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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chowly

The Food Tech Show: Going Off-Premise During a Pandemic

With dine-in still shut down in most places around the US (and the world), restaurants are trying to survive by going off-premise through a combination of delivery and takeout. The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht caught up with Chowly‘s Sterling Douglass to talk about the rapidly changing restaurant landscape and to discuss strategies for going off-premise.

This conversation took place as part of The Spoon’s COVID-19 Virtual Strategy Summit. If you missed the summit and would like to see some of what you missed, all the sessions are now available to watch.

You can get this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download direct to your device or just click play below.

COVID-19 Summit: How to Get Up, Running, and Efficient With Restaurant Delivery/Takeout

At today’s jam-packed yet socially distanced COVID-19 summit, we’ve been exploring the different strategies food businesses can take to survive the sudden changes brought about by coronavirus, a stopped economy, and massive disruptions to daily life. And no other sector in food has been hit harder than the restaurant industry, thanks to mandatory state closures of dining rooms that are forcing businesses to reach for off-premises ordering formats as a lifeline or die trying. 

So how exactly to you grasp that lifeline to keep your business from going under? Today, The Spoon’s Managing Editor Chris Albrecht talked with Sterling Douglass, co-founder and CEO of POS integrator Chowly to find out. Chowly’s platform simplifies (and automates) the process of a restaurant taking orders from multiple sales channels, so Douglass knows a thing or two about restaurants and off-premises orders. Here, I’ve broken his advice down into three different steps restaurants can take in order to get up and running faster and more efficiently with their own off-premises strategies. 

The Spoon's COVID-19 Summit: Sterling Douglas & Building an Off-Premise Business

1. Prepare your staff.

Douglass mentioned that Chowly is currently working with a lot of restaurants that are implementing delivery and takeout strategies for the very first time. And the very first thing he tells them has nothing to do with software or delivery services. Rather, he recommends restaurants examine and prepare their staff for the changes necessary to operate right now.

Consider what roles your workers will play now that there is no more dining room? That doesn’t change much for those in back of house, but what about servers? Can you afford to keep them and, if so, how can they be used to help the off-premises business along?

One thing that changes for everyone is scheduling. Right now, for example, many workers have children at home because of school closures. A workers’ normal schedule might need to be adjusted. Restaurants need to work with their staff to try and accommodate the different situations brought on by social distancing and shelter in place orders. 

2. Get set up with delivery companies. All of them.

Setting up a delivery program isn’t simply a matter of plugging DoorDash into your POS and getting some takeout boxes. Accounts with third-party delivery platforms can, especially now, take weeks to set up — a hardly ideal scenario right now. Chowly, along with other integration companies like Ordermark and Olo, compress a lot of this timeframe so that restaurants don’t have to go through the set of moves for each different delivery partner.

Those decisions include which platforms to work with (all of them, for now), how they want to be integrated (tablets versus the pricier but more efficient direct POS integration), and, once up and running, what food they’ll serve.

There’s also menu pricing to consider. Right now, independent restaurants and smaller chains without the deep pockets of, say, Starbucks, don’t get much negotiating power when it comes to commission fees they must pay delivery aggregators. Douglass suggested in the session that higher priced items on third-party marketplaces. That puts the burden on consumers, which could be risky in a recession-bound economy but does shift some of the financial stress off the shoulders of restaurants themselves.

Unless you also run your own driver fleet, the process for setting up delivery and takeout is fairly similar. Douglass said Chowly encourages potential customers to do both.

3. Get virtual.

Virtual restaurants have gotten more popular and more numerous over the last year. Imagine al of the above steps — delivery integration, a smiple menu, etc.—applied to a restaurant concept that doesn’t have a dining room and relies on delivery and takeout to reach customers. 

In today’s session, Douglass pointed out a few such concepts, most notably those Grubhub has been doing with restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You and non-restaurant food brands like Bon Apétit and Whole30. The rise of ghost kitchens has also led to many more virtual restaurants, and even virtual restaurant networks like Keatz.

