge line, this time powered by Whisk, a smart food AI platform they acquired in spring of 2019 (Central Hall 15006). If you’re interested in products that make existing dumb fridges smart, Smarter will be showing off its smart fridge cam platform at FoodTech Live (ticket required).

Fake Meat. Impossible stole the show last year at CES with the debut of the Impossible 2.0. In retrospect, it was a brilliant move for the fake meat unicorn to unveil their next-gen meat at CES 2019, mostly because it would be the first time most journalists and attendees would have a bite of a plant based burger. It also didn’t hurt that the 2.0 is much better than the 1.0. This year Impossible will be back, kicking things off with a press conference at 5 PM on Jan 6th and then serving up twenty five thousand free samples of Impossible Burger (I’m guessing it will be the new recipe/3.0 edition) their new pork product and the Impossible Burger at the Central Plaza of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Smart Grillin’. The Weber folks partnered up with June late last year to add some software powered cooking intelligence to their grill. You can swing by their booth at the South Hall to see what those two have cooking on the Barbie (South Hall SP-2). Also, Chris wrote up the news this weekend about Yummly’s new entry in the increasingly crowded smart thermometer space. You can check that new product if you make an appointment with Whirlpool and swing by their meeting space at the Wynn (Wynn hospitality suites). Speaking of smart thermometers, Meater is back and you can check out their latest if you have a ticket to FoodTech Live.

Tiny Adorable Dishwashers. Like many of you kitchen nerds, I’ve been excited about the Tetra. Only problem is, Heatworks, the company behind the Tetra, is a bit behind on shipping their sexy little countertop cleaning machine and so it looks like they are staying home this year and focusing on getting it out the door in 2020. But don’t worry! If you’re looking to scratch the countertop cleaning machine itch, head on over to the Daan booth to check out equally adorable Bob (Sands 50819).

Ok, that’s it. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it’s a good start. If anything really interesting pops up before tomorrow’s CES Unveiled, I’ll update the post (send me any news I’ve missed via our tip form), and for more detailed updates make sure to check back here at The Spoon all next week!

Sensory Unveils New Voice Assistant for Kitchen Appliances that Processes Commands at the Edge

Sensory, a company that creates artificial intelligence for edge computing, announced today the release of a specialized version of its TrulyNatural speech recognition platform for home appliances.

The technology can be used by appliance manufacturers to add voice control functionality to their devices. According to Sensory’s press announcement, the company’s speech processing is all done on the edge, meaning on the device itself, instead of in the cloud. In addition to not requiring the addition of a WiFi component, Sensory says this edge processing means its technology “enables a safe, secure, consistent, reliable and easy to implement experience for the end-user, free of requiring any extra apps or WIFI to be setup or operational.”

You can see Sensory’s technology in action in a microwave in the company’s promotional video.

Sensory's TrulyNatural

This makes Sensory’s voice recognition different from the Amazon voice controlled smart oven, which requires a paired Echo device in order to execute voice commands.

Additionally, Sensory says it’s edge-based approach means that appliances using its voice recognition technology are more secure and private because commands do not leave the device, nor are they ever stored. Privacy became a bigger concern for voice assistants this year, as we learned that both Amazon and Google have actual human contractors listening in on some of our conversations with these devices to better train their respective AIs. So the idea of having a “smart” device that doesn’t collect user data could be a key differentiator and selling point in the appliance market.

Sensory’s technology will be on display in the Midea microwave at the upcoming CES. TrulyNatural currently supports U.S. English, with more languages coming in the next year.

Amazon: Instant Pots, Avocados and, of course, Amazon Devices are Big Sellers This Year

In what is becoming its own holiday tradition, Amazon sent out a press release this week explaining how Amazon and Amazon devices in particular crushed it this past Cyber Monday.

In Amazon’s typical vague fashion, the company didn’t release any hard numbers, saying only that “Customers purchased millions more Amazon Devices compared to the same period last year in Amazon’s Stores globally and the best-selling items were Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote.”

It’s no real surprise that the biggest e-commerce site in the world could pull levers and buttons on its biggest shopping day of the year to generate millions of sales of its own products. But if we look back, during last year’s Cyber Monday holiday weekend, Echo Dot was also a big seller, with millions of Echo devices sold. And in 2017, Amazon said that over that entire holiday shopping season that it had sold tens of millions of Alexa devices.

