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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Restaurant Tech

Anatomy of a Digital Restaurant

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When Taster, a virtual restaurant company headquartered in London, announced its $37 million fundraise last week, co-founder and CEO Anton Soulier made clear that his company is trying to “redefine what it means to be a restaurant group in the 21st century.”

The company, founded in 2017, started out cooking food for its virtual restaurant brands from its own dedicated kitchen spaces then selling items via third-party delivery platforms like Uber Eats. Previously, Soulier was an early team member at Deliveroo, so he knows a thing or two about doing a delivery business — most importantly, how delivery has to continue to evolve.

Along those lines, Taster is taking a slightly different approach to the virtual restaurant nowadays. Instead of making the food itself, Taster licenses its five brands out to existing restaurants. The setup brings benefits to both sides. Restaurants can to make extra revenue by selling more delivery orders to not just their existing customers but fans of the virtual brands. Taster gets to expand faster, since it’s no longer having to handle every single order itself or build out kitchen infrastructure. As of last check, the company, which also has teams in Paris and Madrid, has more than 60 restaurant sites in nine cities acorss the UK, France, and Spain. The new funding, a series B round led by Octopus Ventures, will ensure further expansion for Taster’s brands.

In many ways, Taster could be seen as something of a blueprint for the digital-age restaurant chain, because it gathers a few different concepts that are popular into a single platform:

Underutilized Kitchen Space

Taster’s current model is built on helping restaurants put underutilized kitchen space to work. Businesses with extra kitchen space can license one or more of Taster’s restaurant brands and run it out of their own properties. It’s a way of offering a delivery brand without incurring the expense of a long lease with a traditional commissary space, which is too expensive for many restaurants. 

This “license a virtual restaurant” approach has become more commonplace over the last several months. Chicago-based Wow Bao started licensing a delivery-only version of its menu to other restaurants in 2020. Ordermark created an entire sister business around connecting restaurants with underutilized space to virtual brands. Restaurant company C3 has taken the concept beyond restaurants and is licensing its virtual food brands to hotels and luxury apartment properties.

Menus Designed for Delivery

From its inception, Taster has billed itself as a digital food court, serving up street food reimagined for delivery. In other words, the food is supposed to travel well. The company also involved Michelin-star chefs in the design of all its restaurant brands’ menus. 

In theory, at least, that ensures a certain level of quality stays intact throughout the entire journey the food takes from the kitchen to the customer. Even before the pandemic turned most of the restaurant biz into one giant takeout operation, issues with food quality were a major problem for delivery. This is another reason restaurants are now creating or licensing virtual brands instead of trying to repurpose their existing menus for to-go boxes. Under this arrangement, dining room food gets to stay where it belongs, in the dining room, and delivery orders are comprised of food that was built for travel.

Versatile Tech

Good food is the single most important part of any virtual restaurant. Arguably, the runner up is technology. It’s not enough anymore for a system to be simply be able to process digital orders and payments. Because of the growing order volume, delivery tech also needs to integrate with the back of house operations, track inventory and drivers, communicate with customers and integrate with the restaurant’s main POS system. It also needs to be able to integrate with third-party delivery services a la Uber Eats or Deliveroo.

To run a virtual restaurant out of their own kitchens, restaurants could cobble together various third-party solutions to get the above features under one roof. Or they could attempt to build an in-house system from the ground up. Both approaches have their drawbacks, from time and money to compatibility issues between different pieces of software. 

It’s another reason licensing a brand from a company like Taster or C3 or NextBite seems more practical at this point. Taster’s system, for example, can process orders and payments, help manage the kitchen, and track quality control, among other things. Users can also choose whether they want to order Taster brands via third-party delivery apps or Taster’s in-house app. Restaurants licensing Taster’s brands need not actually concern themselves with any of these logistical puzzles — the company handles all of the technology itself. C3’s tech is very similar, and there will doubtless be plenty of other such systems emerging in the near future.   

There’s little chance this “license a virtual restaurant” model will go out of vogue once lockdown restrictions ease and more cities around the world reopen their economies. Off-premises meal formats like delivery are at this point a normal part of doing business for restaurants. And as Taster’s recent fundraise suggests, interest in the evolution of the virtual restaurant is higher than ever.

