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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Personalized Food

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.

Tech-centric Meal Kit Company Gousto Raises £30M in Fresh Funds

London, UK-based meal kit company Gousto announced this week it has raised a £30 million ($37.6 million USD) Series F funding round led by UK private equity investment firm Perwyn, with participation from existing investors BGF Ventures, MMC Ventures, Canaccord Genuity, and Unilever Ventures. The round also includes investment from British Instagram star Joe Wicks, better known as The Body Coach. This round brings Gousto’s total funding to $137.7 million.

Gousto’s meal kits — or “recipe boxes,” as they’re called in the UK — focus on healthy ingredients and more sustainable eating habits (hence Joe Wicks’ involvement). The service offers subscription plans for everything from vegetarian and plant-based diets to boxes for those who just want a healthier take on standard comfort foods. Users sign up via the app or website, choose a plan, and get pre-portioned ingredients delivered to their door with corresponding recipes each week. The company claims to be delivering 1.5 million meals per month in the UK. Price-wise, the service is actually a little cheaper than its main UK competitor HelloFresh: a four-person box with four recipes per week breaks down to £2.98 per serving, compared to £3.44 per serving from HelloFresh.

The company is also intensely focused on using tech to make meal kit logistics more efficient and also offer customers more choice. The company uses a public-facing, AI-powered personalization tool to make more relevant recommendations to individual customers. “We have been using the technology since our founding, and it powers everything from the recipes that customers see on our website to how boxes are prepared in our Picking Hub,” company CEO, Timo Boldt, wrote in a blog post last year. He also claimed, in a separate interview, that that 40 percent of the meals Gousto sells are recommended by AI. The company also uses AI on its back end, to automate the supply chain, as well as a forecasting.

Sustainability is the company’s other major focus area. On its website the company says most of its packaging is fully recyclable, and that it is looking for more sustainable ways to replace the few plastics it uses in the subscription boxes. That’s particularly important in the UK, where new controls are being introduced in an effort to drastically cut down on single-use plastics.

Unlike other meal kit companies, Gousto won’t head to the grocery aisle any time soon. Last year, HelloFresh started selling meal kits in grocery stores in addition to offering a subscription business. But Boldt has been vocal about his desire for Gousto to be an alternative to the grocery store, rather than another piece of its inventory.

Gousto told AgFunder this latest investment round will go towards further building out its technology side of the business, including hiring over 100 tech employees by 2020.

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.

Sun Basket’s Menu Expansion Suggests Dinner-Only Meal Kits Are a Thing of the Past

Sun Basket, the subscription-based meal kit service that specializes in clean, organic ingredients users cook at home, announced today it is expanding beyond the traditional dinner lineup and will offer other meals.

The expansion comes on the heels of the San Francisco-based company’s $30 million Series E fund in May of 2019. At the time of that announcement, Sun Basket said the funding would in part go towards including breakfast, lunch, and snack options as part of users’ weekly menu choices.

In keeping with the company’s health-focused offerings, breakfast and lunch kits offer recipes and ingredients for granolas, salads, noodle bowls, and gluten-free snacks. Breakfast and lunch items will fall under the normal pricing plan, which offers 18 meals per week for two or four people, or six family recipes per week.

While expanding to include granola butter or superfood cereal might seem like a small move, it’s a hugely important one right now for meal kit companies. An NPD survey from earlier this year found that 93 million U.S. adults haven’t yet tried a meal kit but want to. The same study noted that users and would-be users are looking for more than just dinner in a meal kit.

Several parties have already responded to that desire with expanded choice for customers. The Purple Carrot, who is probably Sun Basket’s most direct competitor in terms of food types, also offers breakfast and lunch options. Kroger and Home Chef, meanwhile, are piloting a new range of kits tailored to meet different lifestyle needs, among them a lunch-specific kit that features grain bowls, sandwiches, and salads that can be quickly thrown together.

As the meal kit sector continues to find footing after a long period of struggle, diversifying their offerings to appeal to a wider range of consumer appetites appears to be what companies need to do in order to survive.

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

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.

23AndMe Can Predict Your Favorite Ice Cream Flavor. How Do We Feel About That?

Genetic testing company, 23AndMe, can determine where your ancestors hail from, if you’re at risk for certain medical conditions, and, apparently, your favorite ice cream flavor.

Well, as long as it’s either chocolate or vanilla. A few days ago 23AndMe released a trait report that, among other things, can estimate whether you’re more likely to prefer vanilla or chocolate ice cream (h/t Food & Wine).

