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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Restaurant Tech

Just Salad Launches a ‘Climatarian’ Menu for Digital Orders

Fast-casual chain Just Salad announced today that it will launch its “Climataraian” menu on September 17. The menu, available exclusively for orders placed via the chain’s app and website, will collect and feature those Just Salad items with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, according to an email sent to The Spoon. It will also display the carbon footprint and GHGs for each item.

The Climatarian menu will have two categories. The “Carbon Counter” is for customers wishing to have the bare minimum of carbon emissions associated with their meal. The “Conscientious Carnivore” is for “meat-eaters concerned about climate change.” The carbon footprint of each item in these categories will be displayed via the digital menu.

Just Salad hasn’t limited this carbon labeling to just menu items on the Climatarian menu. As the company announced back in June, all menu items on the Just Salad app and website will now come with a corresponding carbon footprint, which reflects total GHGs associated with the production of each item. The official rollout of these labels will happen alongside the launch of the Climatarian menu and apply even to “build your own” offerings. 

These menu additions seem aimed at taking some of the guesswork out of eco-friendly eating for consumers. It remains to be seen if seeing “0.41 kg CO2e” and “0.77 kg CO2e” labels on a menu will actually motivate customers to choose the more climate-friendly option in the same way they might choose the lower-calorie option when faced with the numbers. Carbon labeling on restaurant menus is practically unheard of at this point, so it’s reasonable to expect an adoption curve. 

Both the carbon labeling and the Climatarian menu offer us a glimpse of how versatile the digital menu of the future could be in terms of the information it provides. For example, carbon labels could automatically adjust in real time to include GHGs associated with last-mile delivery. And with more restaurant menus going digital and the sustainable restaurant discussion again becoming a priority, Just Salad likely won’t long be the only chain offering environmental info on its menu items. 

This week’s news folds into Just Salad’s larger sustainability goals, which include ditching single-use plastics and sending zero waste to landfills by 2022.

Time to Recirculate the To-Go Cup Debate

Since we now live in a world where the to-go order is the main attraction at restaurants, we need to start treating the issue of excess single-use packaging with a whole lot more urgency.

Clearly I’m not the only one to have that thought, as two major QSR chains made sustainability announcements of their own this week. Both are aimed at reducing the amount of plastic that winds up in landfills and the ocean — no small feat considering the billions of single-use cups, straws, and containers we throw out each year, thanks in no small part to the convenience-driven delivery and to-go craze. 

On Thursday, Starbucks, sent out an update saying its “strawless lids” are now “the standard for iced beverages” at stores in the U.S. and Canada. The lids use roughly 9 percent less plastic than the normal lid-and-straw combo. The rollout of these lids applies to company-owned and licensed Starbucks stores, and is expected to be completed by the end of the month. Straws will still be available upon request. 

It’s an important milestone, especially considering Starbucks is arguably responsible for the populace’s current fixation with fancy drinks in plastic or plastic-coated cups. But it doesn’t actually remove single-use plastics from equation.

The latest initiative from McDonald’s does. This week, the company announced a partnership with zero-waste platform Loop to create a reusable cup program at McDonald’s locations in the UK. Users can opt for a reusable cup, for which they leave a small deposit that’s retrieved when they return the cup. Loop collects the empties, washes and sanitizes them, and puts them back into circulation. The concept is reminiscent of Dishcraft Robotics’ “dishes-as-a-service” model, which recently added reusable takeout containers to the items it collects, washes, and returns to the foodservice loop.

The obvious drawback here is that putting down a deposit at McDonald’s and then taking the time to return the cup is inconvenient. Inconvenience doesn’t sell with many consumers these days (which is another separate issue itself). 

A reusable cup system is, however, a bolder move than simply reducing plastic, and bold moves are what we need right now to get excessive packaging out of the foodservice world. That the McDonald’s pilot is coming from a multi-billion corporation with a $4 billion digital business is encouraging. But to become widespread, the entire restaurant industry is going to have to pitch in, from the major chains and supply companies to delivery services, mom-and-pop stores, and consumers themselves.

