Category: Restaurant Tech
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Are drive-thrus the next celebrity voice licensing opportunity? If Presto Automation has its way, the answer could be yes. The restaurant automation company announced this week that it has launched a new custom voice solution that features different characters ranging from celebrity voices to restaurant mascots to localized voices with specific local dialects. According to…
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Back in 2017, I was in Tokyo for the first SKS Japan and thought I’d look around to see if I could find any robot-powered restaurants. I didn’t have much luck. In fact, about the only one that showed up during my search was a tourist attraction in Shinjuku, which wasn’t so much a robot…
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Despite the constant flood of doomsday headlines as the dark clouds of recession gather overhead and consumer behavior regresses to the mean post-pandemic, not all news is bad news these days when it comes to restaurant tech. In fact, some startups seem to be doing just fine, particularly those whose mission it is to help…
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If you ask Michael Jacobs what he thinks of virtual restaurants, you might expect an enthusiastic declaration of support for the concept. After all, as a co-founder and the original CEO of Ordermark and someone who helped conceive of the idea behind Nextbite, he helped create one of the highest-profile startups powering a wave of…
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This week, Piestro CEO Massimo de Marco announced on Linkedin that his company Piestro is building a back-of-house pizza robot for restaurants. After seeing the news, I decided to catch up with de Marco to ask him why he decided to diversify his company’s product portfolio beyond the automated pizza vending machine that the company…
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In this episode of The Spoon, we are joined by long-time restaurant and restaurant tech journalist Nancy Luna of Insider to compare notes about what’s been a challenging few months for restaurant tech startups. Some stories we discuss on the show include: NextBite’s layoffs and struggles in the virtual restaurant/ghost kitchen space The shutdown of…
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In December 2021, BurgerFi launched a pilot program with GRUBBRR to test the effectiveness of self-ordering technology to decrease operating costs, minimize the dependency on labor, increase revenue, and provide customers with a better overall experience. Together, the GRUBBRR and BurgerFi teams worked to develop a project plan, including a curated customer journey and operational…
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Anyone who’s read Jordan Thaeler’s publication Reforming Retail knows he likes to tell it like it is when it comes to restaurant tech. No matter whether it’s the business model of payment processors or the difficulties of building an at-scale restaurant tech startup, you can find his no-holds-barred analysis on a wide variety of topics…
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Seattle-based Picnic Works announced today that its Pizza Station robot will be heading to college this fall as part of an expanded pilot program with college food service company Chartwells Higher Education. The pilot will include five colleges: Texas A&M, the University of Chicago, Missouri State University, Carroll University, and Indiana University – Purdue University…
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This is the online version of The Spoon Weekly newsletter. Subscribe here to get in your inbox. Electrolux Launches GRO, a Kitchen System Designed to Encourage More Sustainable Eating Can a kitchen’s design help us eat more sustainable, plant-forward diets? Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux thinks the answer is yes and, to that end, has launched an ambitious…
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I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating. And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer…
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A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went out for our anniversary dinner. I’d made reservations for two with OpenTable at a nice little steak place and mentioned it was our anniversary in the ‘special occasion’ field. When we arrived, the staff was friendly and gave us special treatment. Overall it was a…
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