The company used data from 980,000 23AndMe research participants to determine a statistical model which showed whether each person was predestined to prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream (those are the only two flavors the report covers). The same report can also indicate users’ preference for salty or sweet snacks, as well as whether or not they have an aversion to cilantro. 23AndMe has done similar preference reports centered on beer in the past.

Having the power to determine whether someone likes chocolate or vanilla ice cream based on their DNA is obviously not a groundbreaking use of genetic science. Most people know their favorite ice cream flavors already (Team Mint Chocolate Chip!), and if they don’t, it’s pretty darn easy to find out.

Take a longer view, however, and it becomes clear how this sort of technology could have significant implications for the future of food personalization. As food becomes more and more digitized, companies can access your profile to determine dietary preferences, allergens, and general preferences.

It’s starting to happen already. McDonald’s has begun using Dynamic Yield to suggest new menu items to drive-thru customers based off of external factors like weather, trends, etc. But as The Spoon founder Mike Wolf pointed out recently, right now “personalized doesn’t really mean personalized, but instead it just means something slightly different based on a set of localized and current environmental factors.” Add DNA into the mix, and personalized could mean not only personalized based on your purchase history or pre-set preferences, but based on your actual genetics.

There are a ton of ways that companies could use your genetic predispositions to sell you more food tweaked towards your exact tastes. Perhaps your phone would ping you to try a new seasonal flavor at a brewery, or your local taco spot could know to automatically omit cilantro from your online orders. At best, these sort of nudges would make you try something new or save you from picking off cilantro. At worst, they’re super annoying.

However, providing this sort of data could have a lot bigger implications than just marketing nudges. What happens if the food you should or shouldn’t eat based on you genes gets shared not just with a restaurant, but also with your insurance company? Do you want it (and their rate hikes) keeping tabs on what you order? That’s a pretty extreme example, but your genetic makeup is the ultimate in private data. Revealing and sharing it could have far-reaching consequences which are not always obvious, or pleasant.

Gattaca stuff aside, this sort of granular data could present a big opportunity to personalized food companies like Spoonshot, Tastewise, or Analytical Flavor System. Right now they rely on external factors like consumer trends and the molecular makeup of food, but add DNA into the mix and they have an entirely new —and extremely personal— dataset with which to design your ideal flavor combination. CPG brands could, in turn, use these hyper-personalized flavor preferences to then sell to you through hyper-targeted marketing. Futuristic, sure — but not honestly, it’s probably not that far out.

There’s also the fact that living in a world where all your taste choices are predetermined sounds kind of, well, boring. Because even if I know that I love mint chocolate chip, I still like the excitement and the (admittedly tiny) risk of trying a new flavor, and waiting to see if I’ll like it or not.

23AndMe users can check out their ice cream flavor preference report here.

Newsletter: Making the Convenience of Delivery More Convenient, Impractical Home Kitchen Gadgets

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Talk to most individuals in today’s restaurant biz, and they’ll tell you that delivery is table stakes at this point. But a slew of news stories from the last week suggests some aren’t satisfied with simply inking a deal with a third-party service. Now, companies are adding haute cuisine, drones, and alternative locations to the list of things they can offer via delivery.

Yesterday, 7-Eleven joined these efforts by releasing 7NOW Pins, a feature that lets customers order via the convenience store chain’s 7NOW app and get their goods delivered to public places like parks, beaches, and sports stadiums. For 7-Eleven, delivering to these so-called hot spots makes a lot of sense, since drinking Slurpees is practically as common an outdoor activity as volleyball.

7-Eleven’s idea isn’t new. Domino’s launched a similar program in April of 2018 and has since been delivering pies to more than 200,000 of these public spaces around the country.

Domino’s, however, was focused more this past week on another delivery-related initiative: in-car ordering. Ever since it announced a partnership with Xevo, who makes in-car commerce technology, the pizza chain has been working to bring in-car ordering for delivery and pickup orders to more drivers around the U.S. As of last week, Chevrolet owners whose cars are equipped with the company’s Marketplace platform can order Domino’s while they’re still en route to home, and, because of the way Marketplace is configured, can do so without ever having to touch their smartphone.

Uber Eats Takes Haute Cuisine to New Heights
But maybe pizza and Slurpees aren’t your thing. No worries. Other companies are applying the convenience of delivery to more upscale foods, including Juniper & Ivy’s “In-N-Haute” burger, which Uber Eats will soon make available via drone in San Diego. While as of right now the drones will be dropping orders off with an Uber Eats driver who will finish the delivery, using them for even part of the process can save significant time, which means the $21 dollar hamburger would theoretically reach your door in a much fresher state.