That’s no small ask at a time when the restaurant industry is utterly crippled from the pandemic and small chains and independent restaurants are permanently shuttering at an alarming pace. But with off-premises orders being the future of restaurants for the foreseeable future, no one can afford to shelve the glaring issue of single-use packaging for much longer, not without risking further environmental consequences.

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

Zomato Raises $100M, Plans IPO

Zomato, one of India’s largest food delivery services, announced this week it has raised $100 million from Tiger Global and is preparing for an IPO in 2021.

The news is just another layer of development to what’s been a very busy year for Zomato. The company bought Uber Eats’ India business in March, raised a $5 million Series J round in April, and unveiled a grocery delivery service in the same month. It had to cut 13 percent of its workforce in May (thanks, pandemic), but things are clearly looking up for the service, as it raised $62 million from Temasek and just days ago said in a blog post that “recovery trends are strong.”

A prospective IPO is another sign of that recovery. In a letter to employees reviewed by TechCrunch, Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal set “sometime in the first half of next year” as a timeline for said IPO. At the moment the company has “no immediate plans” on how it will spend the investment from Tiger Global, if it spends it at all. Goyal called the cash a “war-chest” for future M&A and for fighting price wars from competition.

Given that Zomato competes fiercely with Swiggy for the Indian food delivery market, and given the consolidation the entire third-party delivery industry is undergoing, having a war chest doesn’t seem like a bad move right now.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Fast-casual chain Sweetgreen this week launched Collections, a new digital-only menu available through the restaurant’s app and website. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, menu items are curated according to specific themes and dietary preferences/restrictions, and will make recommendations that are unique to each individual customer.

Order-ahead platform Allset has teamed up with digital ordering platform Olo to streamline the pickup order process for participating restaurants. Olo’s system lets restaurants manage menus, pricing, and order fulfillment across multiple third-party platforms, thus creating fewer manual workflows for restaurant staff.

Starting Sept. 30, NYC restaurants will be allowed to operate indoor dining rooms at 25 percent capacity. The announcement, made by Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week, comes just as the city gears up for the colder days ahead that will limit outdoor seating for most businesses.

Food Tech News: Wild Type Is Looking for Chefs, White Castle Is Offering Rewards

Some final bits of food tech news from ’round the web this week:

Wild Type Has a Pre-Order List for Chefs

While still a good five years out from commercial production, Wild Type said this week it has opened a pre-order list for chefs wanting to include the company’s cell-based seafood into their dishes. Right now, the company is developing a cultured salmon prototype that would work in sushi dishes. Wild Type cofounder Justin Kolbeck clarified that the company is not launching its product, just “releasing news” that they “have the next iteration of the product.

White Castle Launches a Rewards Program

White Castle has launched its first-ever rewards platform, called “the Craver Nation loyalty program.” Like other digital rewards programs out there, Craver Nation will offer discounts and deals to loyal customers that sign up for the White Castle mobile app. The program was trialed earlier this summer in Louisville, Ky. and is another digital tool in the chain’s quickly-growing arsenal of them.

Asia-based abillionveg Raises Fresh Funding

Singapore-based app abillionveg announced this week that it has closed a $3 million pre-Series A round, with participation from Nan Fung Group, CloudKitchens, and York Capital. The app features community-led reviews for vegan and vegetarian products, including both retail and restaurant offerings. Simultaneous to the funding news, the company announced it has struck partnerships with plant-based heavyweight Impossible Foods and restaurant-booking platform Chope.

Cornucopia Farms Is Building a Large-Scale Hydroponic Farm in Georgia

Leafy green lovers, take note. Marietta, Ga.-based Cornucopia Farms said this week it is completing construction on a 56,000-square-foot hydroponic farm two hours east of Atlanta. The farm will grow all manner of greens, including herbs, Romaine, and Bibb lettuce, among other types, and will produce an estimated 12 million heads of leafy greens and 2 million pounds of herbs per year when it is completed. That won’t be for a minute, though: completion of the project is expected at some point in the latter half of 2021.

Uber Eats Adds Contactless Order and Payment Methods for Dine-In and Takeout

Uber Eats has turned on some new contactless ordering and payment methods according to a story out today in USA Today. The new “Uber Eats Contactless Order Feature” aims to reduce the amount of human-to-human contact for people dining in restaurants or picking up their food.