This is not a step most restaurants are even in a position to consider right now. But it doesn’t but it doesn’t hurt to think about long term strategies, particularly since we don’t yet know what the restaurant industry is going to look like when we all finally emerge from our houses again. Right now, getting your operations ready for delivery and takeout and getting on delivery platforms should be the number one priorities for restaurants for the foreseeable future.

Here’s a Rundown of Restaurant Tech Deals Available to Struggling Businesses

As more restaurants are forced to pivot to off-premises models in the fight to stay alive, it seems more tech companies are coming to market with hardware and/or software meant to speed up, simplify, automate, and more efficiently manage delivery. And in the spirit of simplifying things, I’ve rounded up a number of those solutions here that address different parts of the off-premises model. 

Just remember: there are tech solutions that solve problems and, as a friend of mine once said, tech solutions in search of problems. Reduced fees or no, not every product or service is going to be useful, and what improves one restaurant’s business could be a total distraction for another.

Order-ahead app Allset has a contactless pickup option at participating restaurants. For all existing restaurant partners that provide the contactless pickup option at their stores, the company is waiving commission fees.

Delivery orchestration platform Bringg launched its BringgNow feature months ahead of schedule. The new feature helps larger chain restaurants, among other businesses, manage delivery orders, track drivers, make last-minute adjustments, and integrate with third-party platforms. BringgNow is free to new users at this time.

Chowly, whose tech helps manage delivery orders, is offering a “no cost” starter package to businesses needing to quickly pivot to delivery models as more cities and states shut down dining rooms.

DailyPay, an app that lets restaurant workers access their earnings immediately, has waived all access fees so that individuals using the service can get their earned income immediately. 

POS and guest management software platform Epicuri is waiving set up fees and offering a 60-day free trial with no commitment for restaurants right now.

Paytronix just launched a new cloud-based solution that lets restaurants add online ordering and delivery to their existing POS systems and, for those who want to conduct delivery in-house, integrate with DoorDash.

Presto is giving away free self-service kiosks that at this point can be used for pickup orders. In an email to The Spoon, the company also said it is also “offering Presto Quick Serve drive-thru kiosks, staff handhelds, and smartwatches completely free.”

Ordermark, a software-hardware platform that streamlines the process of accepting, managing, and fulfilling delivery orders, is waiving all setup fees right now, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

Restaurant order management platform Revention is offering an Online Ordering and Delivery Starter Bundle for a reduced price. It includes a POS terminal, optional DoorDash on-demand delivery service, and remote installation.

Guest management platform Sevenrooms now offers a feature called Direct Delivery that gives restaurants more ownership over their customer data on delivery and takeout orders. For the next 90 days, existing and prospective Sevenrooms customers can add the feature on at no extra cost. 

End-to-end platform Toast has eliminated software fees for restaurant customers for the next month and will provide those customers with free access to its digital ordering, marketing, and gift card programs for three months. 

Operations platform Zenput says it is “offering operators that are new to Zenput – at no charge or obligation through the end of June 2020 – the ability to use our platform to build-out, communicate, and ensure compliance with their COVID-19 processes.”

Online food ordering platform Zuppler is offering free setup and reduced pricing for restaurants and caterers who want to add online or Google ordering to their websites.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll know more about which products and services are most beneficial to restaurants trying to survive the current situation in which the industry finds itself. In the meantime, drop us a line if you know a company or product you think should be on this list.

‘Pare Down Your Menu’ and Other Advice for Restaurants Forced Into Delivery

States continue to mandate that restaurants shut down their dining rooms, and across the U.S. major chains are voluntarily switching to off-premises-only models. Those measures are necessary right now as we try to slow the spread of COVID-19. But where does that leave smaller businesses with less robust delivery programs or no off-premises strategies at all?

Plenty of restaurant tech solutions exist that can speed up and/or simplify a delivery strategy. However, I talked with several individuals this week who own and/or manage such solutions, and they made it clear that right now, there’s a whole lot restaurants can do to improve their delivery operations without forking over thousands of dollars on technology.