Landry’s a restaurant group that owns Morton’s The Steakhouse and Bubba Gump’s Shrimp, said in a recent interview that most of the company’s restaurant brands will start accepting bitcoin as payment in the coming months. CEO Tilman Fertitta cited “the next 90 days” as a timeframe.

Starbucks is using its AI technology, Deep Brew, to further improve personalization for customers but also to track vaccination progress throughout the world, the company said on its recent earnings call.

Uber recently announced a new feature,  Pickup and Go, that lets rideshare users see nearby restaurants and order/pickup food while they are in transit.

TerraSlate Makes Menus for Restaurants from Military-Grade Paper

I miss going out to eat at restaurants, but one thing I do not miss is sticky food-smeared menus. But a common alternative to a laminated menu is a paper one, which inevitably gets trashed within a day or two. Thankfully, there is a solution to both of these menu options; a company called TerraSlate has developed an anti-viral menu that can be washed and used for a few years.

TerraSlate was founded in 2015, and its proprietary waterproof material was first used to create backup copies for passports and IDs while traveling. Kyle Ewing, the founder of TerraSlate, said that menus weren’t a popular application of the paper material initially. Then, a restaurant that Ewing is a regular at asked to have menus made from TerraSlate’s paper, which led Ewing to discover this application worked really well. Since then, TerraSlate now prints and supplies menus to over 50,000 restaurants throughout the US and in 52 different countries.

What makes TerraSlate’s menus different than a laminated menu is that there are no layers; the company’s menus are a solid sheet of synthetic, treeless material. The menus include a recently launched antimicrobial and anti-viral coating, which uses a very finely crushed silver, which naturally has these properties. TerraSlate’s menu can still be wiped down and put in a dishwasher, and cannot be ripped. The lifespan of the menus is several years, but Ewing said that a restaurant would likely change its menu items before the lifespan of a menu was up.

Since the start of the pandemic, many companies have opted to use digital menus to prevent the spread of germs. This is certainly a viable option, but scrolling through your phone while seated at a restaurant is not very social. Plus, holding and looking through a tangible menu is part of the restaurant experience.

TerrSlate’s menus are obviously more for restaurants that plan to serve the same thing for a long time. The menus must be printed at TerraSlate’s facility, so a restaurant does not have the ability to change its menu items on a whim.

Prices for TerraSlate menus vary, based on size and quantity. A pack of twenty-five, 13″ x 19″ menus starts at $113. TerraSlate raised a $2 million round of funding this past February, led by Clearbanc Ventures. The company is using the capital to expand its team and printing capabilities in Denver, Colorado.

Just Salad Partners With Arcadia to Offer Renewable Energy Deals, Free Salad

Always a trailblazer when it comes to sustainability, fast-casual chain Just Salad has unveiled yet another way to motivate consumers towards more eco-conscious choices: reward them with free food when they power their homes with clean energy.

The company has teamed up with clean energy startup Arcadia. Per an announcement from the two sent out today, Just Salad customers that sign up for an Arcadia subscription by the end of this month will receive a $50 credit to Just Salad. 

Arcadia stands out in the clean energy space because the company makes it possible for pretty much anyone to connect to renewable energy. By partnering with wind and solar farms around the U.S., Arcadia can source, verify, purchase, and retire renewable energy certificates (RECs) for energy consumers use at home — whether they own the house or rent an apartment. Purchasing RECs, which is essentially what Arcadia customers are doing when they connect their utility bills to the service, means contributing to the overall availability of green power across the country.

Arcadia operates across all 50 U.S. states, though availability varies within each state and isn’t everywhere.

Through the new deal, customers with a Just Salad account can sign up for an Arcadia subscription. Upon paying their power bill through the Arcadia platform, users will earn their Just Salad credit, which will be available digitally via the restaurant chain’s app. In some states, like “most of” New York and Illinois, the $5/month Arcadia membership fee can be waived. 

And while free salad is always a plus, the more important point of the Arcadia deal is that it potentially exposes more consumers to clean energy options they may previously not have known about. Just Salad’s geographic reach has grown substantially in recent years to include various states from New York to Illinois and down south to Florida and North Carolina. Arcadia operates in all of those places currently.