Customers can either scan a special QR code at participating restaurants or find the restaurant in the Uber Eats app to order and pay for meals. For those eating at the restaurant, the food will be brought out to your table. Those choosing takeout can schedule a time to pick up their food.

The food pickup option is available nationally starting today, and the food delivery to your table for dine-in customers is available at now in Indianapolis, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Vermont, Atlanta, New York City and Washington, D.C.

Adding these types of contactless features is the latest in a series of moves Uber has made to adapt to the new normal caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to implementing contactless delivery, Uber also launched a pilot program that lets its restaurants accept pickup and delivery orders directly through their own websites with no added commission fee for the rest of the year, created a voucher program so companies can buy remote workers lunch during meetings, and developed a mask verification feature for its delivery drivers.

Uber is far from alone in adapting its product to support and accelerate a more contactless meal journey. In fact, any business that has any sort of relationship with a restaurant is getting into the contactless game. Holo Lens makes holographic interactive menus. Order for Me, BBot and even Apple are just three of the many companies with mobile payment solutions, while Keenon Robotics and Bear Robotics are creating robot servers to bring you your food.

As the pandemic continues, contactless payments and delivery will just become table stakes for any restaurant, and we are bound to see even more announcements like this from Uber and others in this space to accommodate.

A Next-Gen Automat Suggests the Restaurant Biz Should Mine Its Past When Planning Its Future

“Contactless” in the restaurant biz nowadays usually refers to digital order and pay processes that lessen but don’t totally eradicate human-to-human contact. After all, someone has to bring the food out, whether in the dining room or at the curbside, and the robots haven’t totally taken over quite yet. 

But a forthcoming store in Brooklyn has figured out a way to take human beings out of the picture entirely. The Brooklyn Dumpling Shop (BDS) is slated to open in October (confusingly in Manhattan) and will feature what the business calls Z.H.I. — “zero human interaction,” according to QSR magazine.

The fully automated restaurant concept will rely on temperature-controlled food lockers from ONDO and powered by Panasonic. Think of a high-tech version of the classic Automats of mid-20th century NYC. And as it turns out, that’s exactly what Brooklyn Chop House’s Stratis Morfogen, who conceptualized BDS, was going for: 

“The Automat was single handedly the greatest fast food distribution equipment ever designed. The technology we’re bringing to Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is unlike anything seen before, which will allow us to create an Autoflow from a customers’ cell phone, to our touchless ordering kiosks, right to our lockers to bring quick serve restaurants into the 21st century,” he said in today’s press release.

With this automat 2.0, Customers will be able to place an order on their phone or at the restaurant via a touchless kiosk. Once the food is cooked, a runner places it in the food locker and a notification is sent to the customer’s phone. The customer unlocks their designated locker with a code to retrieve their food. Locker temperatures can be set to “hot,” “cold,” and “ambient,” to allow for more precise temperature control during the pickup process. BDS also said its food will be available via the major third-party delivery platforms. 

BDS is one the first “new” restaurant formats we’ve heard of that’s legitimately contactless, which makes it an inherently attractive concept in the midst of a global health crisis. 

More intriguing, though, is that Morfogen mined the past to help design the future restaurant format — one of them, anyway. The Automat, which was originally developed at the end of the 19th century, became immensely popular during its lifespan because it provided a fast, cheap, efficient way to grab a bite to eat. It served a huge variety of food, and there was zero interaction between customers and those making the food. (Side note: the format wasn’t without its controversies around labor, which should be considered in this day and age.)

Thanks especially to the pandemic, those customer demands for speed, efficiency, and cheap eats are back in full force, so when you stop and think about it, an Automat format seems like a no-brainer. And it’s probably a concept that will make its way into all manner of public settings sooner rather than later, whether that’s a restaurant, the airport, and office buildings, among others. And BDS isn’t the first time someone’s tried to reinvent the automat: Minnow just raised a seed round for its contactless food lockers, which the company is installing residential buildings, and Brightloom (née Eatsa) has been pedaling a high-tech version of the Automat for years now.

