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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

Uber Now Offers Eats Functionality From Its Main App

Uber is making its Uber Eats service available from the main ride-share app in certain markets, with the hopes that cross-promoting its services could improve customer acquisition and retention for the company. TechCrunch reports that a web view version of Uber Eats is now embedded into the company’s ride-share app, which means users hailing a ride can order food without having to download and/or open the Uber Eats app separately.

Uber is currently testing this version in markets that don’t offer bikes or scooters. The company made the version available to iOS users in April, and as TC reports, it’s now rolling the functionality out to Android users, too. By clicking on the Uber Eats button placed in the top-right corner of the main app, users can automatically access Uber Eats functionality and order a meal while en route to their destination.

The hope is that offering this kind of seamless relationship between the two services will increase users for both Eats and the ride-sharing app. If it works, the integration could give Uber Eats an edge when it comes to keeping customers within the brand’s ecosystem. Not long ago, tech company Second Measure released data that indicates customer loyalty to any single brand in the third-party delivery space is declining, partly because of the number of options now available. By cross-promoting its services, Uber would potentially be able to persuade those who have never used Eats to try the service without forcing them to download yet-another app. And as Uber’s S-1 filing from April suggests, more Uber Eats customers can help boost overall usage for the company, whose stocks are currently down 5 percent from when it debuted on the NYSE in April.

And if the rumors are true, a forthcoming $9.99/month loyalty program, which a blogger discovered last month via hidden code within the Uber Eats app, could further boost the company’s lagging loyalty numbers. Said program has yet to be confirmed by the company, but if it does officially launch, it’s yet-more incentive for users to stay in the Uber world.