Encouraging and incentivizing customers to adopt more eco-friendly lives is something Just Salad’s been doing ever since it introduced its reusable bowl program, which offers customers deals and free toppings for bringing their Reusable Just Salad bowls to the store.

Arcadia, meanwhile, has partnered with food companies before, most notably in its deal with Freight Farms, struck last year, that allows CEA growers to connect their farms to cleaner sources of energy.

Beyond Burgers and Fries, Br5’s Robot Cooks Up Paella

Paella has an almost mythic quality about it. Making paella signifies some sort of special event. The dish has its own pan, for goodness sake. I addition to the technical aspects of making paella, there’s an emotional component to it. I mean , just read this bit from Fine Cooking’s paella recipe:

… paella perfection comes about when the person who is cooking it has an almost tangible affection for the dish itself, for the process of making it, and for the people who will be eating it.

If this is true, what happens when there is no person making paella. I don’t mean in a if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest philosophical kind of way. I mean that literally a person isn’t making the dish — is a robot. The Guardian has a story up today about just that — a paella making robot from the startup be robot 5 (br5) and paella stove maker, Mimcook.

The robot automates everything a human cook would do. It adds the rice and stock, mixes, lays in the shrimp and even gets that nice crust good paella is supposed to have. All without, presumably, any tangible affection for what it is making because, well, it’s a robot.

The folks at br5 told The Guardian that its robot is merely an automated assistant. Like other food robots, br5’s machine is meant to take over some of the mundane work associated with restaurants and making food. In fact, the br5 robot is only making paella because it is hooked up to the paella stove. It can work a grill or a fryer just as easily.

We’ve covered plenty of robots that will make you all types of food such as pizza, burgers, tokoyaki and more in the development. But those are all examples of food that is meant to be cooked quickly in high-traffic areas. They can all pump out lots of food consistently around the clock. Br5’s paella bot helps illustrate how sophisticated cooking robots are getting. This arm is doing more than flipping burgers or dunking frozen fries, it’s coordinating a complex, multi-ingredient dish.

Cooking robots are only going to get even more sophisticated. Take Blue Hill Coffee’s robot, for instance. It uses computer vision to “watch” and learn from human baristas. The robot can replicate the same motions as a human and even make latte art. Whether its through computer vision or motion capture, it’s not too long from now that cooking robots will be able to download the movements of famous chefs. This means they will be able to execute more advanced techniques and make even more complex meals. This automated chef replication may be great for our eventual home cooking robots, but how will they play in restaurants?

I think it will ultimately boil down to context and quality. People at the airport probably won’t care if a robot whips up a pizza for them as they rush to make their plane. They just want sustenance. But someone paying top dollar at a fine dining establishment is shelling out that premium for a more individual experience — something that can’t just be replicated the exact same way 400 times in an hour.

Superseding all of this, of course, is whether or not the food is good. People won’t eat bad food, no matter who or what makes it. The robot may not put love into it — but if the food is good people will love eating it.

We’ll be discussing these types of weighty questions around automated artistry and convenience at our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics virtual summit on May 18th. Companies like Karakuri, Yo-Kai Express, Piestro, Mukunda Foods and more will explain their approach to food robotics and what that means for the future of restaurants. Get your ticket today to be a part of the discussion!

Food Delivery Service Zomato Files to Go Public

Zomato, one of India’s leading and largest food delivery startups, announced today it has filed for an IPO from which it plans to raise $1.1 billion. 

To date, the 12-year-old company has raised $2.1 billion in total from the likes of Kora Investments, Tiger Global, and Ant Group, among other investors. Once public, it plans to list on the Indian Stock Exchange as NSE and BSE.

The company said it plans to invest 75 percent of its IPO proceedings into further building out its Zomato Pro subscription program as well as its business-to-business supply operation called Hyperpure.

Like most other restaurant-related companies, Zomato saw its fair share of ups and downs in 2020, including having to make cuts to its workforce about a year ago. However, the company has largely recovered from that, though its paperwork notes that the COVID-19 pandemic “has had and could impact our business, cash flows, financial condition and results of operators.” 