In the meantime, it might behoove the restaurant industry to further mine past concepts that, a bit of a digital facelift might very well still make sense today. 

North American Bancard Acquires Restaurant Management Platform SALIDO

Restaurant tech platform SALIDO announced this week it has been acquired by payment tech company North American Bancard (NAB). According to a press release sent to The Spoon, NAB will “vertically integrate” SALIDO’s restaurant operating system onto its own payments platform, EPX.

SALIDO, which was founded in 2012, began its life as a POS system before evolving into a full restaurant-management platform that includes data analytics, staff management tools, menu management features, and a kitchen display system for back-of-house management. The platform works for both independent operators and large chains/franchises. The company counts EATALY, by CHLOE. and Restoration Hardware among its clients. 

SALIDO said in this week’s press release that since the acquisition, the company has been building out new products, including tableside mobile ordering, contactless payments, and online ordering — all features are fast becoming the norm in the restaurant industry. 

On that note, SALIDO is hardly alone in its efforts to build more digital, contactless tech into its platform. Actually, the majority of recent restaurant tech news has centered on these types of technologies, and SALIDO will compete with the likes of Paytronix, Toast, and many other companies, legacy and startup alike.

“Speed” and “efficiency” are two words you’ll hear frequently around the restaurant industry these days, as businesses fight to stay alive. Controlling operations in the restaurant is one way to get closer to achieving those things. SALIDO bills itself as a “unified” solution with which restaurants can do this. The integration with NAB will also give the platform better capabilities around digital payments, another new norm of the restaurant biz.

NAB acquired the EPX payment-processing platform in 2014. The acquisition of SALIDO will further embed the company in the hospitality industry. 

Soggy Food Sucks Re-Brands as SavrPak, Starts Scaling Up

When Soggy Food Sucks won the Startup Showcase at our 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, you could kinda tell that its moniker wasn’t long for this world. Like the name of some local indie band, Soggy Food Sucks caught your attention and told you exactly what it does, but didn’t exactly scream big enterprise business.

Well today, the company announced a re-branding. Soggy Food Sucks is now the much more professional sounding SavrPak.

“I named the company myself, when it was just me,” Bill Birgen, Founder of Soggy Food Sucks SavrPak told me by phone this week. But the name became a potential issue when talking with prospective high-profile, family-friendly brands who were hesitant about partnering with anything that “sucks.”

For those unfamiliar with the company, SavrPak makes a patch that sticks to the inside of food containers and absorbs moisture. The result, the company promises is, well, no more soggy food when you order delivery.

Birgen said that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a bit of a double-edge sword for the company. On the one hand, delivery and off-premises eating is more important to restaurant business than ever. But on the other hand, restaurants, whose margins were already thin before the pandemic, are reluctant to add any new expenses like a patch for to-go containers.

“COVID was a curveball,” Birgen said. “Customers were ready to receive product, but it’s probably a good thing they didn’t. They may not have been around to pay us.”

According to Birgen, SavrPak is producing 1 million units per month and is scaling up to produce 15 million units per month by the end of the year. The company has a number of brands testing out its patch including Wahoo’s Fish Tacos and Kitchen United, with the latter offering SavrPak’s as a packaging add-on for brands housed in its ghost kitchens.

In addition to ramping up production, SavrPak is also developing a patch that can be dropped into products like bags of salad to help keep produce fresh. The company is also in the process of receiving compostability certification. This is a good thing, considering the incredible amount of single-use container waste being generated by the rise in take out and delivery.

SavrPak isn’t the only company tackling the issue of soggy food sucking. Packaging company Novolex makes the EcoCraft Fresh & Crispy clamshell containers that help keep food crisp through “micro-flute corrugation” built into its to-go containers.

With the pandemic still very much impacting our eating habits, off-premises isn’t going away anytime soon. That sucks for a lot of reasons, but when it comes to eating delivery at home, maybe SavrPak can make it suck less?

Farm.One Installs Its Mini-Vertical Farm at Whole Foods in Manhattan

NYC-based vertical farming company Farm.One announced today it has launched a mini-farm inside the newly opened Whole Foods Market in Manhattan West. 