“Before you even get to the technology, what you really have to figure out is if you’re equipped to do off premises,” says Sterling Douglass, cofounder and CEO of Chowly. “What kind of food? What’s the menu going to look like? How are you going to staff it? Can you afford to staff it?”

Douglass, along with Alex Canter and Charlie Jeffers of Ordermark, and Jim Collins of Kitchen United, took time this week to chat with me and offer some simple steps restaurants can take today to kickstart their off-premises strategy right now.

1. Pare down your menu.

Pivoting to delivery doesn’t mean necessarily mean throwing your existing menu online and dishing up the same meals in to-go boxes. There’s a reason pizza was a delivery item long before any other kind of food went mobile: it travels well and it’s relatively simple to make. 

Thinking along those lines, restaurants should assess their existing menus and decide which items best translate to a to-go scenario. “What they need to do is trim down their menu, look at the items that are easy to procure and produce, so they can make a menu and put it up online and make easy items they can get out that are going to travel well,” says Jeffers. Fried chicken, for example, tends to hold up in transit. Scrambled eggs: not so much.

Jim Collins, who in addition to being CEO of Kitchen United also runs his own restaurant, suggests restaurants create things like family-style options and, if possible, include beer and wine options. “These things will help you stay relevant to the consumer as we move forward.”  

And if there’s leftover inventory from items you can’t make right now? Canter suggests getting creative about how you can repurpose and sell it:  “[Restaurants are] selling frozen items on Postmates. You can sell frozen soup or frozen take-home pizzas and cookie dough.”

2. Consider using multiple delivery platforms.

Unless you have the funds to power your own delivery operation (marketing, drivers, technical logistics), the reality for most restaurants right now is that they need to partner with third-party platforms like DoorDash and Postmates. If possible, they should partner with all of them.

“More and more, restaurants are realizing that to sustain a business solely based on delivery, they need to increase their volume and that typically means being on as many platforms as possible. Instead of picking one or two it’s really critical for restaurants to be thinking about an omni-channel strategy,” Canter says.

An eMarketer forecast said much the same thing a while back, noting that “more options for customers” would be a key growth driver for delivery in the future.

Companies like Ordermark and Chowly, and others legitimately do come in handy here: they will set a restaurant up on multiple different delivery platforms as part of a single package deal. Otherwise, the restaurant owner or operator would have to go through the same lengthy process for each service. “Opt in to all of the marketplaces but work with someone like ChowNow to get direct ordering working as well,” suggests Collins.

3. Adjust your staffing.

This one is honestly hard to write about, especially since earlier this week, the National Restaurant Association estimated the loss of 5–7 million restaurant industry jobs. “At my family’s restaurant, we’ve had to tell the bulk of our staff to not come in,” says Canter. “That means for us, we’re a sit-down restaurant [with] waiters, bus boys that are no longer needed to support a delivery-only situation.”

He adds that running a delivery-only business requires “a very minimal skeleton crew,” which sadly means owners and operators are going to have to make some hard decisions around staffing in the near future. “This is unfortunately the situation at hand. It really comes down to repurposing your best employees to shift them to focus on the takeout and delivery side of the business.”

4. Accept that delivery is “a must” right now.

We can’t have a discussion about restaurant food delivery without at least acknowledging how controversial and frustrating third-party platforms are for restaurants. I’ll spare you yet-another rant, though, because right now, the unfortunate reality is that the majority of restaurants need to partner with these platforms right now.

“At this point, when restaurants are no longer able to provide a dine-in experience, the only way to stay open is by having a delivery program,” says Jeffers. “Most restaurants don’t have the marketing spend or the following to survive on their own.”

“If you’re a restaurant and you’re not doing delivery, you need to immediately implement a program. Just being on DoorDash and Postmates, you now exist to the people who use these apps. It’s not just worth it, it’s a must,” Canter adds.

Right now, the restaurant industry is banding together to help restaurants accept and implement this new reality of off-premises business, whether its by offering tech solutions, support for workers, and help hotlines to answer questions.

“You’re not alone,” Canter says to businesses. “Every restaurant is trying to figure out the best way to get through this.”

