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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Blackbird

Food Tech News Show: Blackbird Launches Pay, DoorDash Delivers Big Numbers

This week on the Food Tech News Show, we are joined by Kristen Hawley, long-time restaurant tech journalist who writes for Fast Company, Eater and her own site, Expedite.

The Food Tech News Show

Blackbird Launches Blackbird Pay

This week, Blackbird, founded by Resy and Eater’s Ben Leventhal, launched Blackbird Pay. Blackbird is a blockchain-based guest loyalty and payments platform designed to better connect restaurants and diners. Diners can use the app to pay at participating restaurants with stored credit card information or loyalty points, and Blackbird charges a 2% processing fee per transaction, lower than standard restaurant POS systems.

Andrew Simmons Ends Pizza Automation Experiment

Andrew Simmons announced the end of his Pizza Roboto project after investing over $300K. His post on Linkedin details the challenges he faced around spinning up new locations and the mixed success of his pizza subscription plan. This news coincides with RestoGPT launching a pizza subscription program based on Simmons’ plan.

DoorDash Sees Digital Orders Surge Despite Industry Headwinds

Amid financial pressures, DoorDash reported a 19% year-over-year increase in total orders and a 23% rise in revenue in its Q2 2024 earnings report. The company noted that digital ordering remains resilient compared to declines in other restaurant industry channels.

Yum Brands to Expand Voice AI Across Taco Bell Locations

Yum! Brands announced plans to expand Voice AI technology to hundreds of Taco Bell drive-thrus in the U.S. by the end of 2024, with future global implementation across KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. Currently in over 100 Taco Bell locations, the company believes the technology will enhance operations, improve order accuracy, and reduce wait times.

Amazon Unveils New Just Walk Out AI Model

Amazon revealed details of its new AI model powering the Just Walk Out platform, despite removing the feature from Fresh stores earlier this year, indicating the platform’s continued development and potential.

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,, or by clicking play below. Don’t forget to like, rate, and review!

Blackbird Launches Blackbird Pay, a Blockchain-Powered Payment Network

Today Blackbird, a restaurant loyalty startup founded by former Resy and Eater founder Ben Leventhal, announced the launch of Blackbird Pay, a new restaurant payment network.

Powered by the company’s new blockchain, Blackbird Flynet, Blackbird Pay is a payment system that Blackbird says will charge less than traditional payment platforms (2% on average compared to 3.5% for systems such as Toast). The system allows customers to play with the Blackbird app using their debit or credit card within the app, or to use a combination of $FLY (Blackbird’s native loyalty points) and a card.

While the company emerged from the game primarily positioned as a next-gen loyalty platform company, Leventhal told The Spoon that payments have always been on the roadmap.

“We’ve been talking from the very start about the importance of giving restaurants tools to bring fees down to increase the fidelity of the data they get customer to customer,” said Leventhal. “And we strongly believe that pay is a huge part of that equation. We’re launching a payments product that allows restaurants to transfer funds between consumers and restaurants much more cheaply than they can using legacy rails.”

While Blackbird Pay marks the company’s entry into payments, one of its key differentiators is the tools it gives restaurant operators to enhance their loyalty programs. Once the customer taps in using the proprietary Blackbird NFC puck, the restaurant is notified that the guest is a Blackbird member. The customer’s dining profile includes a proprietary Guest Value Score and information about their dining history and VIP status. This enables restaurants to offer personalized perks, benefits, points, exclusive access, and other tailored hospitality options to entice and reward their guests.

In addition to launching Blackbird Pay, the company has also added additional communication features and enhancements around building membership programs. According to the company, Sra. Martinez launched a founding members program prior to its Miami opening, which enabled new members to gain access to tables ahead of reservations opening and receive free cocktails and amuse bouche while dining.

According to Leventhal, the new system isn’t a “rip and replace” for the existing point of sale system, but instead, one that is a ‘net new service.’

“We don’t want to introduce new complexity and introduce a new system that restaurants have to train up on,” said Leventhal. “Blackbird is built to integrate with those systems, and implementation for the restaurant is pretty lightweight.”

While a number of startups that launched during the crypto boom have either scaled back or pivoted, Blackbird has remained focused on utilizing blockchain as an underlying enabler for new features. But, as Levanthal has said from the time of launch, the goal is to enable those new features while making the user experience of customers and restaurants utilizing the platform as simple and abstracted from the underlying technology as possible.

“From a technology standpoint, we are using the blockchain to move tokens from consumer wallets to restaurant wallets,” Leventhal said. “And we’re using the blockchain to do it in a secure and scalable way. And to the extent that consumers care about that, or for that matter, restaurants care about that, you can peel back the onion, so to speak, and explore how that works on the platform. We’re certainly not hiding it. But in terms of the product experience, it’s not front and center.”

You can watch the full conversation with Ben Leventhal in the video below.

The Spoon Talks With Ben Leventhal About The Launch of Blackbird Pay

Ben Leventhal Discusses Raising $24M for Web3 Restaurant Loyalty Platform, Blackbird

This week, Blackbird, a startup building a Web3-powered restaurant loyalty platform, announced it had raised a $24 million Series A funding round led by a16z’s crypto team with participation from Amex Ventures and Bolt by QED, among others.