According to its filing documents, Zomato has more than 350,000 active restaurant listings on its platform across 24 different markets. The company says it faces “intense competition,” citing Prosus-backed food delivery service Swiggy as its competition along with cloud kitchen operator Rebel Foods and restaurant chains like Domino’s and McDonald’s. Amazon entered the Indian food delivery market last year but is not named as a competitor in Zomato’s filing. Uber Eats, meanwhile, sold its India business to Zomato in March of 2020 for $206 million.

Earlier this month, chief rival Swiggy raised a whopping $800 million and is now valued at $5 billion. As yet, Swiggy has made no announcements around a potential IPO.

DoorDash Launches Tiered Commission Fees for Restaurants

DoorDash announced today that is has launched a new pricing structure to deal with its historically controversial restaurant commission fees. Via these “Partnership Plans,” as the service calls them, U.S. restaurants can now choose between three different commission price points.

Plans are priced according to how much area a restaurant wants its delivery radius to cover and how much marketing it needs from DoorDash. 

The DoorDash Basic plan has the smallest delivery radius and the highest cost for customers, since most of the delivery costs are shifted to them. The commission fee for restaurants with this plan is 15 percent. It does not include in-app marketing.

DoorDash Plus has a 25 percent commission fee, offers a bigger delivery radius, and includes the DashPass loyalty program. DoorDash Premier has the biggest delivery radius and, in addition to DashPass, also offers what it calls a “growth guarantee.” Via this feature, restaurants will be reimbursed their full commission for the month if they receive fewer than 20 orders for delivery, pickup, or DoorDash subsidiary Caviar.

DoorDash also announced a new and reduced commission fee for pickup orders, which is 6 percent across all plans. 

The new tiered pricing structure is very clearly a response to the commission fee caps dozens of U.S. cities implemented last year. With dining rooms closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants were forced to rely more heavily on third-party delivery services like DoorDash. We weren’t too many months into restaurant restrictions before many across the restaurant industry started to decry commission fees, which often go as high as 30 percent per transaction, as detrimental to restaurants’ bottom lines. 

DoorDash and others oppose fee caps, saying they hurt order volumes and result in the service having to raise prices for customers. 

Granted, with a plan like DoorDash Basic, customers will still pay more for their meals to be delivered. From the looks of it, bringing those costs down will mean hiking commission fees for restaurants back up, so it remains to be seen if this new pricing structure is truly beneficial for businesses or if it’s more of the same old story.

Yum Brands to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions by ‘Nearly 50%’ by 2030

Restaurant operator Yum Brands announced today its plans to cut greenhouse gases 46 percent by 2030 in partnership with its franchisees, suppliers and producers. The company, which operates Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell, and the Habit Burger, also said today it plans to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

In a statement, Yum said it is “working closely” with its brands, franchisees, and suppliers on these goals, with a plan to focus on emission reductions at both corporate and franchise restaurants, as well as throughout its supply chain. 

Its restaurant brands have already kickstarted a few different initiatives that support its goal. Right now those include:

  • Investing in green buildings: KFC is investing in green buildings in Malaysia, South Africa, and the U.K., with “promising results.” For example, KFC reported 18 percent overall energy savings in Malaysia. 
  • Accelerating renewable energy: By the end of this year, Yum will transition 1,000 of its restaurants to renewable energy. The company has not yet specified which restaurants and where, though it has piloted renewable energy programs at KFC Australia in the past, and in 2020, it moved corporate offices in the U.S. to renewable energy.
  • Collaborating with climate-forward partners: Yum said it joined the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA), an alliance of large energy buyers, energy providers and service providers this year. 

Yum is just the latest high-profile restaurant company publicizing its sustainability goals. Back at the start of 2020, Starbucks announced its own plan to cut carbon emissions, water usage, and landfill waste in half by 2030. (The company is also trialing a reusable cup program in Seattle.) Chipotle just diverted 51 percent of its waste, according to the company’s latest sustainability report. It’s also tying sustainability goals to some executive compensation. Dunkin’, meanwhile, introduced food waste and composting programs in March of this year.

The sheer reach of Yum’s restaurant brands — over 50,000 restaurants in more than 150 countries and territories — means its efforts could have significant influence on the restaurant industry as a whole as sustainability becomes a more urgent priority to address.

A Plant-Based Restaurant Redefines the QSR

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I’ve been writing a lot about the plant-based QSR lately, so when I recently got the chance to visit the new location of Copper Branch, a plant-based restaurant company from Canada, I jumped at it. 