 

Own a Restaurant? Here Are Some Resources for Surviving COVID-19

It’s way too soon to know exactly how badly restaurants will be impacted by the mandatory dining room shutdowns happening due to the spread of coronavirus. In a letter to the government obtained by The Spoon, The National Restaurant Association said it anticipates a sales decline of $225 billion over the next three months and the loss of between 5–7 million jobs. Since news of both COVID-19 and its effects on daily life and business change overnight now, there’s no telling if that number will go up in the near future.

To help restaurant owners, managers, workers, and other industry folks affected by this unprecedented situation, we’ve put together a list of useful websites, funds, fact sheets, and more. I’ll be adding to this list daily, so if you know of an organization or movement or own a tech company pushing out solutions to help restaurants, drop me a line at tips@thespoon.tech. 

The National Restaurant Association has put together a COVID-19 fact sheet (PDF) that includes information specific to the restaurant industry, such as the difference between cleaning and sanitizing and what to do if an employee gets sick.

Allset, a reservations and order-ahead app, now offers a contactless pickup option at participating restaurants. For all existing restaurant partners that provide the contactless pickup option at their stores, the company is waiving commission fees. Allset is also offering a daily $4 discount to customers for all pickup orders placed via its platform.

Restaurant tech company Chowly is offering a “no cost” starter package to businesses needing to quickly pivot to delivery models as more cities and states shut down dining rooms. Chowly’s software funnels orders coming from multiple different channels directly into a restaurant’s main POS system, which saves restaurants from having to manually input that information. Right now, Chowly says restaurants can get set up in as little as two business days.

DailyPay, an app that lets restaurant workers access their earnings immediately, has waived all access fees so that individuals using the service can get their earned income immediately. According to a press release from DailyPay, 43% of employees using DailyPay are accessing their pay early for COVID-19-related expenses. Restaurants not yet working with DailyPay can now do so at zero cost right now.

A group of restaurant industry professionals has set up an initiative to get immediate funds to restaurants through a campaign called “Dining Bonds.” It works like a savings bond: guests purchase a bond at today’s value rate and can redeem it for full face value at a later date. Customers can connect and purchase bonds from participating restaurants here.

DoorDash/Caviar is waiving commission fees for 30 days for new independent restaurants. Existing restaurant customers will pay zero commission fees on pickup orders for 30 days. The service has also set up a fund to assist impacted drivers and couriers.

Epicuri is waiving set up fees and offering a 60-day free trial with no commitment of its restaurant POS and guest management software. If interested, email onboarding@epicuri.co.uk.

Foodetective, a restaurant delivery platform serving Switzerland, is offering a commission-free delivery and takeaway platform for restaurants in the U.S. Restaurants will pay a monthly subscription fee but no commissions on individual orders.

The Foodservice Training Portal, which provides online learning tools for foodservice establishments, just released a new course which outlines how to respond to and prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Grubhub/Seamless has suspended commission fees for independent restaurants and set up a fund to assist drivers impacted by COVID-19.

Modern Restaurant Management has compiled a massive list of companies, nonprofits, tech startups, and more all offering tools and tips for restaurants during this time. The list includes everything from free webinars to best practice lists to information about new products that can help restaurants shift to off-premises strategies quickly. Check the full roundup here.

OneDine is now providing its Touchless System for ordering and payment free to all restaurants. It will waive setup and transaction fees and provide free Tap & Order and Tap & Pay sensors to all restaurants staying open.

OpenTable has launched a Restaurant Resource Center with information to help restaurant owners adapt operations to weather forced closures during the coronavirus. It will also waive subscription fees to their booking service if the restaurant is closed, as well as gift card listing fees.

Ordermark, a software-hardware platform that streamlines the process of accepting, managing, and fulfilling delivery orders, is waiving all setup fees right now, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

Postmates will waive commission fees for new San Francisco restaurants signing up with the platform. The service has also set up a fund for impacted workers.