Interestingly, Uber Eats’ other drone delivery test is with McDonald’s, the polar opposite of haute cuisine. But testing with two such extremes makes sense. As I wrote recently:

Whichever is more successful in terms of both quality of the food when it finally arrives at your door step as well as overall customer satisfaction with the experience, will tell Uber a lot about where to bet its hand in the upcoming drone delivery race.

Now if they could just figure out how to drone-drop haute burgers to my next beach trip . . .

The mycusini chocolate 3D printer

Impractical Cooking Fun for the Whole Family
Back in the world of at-home culinary devices, Mike Wolf dug into an impractical-but-so-cool activity for the kitchen: 3D printing chocolate.

The mycusini printer functions much like other 3D printers, only in this case it dispenses chocolate layer by layer. The device is expected to ship to backers by the end of 2019. Sadly for Mike and other U.S. fans of choco-printing, mycusini will only be available in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand initially.

Statesiders might instead look to McCormick’s new gimmick: a grill integrated with a DJ system that changes tracks based on what you’re cooking. As Catherine Lamb wrote this week, the SUMR HITS 5000 grill “links pre-recorded music and sounds to a weight-sensitive condiment tray and the grill itself. So when you pick up the hot sauce or flip your veggie burger, new sound bites play from a speaker presumably embedded somewhere inside the grill.”

While the SUMR HITS 5000 grill probably won’t be making it on checklists of any serious grillers, it could at the very least provide a few entertaining moments for upcoming summer BBQs this year. Throw in an order of delivery Slurpees, and you have yourself a legit party.

Until next time,

Jenn

How Epicured Uses Meal Kit Delivery to Make Food-as-Medicine More Accessible

Until very recently, a physician was more likely to reach for the prescription pad than a cookbook when treating a patient illness. But with the food-as-medicine movement finally starting to take hold in the U.S., and as stories of preventing cancer and reversing diabetes with food continue surfacing, parts of the healthcare and culinary sectors are finally starting to come together to not just treat illness but in many cases hopefully prevent it altogether.

Of the many, many areas in medicine, gastrointestinal (GI) disorders are especially full of potential for food-as-medicine treatment. Not only are these disorders widespread (an estimated 60–70 million Americans have one), they’re also directly tied to the digestive system, and therefore inherently connected to the food we eat.

All of this information served as Richard Bennett’s inspiration when he started Epicured in 2015 with cofounder Renee Cherkezian. The company caters its meal kit service specifically to people with GI disorders who are in need of gluten free and/or low-FODMAP diets, both of which are unwieldy diets to tackle if you’re not a nutritionist.

For example, a low-FODMAP diet permits raspberries but not blackberries. Quinoa is permitted, but wheat is to be avoided. Espresso is fine, chamomile tea, not so much. It doesn’t exactly make planning your next meal easy, or as Bennett says, “You can’t just walk through the grocery store aisle and know what you can buy.”

And even if you could, it’s probably not going to taste that great, at least not without a lot of practice and therefore a lot of time.

That’s where Epicured comes in. The service takes the guesswork out of gluten free and low-FODMAP diets by offering prepared meals for sale via a subscription service. Bennett told me all meals get vetted and reviewed by a dietitians to ensure they comply with low-FODMAP standards and are also 100 percent gluten free. He says Epicured currently addresses Crohn’s disease, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), colitis, celiac disease, and non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

As a service, it’s straightforward process for users. Upon signing up, they choose their meals for the week from a rotating menu. (Note: Epicured’s FAQ page makes it clear the service is not substitution for physician advice.) All meals are pre-prepared, so users need only heat them when they arrive. While individual meal prices vary, the average works out to about $15 per dish.

In that sense, Bennett, who has a background in healthcare, considers Epicured less of a food company and more of a way to extend care from the doctor’s office into the home by delivering meals that both meet dietary requirements for these GI disorders and still taste good. “I didn’t wake up and want to deliver a food or meal delivery company,” he told me. “I wanted to develop a health company that could bring the best of the culinary world and the best of the healthcare world [together].”

A key piece of what makes this work is that meals are conceptualized by Michelin-star chefs — that is, people who will know how to make food taste good even under restrictions as stringent as a gluten-free or low-FODMAP diet. “Chefs understand the impact of ingredients on the human system,” says Bennett, adding that the truly great chefs know how to create restaurant-quality food that needs to also be medicinal.