In short, dominance perpetuates itself, and with Amazon owning 70 percent of the smart speaker market, its dominance doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. For the smart kitchen, this means appliance makers will continue to bake Alexa capabilities into their devices, which will beget more sales of Alexa-enabled devices, and the cycle continues.

Quick sidenote: It’s interesting to see Amazon’s wording evolve over the past three years. In 2017 it was “Alexa” enabled devices. In 2018 they were “Echo” devices and this year they are “Amazon” devices. This evolution is a reflection of how Amazon has broadened its first-party offerings with items like the Fire TV devices and Ring connected doorbells and lights.

But it wasn’t all Amazon, Amazon, Amazon this holiday season. The company also announced its “Best of Prime 2019” this week and among the winners were Instant Pot and… avocados.

The Instant Pot (which merged with the maker of Pyrex earlier this year) is indefatigable. Amazon said it has been a top seller for the past three years, and the Instant Pot DUO60 was among the most gifted items by Prime members this year as well.

And while it really didn’t provide any other context or numbers, Avocados were also a big seller throughout 2019 for Amazon Prime members as well.

OK. Sure.

This is just the first round of Amazon’s “Aren’t We Great?” press releases. Expect another after Christmas as well, telling (in vague terms only) how many millions of devices it sold throughout this holiday season.

How Sevenrooms Is Making Voice Tech the Centerpiece of Restaurant Operations

If you are a restaurant in 2019, one of your most valuable assets is your customer data: what they order, how much they spend, whether or not they hate parsley. There are numerous tech platforms nowadays to help restaurants access this mountain of information, but historically that’s meant handling a tablet or mobile device along with all the other items restaurant staff juggle.

Guest-management platform Sevenrooms wants to change that by making it possible to access vital customer information using your voice.

The NYC-based company’s software platform already lets restaurants track customer data points in real time and access that information quickly to provide guests with more personalized service. Now the company is doubling-down on voice tech, which it believes will be the key tool for collecting and inputing customer data into restaurant systems of the future.

The company, who has raised $21.5 million to date, received an investment for an undisclosed sum from the Amazon Alexa Fund in late 2018 and has been working on an Alexa skill ever since to help restaurants access customer data faster and more seamlessly, and without having to use their hands.

“That’s a thing that would have originally required a GM to be looking down at a tablet or some form of screen,” Allison Page, Sevenrooms’ cofounder and Chief Product Officer, says over the phone of getting customer data. “And Alexa’s going to make it so much easier to get [that information] hands free in the middle of service so they don’t have to interrupt that hospitality they’re providing.”

So long as a guest’s information is stored in the restaurant’s system (via, for example, a loyalty program), Alexa can access that information with a simple voice command. For example, a GM could ask Alexa who is sitting at Table 5 and be told it’s a local customer who’s spent a total of $5,000 at the restaurant over the course of time and is celebrating an anniversary that night. The GM could then send over a giftcard, dessert or some other token of appreciation for the guest that would both personalize their experience that night and, hopefully, keep them coming back.

In certain settings, it might seem superfluous to add a voice layer to a system. But restaurants are inherently chaotic settings where multitasking reigns supreme and staff quite literally have their hands full most of the time with trays of food that could easily be spilled and damage a touchscreen device. Going hands-free with voice-enabled technology is potentially a far more seamless way of integrating guest management into a restaurant’s system. Page says the skill can also tell a user things like how much revenue a restaurant has booked that night and how that number compares to previous nights, if a guest has dietary restrictions, and even if they wrote any recent reviews of the restaurant.

The system also works the other way around. If a server or GM learns, for example, that a guest just moved to the neighborhood, they can tell Alexa to input that data into the guest’s profile to store as information for future visits.

All of this can be done without the user ever having to log into the Sevenrooms system, and that’s at the heart of Sevenrooms’ Alexa integration: bringing tech into the restaurant without letting it take over a la tablet hell.

Page demonstrated this at the 2019 NRN show by donning a pair of Alexa-enabled glasses and showing the audience how she could ask the skill questions about a restaurant guest and have the information appear right on the lens.

Whether its glasses, watches, or some other wearable device that’s the future of voice tech is yet to be determined. While voice tech in the restaurant has gotten a lot of press lately thanks to McDonald’s acquisition of Apprente, it’s still early days for the technology’s place in restaurants, and there are still challenges to work through. For example, Page says one of the current hurdles for Sevenrooms is getting Alexa to properly understand voice commands and questions in the middle of a noisy dining room. The company is currently working with Amazon on solving this issue.