Farm.One custom designed the farm for this location. From a visual standpoint, that means the design matches the Whole Foods’ look, while the physical footprint — 36 square feet — does not intrude on shopping space. The farm can hold 150 plants, which it grows using artificial lighting and the hydroponic method. 

It being a mini-farm, there isn’t a ton of variety in the crops grown. In fact, for now, the mini-farm grows only basil, which will be used for in-store pizzas and cocktails. Which sounds about right for a Whole Foods in Manhattan. Today’s press release says the farm will grow about eight pounds of basil each month. Whole Foods’ staff will harvest the plants and, thanks to the accompanying software platform, require little supervision from Farm.One engineers.

Farm.One operates other custom locations at EATALY in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood and at the Project Farmhouse event space. The company will also unveil a new farm in a yet-to-be-named plant-based restaurant in October. Thus far, the company has raised nearly $500,000 in funding.

While growing cocktail garnishes won’t exactly end world hunger, Farm.One’s continued growth across Manhattan shows how varied the uses for vertical farming are getting. Not so long ago, the concept was the territory of large-scale operations in warehouse-style buildings on the outskirts of cities. Now, vertical farms have made their way into schools, restaurants, grocery stores, grocery distribution centers, and, increasingly, consumers’ homes. The more use cases we can see in action, the better we can understand where vertical farming is most valuable as a component of our future food system.

Farm.One has plans to build other mini-farms as well as flagship locations in other major U.S. cities as well as expand internationally over the next couple of years.

Ghost Kitchen Network Virtual Kitchen Raises $20M

Virtual Kitchen, a company founded by two ex-Uber executives, has raised $20 million in new funding, according to a filing with the SEC (h/t Restaurant Dive). The round was led by Founders Fund and brings Virtual Kitchen’s total funding to $37 million. 

Virtual Kitchen runs multiple “delivery-optimized kitchens” where restaurants can rent space and also take advantage of the company’s technology to scale up operations quickly. Delivery fulfillment is done through partnerships with Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates, DoorDash and other third-party services. 

It’s unclear at this time what Virtual Kitchen will do with the new funds, though Restaurant Dive suggests the San Francisco-based company is likely to focus on expanding its network of ghost kitchens.

Now would certainly be the time to do that. As we detailed in a recent Spoon Plus report, the market for ghost kitchens is enormous — trekking towards $1 trillion by some accounts. As a business model, the ghost kitchen was already becoming an attractive option for more and more restaurants before the COVID-19 pandemic ever hit and decimated the restaurant industry. Since then, delivery and other off-premises formats have become priorities for large chains and mom-and-pop joints alike, and there’s no setting more logical for fulfilling all these to-go orders than a ghost kitchen. 

Given all that, the recent activity in the ghost kitchen space shouldn’t surprise. Kitchen United continues to expand across the U.S. Kitopi raised $20 million this year. Zuul raised $9 million for its NYC-focused ghost kitchen operation, Dubai-based iKcon raised $5 million, and that’s but a smattering of the recent developments in this sector. 

Virtual Kitchen’s new funding follows last year’s $15 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Base10 Partners. 

McDonald’s Partners With Loop to Pilot Reusable Packaging

With the restaurant industry currently being reinvented with to-go-first experiences in mind, there’s cause to worry that the shift will add even more single-use cups, straws, and boxes to our already bulging landfills. So it makes for a small silver lining that McDonald’s today announced a partnership with Terracycle’s zero-waste platform Loop to pilot a reusable cup model.

The program will first be trialed at select McDonald’s in the UK in 2021. For a small deposit, customers will get a reusable Loop cup for their hot beverages. The deposit can be redeemed by returning the cup to any participating McDonald’s location, according to today’s press release. Loop will retrieve the used cups, wash them, and return them to the cycle.

As to whether this reusable cup program will make its way to the States, a McDonald’s spokesperson said, “The feedback collected through these packaging trials will help inform which options are scaled up or adopted in other countries around the world.”