So far Epicured has enjoyed a positive reception. The service has investments from major medical centers like Mount Sinai, and Bennett told me the company is launching its first-ever clinical study with a major partner (he can’t say who yet).

Epicured has had suitors outside the healthcare realm, too. Amazon approached the company a while back to feature their prepared meals in its Amazon Go stores.

The Amazon partnership could give Epicured a major boost in terms of visibility in a meal-kit-as-medicine market that’s starting to become more populated, with the likes of BistroMD, BeWellEats, and Phood Farmacy all bringing versions of the meal kit to market.

Bennett couldn’t say whether this partnership will head to other Amazon Go locations in future, just that, his company hopes “to be aligned with their growth” and that Epicured can “deepen the partnership.”

In the meantime, Epicured will continue serving the Northeastern U.S. and focusing on the importance of marrying the idea of medicinal meals with food you’d actually want to sit down and eat.

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.

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.

Chef Meal Kits Brings the Virtual Kitchen Concept and Restaurant-Branded Meal Kits Together

Despite the amount of text we dedicate to documenting its struggles, there’s still opportunity to be had in the meal kit sector. Grocery stores are selling kits in their aisles, others are integrating them with shoppable recipes, and, in a trend that picked up steam last year thanks to Chick-fil-A, restaurants are starting to sell their own branded kits via mail order.

As far as Chef Meal Kits founder Meg Ginimay is concerned, the restaurant meal kit category is a hugely promising one, especially when you combine it with the concept of a virtual kitchen and offer it to restaurants at a low cost.

Chef Meal Kits operates as a marketplace for restaurants wanting to sell meal kit versions of their popular in-house dishes to customers. Currently the service operates in eight U.S. states: California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho.

The website currently offers 220 kits for purchase. Customers can filter by things like protein type, diet requirement, or a specific city. You can also, of course, filter by the restaurant itself so long as it’s participating. Most dishes are portioned for between two and four servings. Price varies based on the restaurant, plus shipping costs. Depending on the kit you choose, the price is typically higher than, say, something from HelloFresh. But as Ginimav points out, the goal is to connect customers with “a premium service that [offers] better quality ingredients” and is in some way an extension of the restaurant experience itself.

Unlike many traditional meal kit companies, Chef Meal Kits doesn’t require a subscription to use. Once ordered, Chefs Meal Kit portions out and packs up the ingredients and sends them out, and they arrive at the customer’s door one to two days later. Ginimav says the company is also considering FedEx Air once it has the volume to justify that.

For restaurants, participating in Chef Meal Kits could potentially make extra money and grow a brand without incurring unmanageably high costs in terms of both time and money.

Right now, Chef Meal Kit works with independent restaurants and/or food entrepreneurs. The company connects each restaurant with a consulting chef who helps them choose recipes from their menu (between four and eight), typically, and convert them into a meal kit recipe. From there, Chef Meal Kit takes photos of each dish, creates a restaurant-branded “storefront” on its website, and manages the portioning, packing, and shipping of orders each week. According to Ginimav, the company currently has 300 restaurants signed up to participate on the platform. Around 30 of those are active on the Chef Meal Kit marketplace; the company is in the process of onboarding the others as we speak. And as for larger chain restaurants, Ginimav says they will look into including Cheesecake Factory-level brands “down the line.”

Down the line also includes goals ramping up the virtual kitchen aspect of the operation. Right now, Chef Meal Kit handles all the work in terms of preparing the ingredients for shipment, which it does from its virtual kitchen in San Diego. In future, Ginimav wants to be able to offer restaurants the option to manage this process themselves (and save money doing so) by bringing their own staff to a Chef Meal Kit virtual kitchen. This “self-fulfillment” concept would also work for food entrepreneurs just starting out who perhaps want to test a brand without incurring the risks and costs of doing business with brick and mortar.

“No longer are the days where you have to spend $200,000 to $300,000 minimum to set up a restaurant,” he said, adding that virtual kitchens can be a “very low-cost launchpad for your brand.” He also points out that this future scenario will still be meal kit focused, and that the virtual kitchen spaces will exist for picking and portioning ingredients, not doing any of the actual cooking. The meal kit, Ginimav explains, is its own important arm of the restaurant experience: “Now you have a third option, which is you can cook at home with our meal kit. We’re just trying to be that third option. We’re not trying to replace the others.”