There’s also the question of whether restaurants will sign up for yet-another piece of tech, and one they can’t even put their hands on. Page doesn’t seem terribly concerned about this, however. As she sees it, the benefits of “not having to take your eyes off the dining room and not having to take your eyes off the guest” will prove valuable enough to the customer to justify making voice tech a central part of a restaurant’s guest management system.

Amazon Echo Buds Will Tell You Where to Find Tomatoes in Whole Foods

It had been rumored that Amazon was going to announce a set of earbuds at its big media event today yesterday. But I don’t think anyone guessed that those earbuds would tell you where to find tomatoes at your local Whole Foods.

The Amazon Echo Buds let you wirelessly listen to music and take calls, and also feature noise reduction and hand-free access to Alexa (they also work with Siri and Google Assistant). The Echo Buds are available for pre-order today for $129 and will be available at the end of next month.

Normally we wouldn’t write about earbuds, but during the demo on-stage yesterday, Amazon showed the Echo Buds doing two food techy things: First they were used to find out if a local Whole Foods had canned tomatoes in stock, and then they showed us how Alexa can tell you where those tomatoes are inside the store (e.g. “aisle 6”).

Aside from being neat — and useful — it also points to how Amazon is folding Whole Foods more directly into its other products, and how Alexa is getting more contextual. The device is no longer just handing out information but providing real-world guidance on a granular level. You can imagine Alexa not just guiding you to one item, but if you tell it that you are making lasagne, the Echo Buds could guide you through a store, giving you the fastest route to pick up all the necessary ingredients.

Of course, this guidance only applies to Whole Foods at the moment, so you’re out of luck if you shop at Kroger or Albertsons. And even then, the in-store location within Whole Foods is limited because for now, you have to select a Whole Foods location that Alexa then taps into. So you can’t wander into any Whole Foods to get guidance, you have to be in the one you picked.

Still, we know that Amazon has been experimenting with Amazon Go store-like cashierless checkout technology at bigger stores. That system involves lots of cameras and computer vision, so it’s aware of inventory levels and product placement in-stores. If Amazon rolls that system out to all of its Whole Foods, Alexa will be able to “see” into those stores to provide more precise location information (“halfway down aisle 6, top shelf”).

That’s still a ways away but listen up, with the Echo Buds, Alexa is coming with you, wherever you are.

McDonald’s Acquires Voice Ordering Tech Startup Apprente, Will Form New Tech Lab

McDonald’s announced today that it will acquire Apprente to bolster the fast food giants voice-based ordering capabilities. This is the second tech startup acquisition for Mickey D’s this year, and the Apprente team will form the basis of a new tech lab for the chain.

In the press announcement, McDonald’s described Apprente and how it will use the startup’s technology:

Apprente was founded in 2017 in Mountain View, California, to create voice-based platforms for complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item conversational ordering. In McDonald’s restaurants, this technology is expected to allow for faster, simpler and more accurate order taking at the Drive Thru with future potential to incorporate into mobile ordering and kiosks.

The Apprente acquisition is part of McDonald’s ongoing evolution into more of a tech company. Back in March of this year, McDonald’s acquired personalization platform Dynamic Yield for $300 million to make its menus more Netflix-y with recommendations based on factors like the weather or current purchases. That technology is now deployed into more than 8.000 McDonald’s locations. Additionally, the chain was reported in June that McDonald’s was experimenting with robot-powered deep fryers and voice-activated technology at its drive thrus.

Major QSRs see over half their orders come via the drive thru, so it’s no surprise that area of fast food is a hotbed of tech activity. Both Clinc and Valyant AI are working on their own voice-tech solutions, and 5thru uses AI to that involves scanning a customer’s license plate. And while McDonald’s has certainly made the biggest strides of all QSRs in terms of adding tech to the drive-thru experience, others, including KFC and Dunkin’, are also experimenting with ways to speed up order times and upsell more customers.

Seeing this type of competition is most likely spurring McDonald’s decision to ramp up its own tech efforts internally. As such, the company also announced today that the Apprente team will be the founding member of a new group within McDonald’s Global Technology team called the McD Tech Labs based in Silicon Valley. The new lab will be going on a hiring spree to bring on engineers, data scientists and other technology related positions.