With the news, the company lifted the curtain around its platform and how it works. When customers arrive at a restaurant, they initiate membership by tapping their smartphone on Blackbird’s NFC reader. From there, Blackbird issues an NFT, which acts as an identity card that keeps track of the customer’s relationship with the restaurant. When a customer returns and taps with the NFC reader, it acts as a digital handshake that sends info associated with a customer’s membership to the restaurant, such as first and last name, address, and dining history.

In short, the platform is designed to work without burdening the customer or the restaurant with technical know-how. The Web3 technology works in the background, creating a wallet for customers to hold their NFTs and the $FLY tokens earned over time.

It’s clear from the announcement that the company is not leaning too heavily in branding itself as a Web3 company but instead emphasizing what founder Ben Leventhal sees as a friction-free, next-generation loyalty platform that helps smaller operators who may not have a significant technical staff or internal resources.

“Blackbird works very well if you couldn’t possibly care less about the blockchain,” Leventhal told The Spoon. “That’s crucial because the adoption of blockchain and the passion around the blockchain is rather specific and limited right now. And we need to create magic for all guests, regardless of how they think about tech, or if they think about tech at all.”

Still, while Leventhal and Blackbird aren’t emphasizing the platform’s Web3 underpinnings, there’s no doubt that much of the buzz around the company and the reason it was able to raise money from blue chips like Andreessen Horowitz in a challenging environment is precisely because it’s a web3 company; there’s a sense among investors and early partners that the company’s technology could, in some way, upend the traditional restaurant loyalty technology market.

I asked Leventhal how he thinks his company’s Web3 tech differentiates itself from what’s out there today. He pointed to a campaign his early trial partners ran this summer in partnership with Coinbase called the Summer Sweet Pass as part of Coinbase’s OnChain Summer.

“If you’re somebody who likes dessert, you have a sweet tooth, and you’re in New York in August, we curated eight restaurant desserts for you that you could, by virtue of having this pass in your Blackbird wallet, enjoy. I think that there are potentially several layers of community and connectivity that we can power for restaurants.”

It became clear during our conversation that Leventhal thinks his company can appeal to the passionate – but relatively small – community that wants to leverage blockchain and Web3 today to tap into experiences in the physical world while also helping restaurants build loyalty platforms that have more headroom to grow in the future while not putting any significant technical burden on their small staffs or the customer.

According to Leventhal, a low technical burden is especially crucial for smaller independent operators, the type of customer that Blackbird is targeting.

“We’re trying to focus on independent restaurants to help them level the playing field against some of these, you know, very, very serious competitors,” said Leventhal. “The average independent coffee shop is competing with Starbucks for their customers. The average independent restaurant competes with Sweetgreen and PF Chang’s for their customers. So they’re going to need some tools to do that effectively.”

This is Leventhal’s third restaurant industry startup. He founded the food media company Eater nearly two decades ago before selling it to Vox and started reservation tech company Resy in 2013 before selling it to American Express in 2019.

I asked Leventhal how things compare today to those previous eras.

“Twenty years ago, and the average restaurant is making ten to twelve percent margin,” said Leventhal. “Today, it’s three to four. So, we need to continue to think about what the future for restaurants looks like. And to me, a big part of the problem is not around the kind of reservations technology – that is now a pretty mature and robust area of technology – I think it’s about core connectivity to restaurants and guests and giving restaurants to make the most of their most loyal customers.”

Founder of Eater & Resy Launches Blackbird, a Web3 Loyalty Platform for Hospitality

Ben Leventhal is at it again.

The founder of Eater and Resy’s new startup is called Blackbird, which he describes as “a new loyalty, membership, and payments technology company.”

The company will work on building software products “that establishes and enhances connectivity between individual restaurants and their guests.” The company says they will use “a mix of web2 and web3 inventions to make it all work.”

The move by Leventhal isn’t all that surprising, in part because he’s struck gold twice already with good timing: first by recognizing the opportunity for hyperlocal food media and later through building a mobile-forward, Airbnb-integrated restaurant reservation platform in Resy.

As we wrote in August, the efforts by some to onboard restaurants onto web3 were having mixed results. The most high-profile web3 meets restaurant effort so far has been from that of Leventhal’s former Resy cofounder Gary Vaynerchuk, who generated lots of buzz early this year with its NFT restaurant concept. Vaynerchuk, not surprisingly, is participating in Blackbird’s just announced $11 million seed round.

Leventhal’s hint Blackbird will use both web3 and web2 technologies sounds like he doesn’t have any designs to be hard-core crypto purist (part of the problem for some of the earlier efforts), and instead recognizes the need to provide an approachable onramp to most in the industry. And to be sure, the best near-term bet for restaurants to baby-step into Web3 is through enhanced loyalty programs, particularly programs that reward restaurants’ true fans with utility-driven rewards that encourage even more business.

As we discussed last March with Brightloom’s Adam Brotman, it’s not just chains that could benefit; non-chain restaurants also could use an easy-to-use platform that gives them a modern way to build community and make their best customers feel special. For his part, Brotman and Brightloom are probably Blackbird’s most direct competition as a web3 loyalty platform products company, given Brightloom’s already been working with clients like WowBao to develop their web3 products, have been hiring web3 developers, and Brotman’s fascination with the topic himself.