Loop’s main business lets customers shop online for grocery, household, and beauty products from well-known brands, then get them delivered in packaging. Living up to the platform’s name, Loop  retrieves and cleans the empty containers once a customer is finished, and the cycle starts again. The company currently has partnerships with Häagen-Dazs, Tropicana, Nature’s Path Organic, and several well-known personal care brands. The service is available in select U.S. cities and is in the process of expanding to more places, including international locations.

The McDonald’s partnership comes at a time when the fight for a more sustainable restaurant has to co-exist alongside the fight against COVID-19. Some chains, notably Starbucks, have banned reusable cups for the time being, (understandably) citing safety concerns. But the sustainability issue can’t be put on hold for long, particularly since the increase in to-go orders could eventually equal an alarming increase in trash, too.

Whether you love big restaurant chains or fear they’ll be the only ones left after the dust from the restaurant industry upheaval settles, it’s worth acknowledging that they’re typically the ones with the deep enough pockets to invest in new forms of to-go containers. For its part, McDonald’s has already piloted other circular solutions for cups, including the Recup system in Germany and the chain’s participation in the NextGen Cup Challenge in the U.S.

Earlier this year, the company also completed construction on its first “net zero energy-designed restaurant” in Florida. At the time of that news, I wrote that billion-plus-dollar restaurant chains like McDonald’s, Chipotle, etc. are the ones that need to take the lead in writing the playbook for sustainability in the restaurant. Smaller restaurants — the ones that have managed to survive the fallout — still struggle to remain open, so it seems unreasonable right now to ask them to also reinvent the paper cup. 

McDonald’s, on the other hand, has a $4 billion off-premises business and a recent track record that’s heavy on the innovation front. Using some of those dollars and resources to create a more sustainable restaurant experience seem the next logical step. 

Dunkin Donuts

Cashierless Tech Could Move Dunkin’ Ahead in the Race to Reinvent the QSR Format

QSR chain Dunkin’ will launch its cashierless checkout pilot program in October at a store in California, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. And in doing so, it may set new standards for restaurant chains when it comes to how they deploy contactless tech.

News of Dunkin’s foray into the world of Amazon Go-style checkout first surfaced at the end of August, when Mastercard announced several partnerships to deploy its newly launched Shop Anywhere platform, which is powered by Accel Robotics. Shop Anywhere uses the computer vision and AI technology of Accel robotics provide checkout-free restaurant and retail experiences. 

At the California Dunkin’ location, that means customers will opt into the Shop Anywhere platform via the Dunkin’ mobile app, then receive a QR code to enter the store. From there, customers can grab their coffee and donuts and simply walk out of the store. Accel’s system uses computer vision to keep track of items and sends a digital receipt to the customer once they leave the store.

Companies are already testing this “grab-and-go” format in several grocery and convenience store formats, but Dunkin’ is one of the first to make such an announcement in the QSR realm. 

And cashierless tech may well set the chain apart at a time when more and more QSRs are making public their high-tech visions of future store formats. At the end of last week, Burger King unveiled its plans for a physically smaller space that emphasizes to-go formats and contactless ordering and payments. Taco Bell brought news of its “Go Mobile” format in August. Shake Shack and Chipotle have also made announcements of their own around new formats driven by more technology and fewer interactions between customers and restaurant staff.

All of those examples still rely on customers placing orders, manually paying, then waiting for their food. Being able to simply grab an item and leave the store without having to do any of those things would definitely provide a faster, more efficient, and truly contactless restaurant experience.

Dunkin’s menu, which is primarily coffee and donuts, rather than customized orders, lends itself to such a model. But there are plenty of QSRs out there at which the cashierless format would make sense, Starbucks being the prime example. Cashierless checkout could even make sense at other chains for certain items that can be pre-prepped — for example, if someone just wanted to grab some chips and queso from Chipotle. White Castle, too, plans to experiment with cashierless checkout, and is another Mastercard partner planning too deploy Shop Anywhere later this fall.

None of this is quite a reality yet, but Dunkin’ for the last couple years has proven itself an early adopter of restaurant tech. It was one of the first to offer drive-thru lanes dedicated to mobile orders, and has since opened several of its next-generation stores that feature self-service kiosks, geofence-enabled delivery, and other to-go-friendly tools and technologies. Seen in that light, cashierless checkout seems the next logical step, and one others will inevitably take as well in the near future. 