Restaurant order management platform Revention is offering an Online Ordering and Delivery Starter Bundle for a reduced price. It includes a POS terminal, optional DoorDash on-demand delivery service, and remote installation.

Restaurant Playbooks will offer sales and hospitality training programs free to restaurant operators who are using their mandatory closures to develop their team.

The Restaurant Workers Community Foundation now has a COVID-19 Crisis Relief Fund where individuals and businesses can donate to help provide financial relief to restaurants and workers. 

Seated, a restaurant reservation and rewards platform, has created a help hotline to provide free financial, business, and legal advice to restaurant owners.

Toast has set up a relief fund called Rally for Restaurants. Users can search an online directory for their favorite restaurants and donate to them by purchasing gift cards.

Uber Eats has waived delivery fees for independent restaurants and offers two weeks of pay to drivers diagnosed with or quarantined because of COVID-19.

USBG National Charity Foundation is raising funds for the COVID-19 Relief Campaign in order to finance the Bartender Emergency Assistance Program.

The U.S. Small Business Association is offering low-interest disaster recovery loans to small businesses that have been severely impacted by COVID-19.

Online food ordering platform Zuppler is offering free setup and reduced pricing for restaurants and caterers who want to add online or Google ordering to their websites.

Chowly Offering “No-Cost” Starter Package to Help Restaurants Pivot to Delivery

Amid increasing city and state mandates for restaurants to stop any dine-in options, restaurant software company Chowly announced today that it is offering restaurants a “no-cost startup package” to help dine-in establishments quickly shift their businesses into delivery-focused models.

From the press announcement emailed to The Spoon:

To help restaurants quickly start executing off-premise order fulfillment, Chowly’s COVID-19 Relief Response will offer waived setup fees and a 60-day, no-risk trial period to restaurants that sign up for a limited time.

Through Chowly, restaurants can integrate direct online ordering channels and third-party delivery platforms such as Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash and Postmates. Chowly says restaurants can do this in a little as two business days and all orders through channels are sent directly to restaurants’ existing POS systems with no need for additional tablets, hardware or extra labor.

Being able to quickly get up and running with not just a delivery platform but one that can process and manage orders from multiple services at once is hugely important for restaurants at the moment. Most businesses operate under razor-thin margins in the best of times; having to close up shop for an unspecified amount of time could cause serious financial strain for some businesses and permanently close others.

Chowly’s offer is among the many ways the restaurant industry, and those dependent on it, are trying to cope with the global COVID-19 global pandemic. Other software companies like Foodetective, Bbot and Lavu have also made special offers to try and ease restaurants’ burdens.

As we have written extensively as of late, the coronavirus’ spread it rapidly upending not just the restaurant business, but the entire meal journey.

Chowly and ezCater Team Up to Integrate Catering Orders Into Restaurant POS Systems

Restaurant tech company Chowly, which integrates third-party delivery orders with restaurant POS systems, officially announced today its partnership with online catering marketplace ezCater. Chowly restaurant customers interested in adding catering as another ordering channel will now be able to do so through the ezCater integration, according to a press release from Chowly.

Since catering is yet-another type of off-premises ordering, restaurants typically have to manually input those orders into the main POS system — a time-consuming process that’s also highly susceptible to human error. That issue isn’t unique to catering, but since the ticket size of catering orders tends to be much higher (around $283), making a mistake gets costly much faster.

At least on the order processing side, Chicago-based Chowly solves that issue by taking the takes the human out of that equation. The company’s software automates the process of getting catering orders into a restaurant’s main POS system. When a customer places an order via a third party, whether it’s DoorDash or ezCater, that data gets automatically transmitted to the restaurant’s in-house POS system and enters the main ticket stream. All this happens in about 30 seconds, according to Chowly’s website, and for restaurants, there’s no additional hardware needed to use the system.