Domino’s Supreme Court Petition Highlights a Growing Problem in Restaurant Tech

Increasingly, Domino’s is seen as a company striving to get pizzas anywhere at any time and to anyone. But that apparently doesn’t include the blind.

In the last year alone, the company has made many advancements when it comes to finding easier, faster ways to get the pie to customers, from autonomous delivery to testing in-vehicle ordering and delivering to non-traditional addresses via location services technology.

But an article published this week on Eater noted that Domino’s is “willing to go to the Supreme Court” in order to fight a ruling that would require the pizza-tech heavyweight to make its website accessible to the blind.

As the article explains, California resident Guillermo Robles, who is blind, filed a lawsuit against Domino’s after two failed attempts to order a customized pizza from the Domino’s website and mobile app, arguing that protections under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) apply to brick-and-mortar businesses’ online properties, too. But after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Robles in January, Domino’s is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the Robles case, arguing that the Federal government hasn’t yet issued rules for businesses on how to make their websites (and mobile apps and other digital properties) ADA compliant.

Eater has the full breakdown of the case’s details, and also highlights the rise in lawsuits (what Domino’s suggested was a “flood of litigation” in its petition) against websites for failing to account for those with disabilities.

In the case of Domino’s part of the issue is litigation: In its petition, Domino’s wrote that, “Left undisturbed, the Ninth Circuit’s decision would turn that flood of litigation into a tsunami” and that the Supreme Court’s review “is imperative to stem a burdensome litigation epidemic.”

But getting buried in legal fees or no, it highlights an important point that, while Domino’s is definitely a part of it, is much, much bigger than a single pizza chain: this brave new restaurant world of digital-first ordering, AI-powered recommendations, drive-thrus of the future, and any number of other developments in the restaurant industry need to work harder at making their solutions available to not just most people but to all people.

We’ve seen this issue of inclusivity surface around other areas of food tech, most recently with the discriminatory nature of cashless payments towards underbanked and unbanked populations. And we’ve seen how the answers aren’t always simple, as the debate over providing plastic straws to persons with disabilities suggests.

Now what we need to see is more people — tech companies, delivery services, the restaurants themselves, acknowledging this growing problem of inclusivity and refocusing some of their energy around all this so-called innovation. As a leader in both the restaurant industry and restaurant tech sector, Domino’s — and other major chains — should be setting an example for other smaller companies and showing them how to use tech to the benefit of everyone, rather than spending their time petitioning the Federal government. They may be trying to stem “burdensome litigation” right now, but they’ll be trying to stem a lot of bad press and lost business in the future.

Report: Global Kiosk Market to Reach $30.8B by 2024, Thanks to Restaurants

The global kiosk market is expected to be worth $30.8 billion thanks in large part to the shift in quick-service restaurants (QSRs) towards self-service technology, according to a new report by Tillster and research firm SSI.

The Tillster research surveyed 2,000 QSRs and their customers. According to its findings, kiosk usage in restaurants is up and will continue growing over time: 37 percent of customers said they had used a kiosk last year, up from 20 percent the previous year, and another 67 percent said they intended to place an order with a self-service kiosk within the next year.

Customers also said that if the line at a QSR is longer than four people, they would prefer to order at a kiosk. And, perhaps most surprisingly, usage numbers don’t skew towards a younger generation; the research found that kiosks are popular across age groups.

The research noted that, “Self-service kiosks help restaurants with line-busting, which in turn optimizes the customer experience. Kiosks have also proven to increase average check size through consistent upselling and cross-selling.”

Part of this growth is fueled simply by the availability of kiosk technology in restaurants. Major QSRs, from Dunkin’ and Shake Shack to Wingstop and Wendy’s have implemented the technology in at least some locations.

However, a more important part of this technology’s ongoing growth in QSRs is not about the presence of the machines themselves but about what those machines are capable of doing in terms of speeding up service and offering a more personalized menu experience to customers. McDonald’s is the obvious case in point here: its recent acquisition of Dynamic Yield and ongoing rollout of AI-powered menu personalization suggests a new standard for kiosks that will at some point start to become the norm. Soon, it won’t be enough to have durable hardware and a slick, easy-to-use interface. Rather, QSR kiosks will need to come built the ability to tell customers exactly what they want the moment they step up to the screen.

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.