Floating Kitchens of Burger King

Now that its apparent even contactless tech won’t bring back the glory days of the dining room, restaurant chains are on a tear to refit their existing stores to better serve to-go formats. Efforts run the gamut, from dumping the front of house altogether to geofencing the premises for faster pickup orders to building more drive-thru lanes.

Burger King just one-upped all those efforts. The decades-old burger chain has has compiled all of the above and then some into a whopper of a design prototype for future restaurants. Per a BK press release from this week, the new design — which hasn’t actually been implemented yet — is meant to serve multiple order and delivery formats and will be 60 percent smaller than a traditional BK location.

BK plans to accomplish that with the following:

  • A drive-in area where customers scan a QR code then order and pay through the app. Food is delivered to the car. 
  • Curbside delivery and pickup lockers for customers who order ahead via the BK mobile app. The only element missing from this is geofencing tech for the curbside service, which other QSRs are now using to speed up operations.
  • On-premises service. No surprise that this will be a much smaller part of the overall plan moving forward. In one design, BK swapped out the traditional dining room for a covered patio. See below for the other option.
  • Double- and triple-lane drive-thrus. There will also be a walkup window and a view of the kitchen inside.
  • Suspended kitchens and dining rooms are by far the most intriguing addition, and one we haven’t yet see from another QSR. The kitchen and dining room will hang above the drive-thru lane, cutting down on the restaurant’s overall physical footprint. For drive-thru guests, at least, orders are delivered via a conveyor belt system. This particular design also includes a dedicated drive-thru lane for delivery drivers and is, according to the press release, “a 100% touchless experience.”

The first real-life buildout of these designs will be in Miami and the Caribbean in 2021. 

And while we wouldn’t expect other QSRs to produce a carbon copy of the design, it does feel that BK has raised the bar in terms of both standards and innovation when it comes to reformatting the restaurant experience. Some of the elements, like curbside pickup, are already fully established formats across most QSRs. Others, like triple drive-thru lanes, are more an anomaly. The hanging kitchen is, to the best of my knowledge, unheard of at any other QSR. 

The design does raise some questions around what the company will expect of its franchisees. As we saw last year with McDonald’s, retrofitting stores is an expensive, sometimes frustrating endeavor for franchisees. If Burger King wants this wonder of the QSR world to set the new standard for restaurant chains, it will need to ensure new build outs and existing store updates are as pleasant an experience for franchisees as they seem poised to be for customers. 

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NPD: Drive-Thru Visits Increased 26%

If there’s one true off-premises lifeline for QSRs during the pandemic, it’s the drive-thru. (Sorry not sorry, delivery.) The NPD Group underscored that point this week when it announced that drive-thru visits increased 26 percent in April, May, and June, and that this format “will be key to the industry’s future.”

It’s common knowledge at this point that those restaurants equipped with drive-thrus are faring much better than those that have traditionally focused on dine-in service. And some QSRs and fast casuals that historically never really offered drive-thru service are now doubling down on that format, including Chipotle and Shake Shack. 

Even in July, when more restaurant dining rooms were opened, the number of drive-thru visits increased by 13 percent, according to NPD. That number represents the highest increase among all service modes in the restaurant (e.g., dine-in, takeout, delivery).

David Portalatin, a food industry advisor to NPD, said we should expect to see more chains switching to drive-thru in the future. Whether all of them come with a hanging kitchen and conveyor belt setup remains to be seen. 

Fee Caps ‘Round the Web

This week, Santa Clara, CA moved to finally cap the commission fees third-party delivery services charge restaurants at 15 percent. The ordinance is effective immediately and will last “until the end of the pandemic.”

NYC extended its own emergency fee cap of 20 percent to be in effect 90 days after restaurants are allowed to operate dining rooms at full capacity. Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to that distant day.

Back on the Left Coast, Los Angeles also extended its fee cap with the same criteria as NYC. Fees must remain at 15 percent or lower until LA restaurants can operate dining rooms at 100 percent capacity.