Across its franchise locations, which span Canada and are now making their way into the States, Copper Branch offers quick-service food that’s entirely plant-based. The company’s latest location to open, and its second in the U.S., is in Nashville, Tennessee — conveniently down the street from my house. 

Upon visiting, however, it became clear that food is only one part of Copper Branch’s mission. The company is, it seems, less about selling plant-based foods and more about reinventing what it means to be a quick-service restaurant (QSR). 

Despite the popularity in recent years of items like the Impossible Whopper and the Beyond Taco, the average QSR is better known for greasy burgers, salty fries, and sodas drunk out of non-recyclable cups. I love an occasional trip to the drive-thru as much as the next person, but those indulgences come with health and planetary costs that are becoming increasingly more problematic in light of climate change and chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity.

Copper Branch’s model is compelling because the company’s goal is bigger than simply making plant-based foods accessible to mainstream consumers’ palates. Over a recent call, CEO Trish Paterson talked about the company’s “triangular focus” when it comes to sustainability. The goal is to strike a balance between human health, animal welfare, and planetary health when it comes to food, packaging, operations, and everything else it takes to run a restaurant. The bigger-picture mission is to “change people’s mindsets of what fast food really is.”

In the case of Copper Branch, fast food means partnerships with companies like Eat Just (eggs) and Field Roast (cheese, meat) to recreate scrambles, burgers, chili, and other dishes made entirely from plants. At the same time, the company also prioritizes local partnerships for certain items, which is itself a form of sustainability. For example, the Nashville location serves coffee from Bongo Java, a beloved local roaster and one of the oldest independent coffee shops in town. Paterson says the local partnerships are intentional and a means of supporting local business and communities surrounding each Copper Branch location. Franchisees are expected to spend “a percentage of their revenue on local activities and giving back to their own communities,” which includes sourcing coffees, desserts, and other items from around town.

Packaging is another important part of the operation. Copper Branch has used compostable straws and cutlery for years, as well as compostable water bottles. A little more challenging are the to-go boxes for the food, which have to be lined with plastic to keep food hot during transport. Paterson said the company has considered a “bring your own container” program, though for the moment that’s on hold due to the pandemic. 

All of this sustainability doesn’t come cheap, though. Paterson said right now the biggest challenge for her company is the price point of menu items. For instance, a “Copper Burger Deluxe” at the restaurant costs $8.95. An Impossible Whopper is $5.89 by comparison.

“The ingredients that we use will never lend themselves to put us on that price point,” she says of the standard QSR menu. Instead, Copper Branch sees its job as helping consumers to understand the higher price points as “investing” in their own health and that of the planet.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Getting consumers in front of actual products, preferably eating in the restaurant, are important parts of educating consumers. That education doesn’t have to be preachy, either. A good meal speaks for itself. If that meal can be got as quickly and conveniently as the experience at a place like McDonald’s, consumers may be willing to pay a little more. 

Even if they’re not, the price point for plant-based, sustainably packaged foods may yet come down. For her part, Paterson believes we’ll get closer to that point. “The more advanced research and development gets, the lower the cost structure becomes, and those products will become more mainstream.”

Restaurants ‘Round the Web

CloudKitchens, the uber-secretive startup from ex-Uber boss Travis Kalanick, is reportedly Uber all over again, and definitely not in a good way. Business Insider recently reported on tensions and a mass exodus of staffers from the company.

Speaking of food delivery, a group of food delivery workers in NYC, known as Los Deliveristas Unidos, recently took to the streets to protest working conditions. The city’s largest union of service worker supported. Eater NY has the full story.

The latest Yelp Economic Average report recently found that restaurant openings were up in the first quarter of 2021 compared to one year ago. However, they fell short of 2019 levels. 

xRobotics’ Pizza Assembling Robot Concludes Test with Dodo Pizza

Pizza, of all things, is often at the center of advancements in food technology. You’ll find pizza at the forefront of innovation in restaurant software, autonomous delivery, NFTs, and of course, robotics. There are already a number of automated pizza making machines on the market, and jumping into that fray is xRobotics, which announced this week that it recently finished a test of its prototype at Dodo Pizza in Oxford, Mississippi.