Chipotle Officially Announces Its Partnership With Tech Platform Sparkfly

Not so long ago, Chipotle was known more as poster child for fast-casual foodborne illness than for its burritos. A few years and a regime change later, and the chain is talked about not for E. Coli but for its digital transformation efforts that are much praised across the industry.

Those efforts have in no small part been aided by Sparkfly, whose patented tech platform integrates with POS systems to improve restaurants’ marketing efforts around mobile apps, social media, online loyalty programs, and other digital channels. And while the two companies have been working together for some time, they formally unveiled their partnership to the public this week and gave us an idea of just how much behind-the-scenes work Sparkfly is actually doing at Chipotle.

The partnership is heavily focused on leveraging tech to gain and retain more customers; provide those customers with better digital rewards and more ways to use said rewards; and in general improve the relationship between online and offline ordering. All offers can be sent to a user’s Chipotle Mobile Wallet, which can then be used in the store or when ordering online. While that might sound like a bunch of fluffy tech talk, in reality, being able to see a coupon and immediately redeem it without ever having to leave the Chipotle app removes a number of steps from the order process — and with it, a number of chances for the user to abandon ship and go elsewhere to order lunch.

Because Sparkfly is integrated directly into Chipotle’s POS system, it can also track these promotions in real time and, through data, provide restaurants with a deeper look into what is and isn’t working in terms of marketing to customers.

As more and more restaurant ordering goes online, capturing that data will be key to making sure restaurants are launching the right kinds of marketing campaigns at the right time, and quickly abandoning plans for ones that don’t work and could wind up costing them valuable time and money.

For Chipotle’s part, its efforts with Sparkfly and with digital in general are clearly paying off. In April CEO Brian Niccol (formerly of Taco Bell), said digital sales grew 101 percent year-over year in the first quarter of 2019, totaling $206 million during that time and representing 15.7 percent of all sales. Chipotle is also averaging about 1 million digital transactions per week.

Along with delivery, making sense of digital marketing and all the data that goes with it is one of the major concerns for restaurants nowadays — and there are other platforms on the market looking to help. Punchh, who raised $20 million in 2018, touts AI and machine learning as the key tools behind its marketing optimization platform. And while it’s not strictly a marketing-focused affair, McDonald’s recent acquisition of AI company Dynamic Yield has upped the bar in terms of what customers expect of restaurants when it comes to personalized offers and promotions — and just how much data restaurants can collect in the process.

Sparkfly serves more than just the food industry at present, though its recent successes with Chipotle could mean the Atlanta GA-based company will soon have a lot more restaurants knocking on its door for help.

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).

ItsaCheckmate and Allset Team Up to Streamline Pickup Orders for Restaurants

With digital restaurant orders set to triple by 2020, it’s becoming more crucial than ever for restaurants to find ways to manage the flow of different sales channels, from third-party sources to in-house mobile apps. And it’s not just delivery. Takeout also accounts for part of the digital orders placed by 60 percent of consumers each week in the U.S. Even in-house diners can now order via an app rather than a server.

ItsaCheckmate, whose software platform streamlines the task of juggling all these orders, has teamed up with Allset to address the latter two of those sales channels: takeout items and in-house meals ordered ahead of time. The partnership, announced today, is aimed at helping restaurants transition to digital ordering, even if they don’t yet offer straight delivery.

ItsaCheckmate’s technology integrates all incoming orders from third parties into the restaurant’s main POS system. Right now, the system connects major POS vendors like Toast and Clover with outside services like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Postmates. Other third-party partners include the likes of Bite Squad, Texas ToGo, delivery.com, and ChowNow among them.

The whole point of integrating third-party order services with restaurant POS systems is to make the day-to-day workflow easier for restaurant owners and staff, who would otherwise have to manually input all the orders coming from disparate sources — a process that’s fraught with confusion and very prone to human error.

The Allset app, meanwhile, currently serves a few different channels: you can reserve a table, order food, and pay for it before you ever set foot in the restaurant. More recently, the company started offering customers the ability to order and pay for pickup items, too.

Integrating the app with ItsaCheckmate will allow restaurants wanting to include the Allset app among their sales channels to do so without creating more confusion.

ItsaCheckmate counts Dig Inn, Five Guys, Momofuku’s Milk Bar, and Bareburger among its customers. To date, the company has raised $3 million. Allset has raised a total of $8.4 million and currently serves restaurants in NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston, TX.