Chowly’s software is already well known in the restaurant biz for automating the process of getting third-party delivery orders into the POS system. The company partnered with DoorDash in September and also counts Jet’s Pizza, Branded Restaurants, and other chains among its restaurant partners (not to mention, some ghost kitchens).  

ezCater, meanwhile, raised $150 million earlier this year to expand its online catering marketplace. Its integration with Chowly adds another off-premises ordering channel for restaurants to utilize. Charlotte, NC-based Clean Juice is one such chain doing that. According to the press release, Clean Juice, who was already a Chowly customer, started offering catering at all 80 of its locations after adding ezCater as an ordering channel. 

Catering juice and catering full meals are two different things, of course, and the latter takes more time, money, and manpower than some chains have, POS integration or no. Nonetheless, the online catering world is growing. For example, EAT Club is a “virtual cafeteria” serving corporate offices in the San Francisco Bay Area. City Pantry, which Just Eat acquired in July, has a similar service in London.

Off-premises orders expected to make up the bulk of restaurant sales over the next decade. As companies like Chowly work to make the tech side of processing catering orders easier for restaurants, we’ll likely see more of those catering options at schools, universities, and in the workplace in the future.

Chowly and DoorDash Partner on Expanded POS Integration

Today, Chowly, whose technology integrates third-party delivery orders with restaurant POS systems, announced a partnership with DoorDash to bring DoorDash Drive to restaurants, allowing them to utilize third-party delivery drivers while still taking orders in house.

DoorDash Drive lets a restaurant directly request a driver from DoorDash, allowing them to accept delivery orders via their own digital properties while still taking advantage of the delivery service’s actual couriers. Most Drive orders right now are for catering; the DoorDash-Chowly partnership will make the service available to all of Chowly’s restaurant clients.

With the new integration, when a restaurant accepts a delivery order via its own website, app, or even phone call, Chowly’s system will automatically dispatch a DoorDash driver (called “Dashers”). Previously, employees had to manually re-enter an in-house delivery order into a separate tablet to call a Dasher. The Chowly integration funnels all orders into restaurant’s main POS system and removes the manual input step from the process entirely.

The partnership is also a nod to the rising importance of restaurants being able to use third-party delivery services for their drivers but still accept orders via their own digital channels. According to a recent survey, 51 percent of restaurant guests said they had placed an order via a restaurant website in the past month compared to 38 percent who ordered via a third-party service. At the same time, a growing number of companies are starting to employ this hybrid approach to delivery. Some, like Panera, are even doing the inverse, where orders originate via third-party services and are then dispatched by Panera’s own drivers.

Other technologies, such as Ordermark, which just raised a Series B round, and Checkmate, which integrates with Toast’s POS system, also work to streamline and standardize third-party delivery orders into the restaurant’s main POS system. It wouldn’t be surprising to see these companies embarking on partnerships in the near future to test out their own versions of a hybrid delivery model.

Ordermark Raises $18M in Series B Funding

Los Angeles, CA-based restaurant tech startup Ordermark announced today it has raised $18 million in Series B funding, according to Venture Beat. The round was led by Foundry Group, with participation from TenOneTen Ventures, Vertical Venture Partners, Mucker Capital, Act One Ventures, and Nosara Capital. The Series B round brings Ordermark’s total funding to $30.6 million.

Funds from the new round will go towards further integrating Ordermark’s service with other restaurant technologies, such as POS systems, kitchen display systems, and, of course, last-mile delivery companies.

Ordermark makes a hardware-software package that integrates and standardizes orders from disparate third-party systems like Uber Eats and Grubhub into a single dashboard. In the age of food delivery, it’s a noteworthy offering because it rids restaurants of the burden of having to juggle incoming orders off multiple tablet devices from third-party delivery services then input those orders into the main system.

The above scenario is often referred to as “tablet hell,” and it’s one restaurants have less and less patience for as demand for delivery increases and more restaurant-tech companies come to market promising solutions. Chowly is another such company that uses a tech platform to streamline orders from third-party delivery services. In a slightly different approach, Olo actually partners with third-party delivery services to help streamline the order process for restaurants. And with delivery apps predicted to hit 44 million U.S. users by 2020, the space is only going to get more competitive.

Ordermark closed a $9.5 million Series A round in September of 2018. The company counts TGI Friday’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Subway among its restaurant brand clients.