The xPizza One robot is a self-contained, pizza assembling kiosk, which means it doesn’t cook the pizzas or stretch the dough, but instead just automates the topping process. Empty crusts are placed on squat, puck-like robots that scoot under the assembly system. As the robot moves under the machine, canisters of toppings such as sauce, cheese, pepperoni and are dispensed on top of the pizza based on the instructions given. The crust is spun as toppings drop to ensure even distribution. Once the pizza is assembled as ordered, the puck reappears where a person places the pie in an oven to be heated.

xRobotics (xPizza One) - a pizza-making robot

According to press materials sent to The Spoon, the xPizza One used in the Oxford pilot was set up to hold 11 types of toppings, which covered 90 percent of Dodo’s menu. The robot’s average productivity hit 100 pizzas per hour and over the course of the month, successfully made 472 pizzas, saving 32 hours of manual work.

Automated pizza assembly is becoming its own bustling sub-sector in the pizza world. Other players in the space include Picnic, which uses a more modular, conveyor belt-style assembly system, and Middleby, which makes the PizzaBot 5000 pizza assembler.

The pitch with all of these robot pizza players is the same: cost savings. These robots are literal machines that crank out hundreds of pizzas without taking a break. By having a robot take over the topping process, human labor can be moved to other higher-value tasks such as customer service and order expediting. In addition to potential labor savings, robots can also keep ingredient costs down because they distribute a precise, consistent amount of toppings. It’s never too much and there is no loss due to sloppiness or human error.

With this initial test completed, xRobotics is looking ahead. The company says it has 800 pre-orders from different pizza chains and operators and is prepping facilities to start mass production of the xPizza One in late 2021 or early 2022.

Deliverect Raises $65M for Its Delivery Integration Software

Belgium-based restaurant tech startup Deliverect announced today it has raised $65 million in Series C funding. The round was led by DST Global Partners and Redpoint Ventures, as well as existing investors OMERS Ventures, Newion and Smartfin. Deliverect’s founders also invested in the round. To date, Deliverect has raised a total of $86.8 million including this round.

The Deliverect platform manages orders from third party delivery services, funneling them into a single ticket stream that goes into a restaurant’s main POS system. This eliminates the need for a restaurant staffer to manually input these orders from the third-party delivery service’s tablet into the POS. That in turn saves time and can lessen the likelihood of order inaccuracy. 

While this class of technology has been around for years now, the move towards more delivery and takeout orders, brought on by the pandemic, has made this type of software something of a must-have for businesses using multiple third-party providers (e.g., Uber Eats, Deliverroo, etc.). 

Deliverect’s software services single restaurants, chains, and ghost kitchen operations. The company said today it will use the new funding for more R&D as well as to expand further. Right now, Deliverect’s software is in more than 10,000 restaurants around the world, including high-profile chains like Pret a Manger, Taco Bell, and Le Pain Quotidien.

Numerous other startups, including Ordermark, which raised $120 million last year, and Olo, which recently filed to go public, offer a similar product to restaurants. Which is to say that Deliverect will face its fair share of competition as it continues to expand.

The company raised €16.25 million (~$17.63 million USD) in Series B funding last year. It said today it has processed more than 30 million orders, and is now processing an average of 1 million orders per week.

Video: Connected Robotics’ Restaurant Bots Prep, Cook and Clean

The last time we checked in with Japanese company Connected Robotics, it was primarily known for its OctoChef Tokoyaki robot, which creates fried octopus balls. Connected Robotics had also raised roughly $7.8 million to expand its robo-lineup, which it showed off at the Hotel Restaurant Show at the end of March.

We weren’t able to be at that convention, but came across video of Connected Robotics restaraunt bot lineup in action via a post on Linkedin over the weekend.

【2021ver.】HCJ出展概要ダイジェスト　＃ロボット​＃調理​＃AI

In the video you can see a variety of Connected Robotics’ robots performing different kitchen-related tasks: cooking noodles, grabbing food and placing it in a fryer, sliding cooked food into a display, washing dirty dishes and stacking them once they are cleaned. There’s even computer vision for what looks like inventory management and automated checkout.

Each system makes heavy use of articulating arms, and there appears to be the need for at least one set of human hands in the noodle-plating process. But overall, the robots whirr and swivel and do almost everything on their own.

Japan in particular is a burgeoning center for food-related robotics as the company has a greying population and is looking to automate parts of its labor force. Consumer electronics giant Sony is working on robot chefs and recently invested in Analytical Flavor Systems to help those robots combine flavors when cooking. Panasonic has also developed cooking robots in partnership with the Haidilao hotpot restaurant chain.

If you are interested in learning about — and seeing! — more food robots in action, be sure to attend our ArticulATE food robotics and automation virtual summit on May 18. We’ll have speakers from Karakuri, Mukunda Foods, Yo-Kai Express, Mezli and more! Get your ticket today!

Pizza: an Opportunity for Restaurant Tech Innovation

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Recently, a restaurant technology company called Slice announced a $40 million fundraise, suggesting there’s a huge opportunity when it comes to making software specifically geared towards the independent pizzeria. 

Slice’s platform, developed by founders with a long history in the pizza space, includes online ordering capabilities, a pizza rewards program, a POS system, the option to build a branded website, and the option to offer delivery, among other things. From the consumer-facing view, Slice is a marketplace of local pizzerias (e.g., not Papa John’s) from which to order and build up reward points that eventually result in free food. Slice is currently up and running in businesses across all 50 U.S. states and serves over 15,000 shops. The potential market it could serve — that is, independent pizzerias — numbers in the tens of thousands at this point in the U.S.

Why, you ask, would an independent pizzeria need a pizza-specific platform to do business?

It’s all in that word “independent.”

As Slice’s Chief Product Officer, Preethy Vaidyanatha, explained to me recently, if you want to run a pizza business (or any restaurant, really), you basically have two options: open a Domino’s (or Pizza Hut, or Papa John’s) franchise or start your own business. The latter choice allows for more culinary creativity and freedom, but comes with the added stressors of running a type of business that’s low-margin even when there’s not a pandemic shutting down restaurants left and right. 

On top of that — and this is what Slice’s technology really aims to address — technology’s march on the restaurant business is unavoidable at this point for pretty much everyone. Digital ordering is a must for businesses large and small now. And after a year of shutdowns and ever-changing restrictions on restaurants, costs have to be reeled in, and digitizing the back of house (bookkeeping, inventory management, etc.) is one way to do that.

Add to this some elements very specific to pizzerias. The menu may be simple (pizza), but it has to accommodate requests like half-and-half toppings, extra cheese, and crust types. Some businesses sell both whole pies and individual slices. Digitally speaking, these choices need to be available with just a couple clicks on a phone or computer. Meanwhile, many pizzerias still handle their own delivery, which as to be accounted for when it comes to managing operations. 

Slice handles the technical logistics of all of those situations, and there is arguably plenty of room for other restaurant tech companies to also develop tools for these things.

If you’re Domino’s, you can just throw money at the problem and open an innovation center to tackle these issues. I can promise you that your average family-owned pizza shop does not have its own innovation center. Nonetheless, it and any other independent pizzeria needs the ability to also offer the kinds of digital conveniences consumers get from the big companies, and that’s where restaurant tech companies like Slice could prove hugely valuable. 

For its part, Slice’s tech offers independent shops the same digitization, process automation, and online ordering/payment tools you would get with Domino’s or a third-party delivery service, but at a far lower cost. The company did not divulge actual numbers, but did mention that restaurants pay a flat fee per transaction to use the platform, rather than the percentage-per-transaction model used by DoorDash et al.

Pizza has always been in its own class when it comes to delivery, from the food itself to the way it handles off-premises formats like delivery. Getting its own tech stack made for pizzerias by pizzerias seems like the natural next step in the segments evolution.

 

Starbucks has teamed up with Arizona State University to open a research and innovation facility that will test initiatives that support more sustainability in Starbucks stores. The facility is called the ASU-Starbucks Center for the Future of the People and the Planet, and will open at the end of 2021. 

Toast has made updates to its Order & Pay tool, including pre-authorization that lets customers start a tab, authorize a credit card, and enable group ordering, all from their own mobile device.

Atlanta-based pay-at-the-table startup sunday recently launched its QR code solution, following a $24 million fundraise. The Atlanta, Georgia-based company wants, like many others, to make it easier for guests to get and pay their bill in the restaurant.