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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

contactless ordering

Bluestone Lane Expands Its Tech-Enabled Cafes, Adds Drive-Thru Lanes

Bluestone Lane, a coffee chain known for healthy eats and Australian hospitality, announced this week it is expanding beyond major urban centers in the U.S. and will be in suburban locations around the country by the end of 2021.

The chain, founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York City, currently operates more than 50 locations around the U.S., including those in NYC, California, and Washington, D.C. It also has a few locations in Canada. New locations are slated for Manhattan, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but the company is also moving outside of major cities, partially in response to the pandemic-induced mass exodus to the suburbs that’s been happening for some months.

New Bluestone Lane locations will include parts of Orange County and San Diego, suburbs of New York and DC, as well as the chain’s first-ever cafes in Texas.

Bluestone is one of those smaller restaurant chains that was able to quickly react to the pandemic and keep business alive as a result. When we spoke in July of last year, CEO Nicholas Stone told me the company pivoted all of its locations to takeout formats and pieced together a tech stack to build its own in-house app to enable faster service for customers. Multiple different third-party software pieces help power the experience, which, from a customer point of view, is as seamless as any other well-made ordering out there nowadays. Which just goes to show, you don’t need to spend millions of dollars to rig up an effective in-house order and payments platform.

Stone told me last year that the company will continue its focus on tech for the foreseeable future. Supporting that statement, digital ordering will be the norm at new locations Blue Stone opens this year. The company said this week it has also successfully piloted a “mobile-enabled drive-thru experience” in Los Altos, California, and will bring that format to other suburban locations in the future.    

Bbot Raises $4M for Its Contactless Dining Room Tech

Restaurant tech startup Bbot announced today it has closed a $4 million seed extension funding round, bringing its total funding to $7.3 million. The seed extension round was led by Rally Ventures with participation from existing investor Craft Ventures, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The round follows Bbot’s $3 million fundraise from July 2020. The new funding will go towards hiring new talent and accelerating product development. Currently, Bbot makes a mobile order and payments platform restaurants can use to promote more “contactless” experiences in the dining room.

Of course, “contactless” was arguably the buzzword in the restaurant biz in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed eating establishments all over the world to promote more social distancing for in-restaurant experiences. Bbot uses a common method, providing restaurant-goers with a QR code they can scan to browse a menu and order and pay for food. The Bbot system integrates directly into a restaurant’s existing tech setup. 

In today’s press release, the company said it plans to introduce a new feature in 2021 that “reinvents the traditional bar tab” by allowing customers and bartenders joint access to it. Bbot will also release its own API that will let hospitality businesses “build on the Bbot infrastructure,” though more specifics were not provided.

The release (and subsequent success) of the bar tab feature may hinge partly on the direction of the pandemic, since bars specifically remain shuttered in many places. For the restaurant/bar/hospitality sector in general, there is a lot of competition afoot at the moment, since pretty much every front-of-house focused restaurant tech company released some version of a contactless order/pay system over the last year. Activity in this space has plateued slightly after the initial rush to go contactless. However, as a COVID-19 vaccine becomes more widespread and dining room restrictions relaxed, we expect competition to fire up once more.

Toast Launches a Winter Recovery Fund for Restaurants

Restaurant tech company Toast today announced a $35 million relief plan for restaurants as winter begins and the pandemic continues to disrupt normal operations. 

The Boston, Massachusetts-based company said today this “relief package” is in response to the status of the RESTAURANTS act, which is part of a larger stimulus plan and therefore currently stalled in Congress. Were it to pass, a $120 billion grant program would be available for those in the restaurant industry impacted by the pandemic. The point, however, is that it hasn’t passed yet, winter is here, and many restaurants are on the brink of permanent closure if they don’t receive assistance.

Toast’s Winter Restaurant Recovery Fund is not near the size of the $120 billion figure of the aforementioned legislation, but it could provide a temporary boost to restaurants in some areas. 

The fund is available to Toast’s current customers. Through it, restaurants can access funding they can put towards winterization (aka, making outdoor dining feasible in cold weather) and working capital needs. They will also receive a one-month software credit for their current Toast tech stack and complementary access to the company’s online ordering, payroll, and marketing products. Finally, restaurant customers will also be allowed to pass their one-month software credit on to another restaurant (that doesn’t have to be a Toast customer) facing greater hardships. 

According to the Toast website, restaurants do not have to take any extra steps in order to activate their one-month credit. For the funding portion of this relief package, restaurants will need to apply.

Toast has been quick to respond to restaurant industry needs brought on by the pandemic. In March, just as COVID numbers were rising and businesses closing, the company launched an initial relief plan and, like others, eliminated software fees for restaurant customers. Over the last several months, it has also released a slew of new products and features geared towards native delivery and contactless order/payments. 

The restaurant industry in all likelihood stills need major assistance from Congress. (Honestly, it probably just needs a bailout.) In the meantime, assistance packages like those from Toast and other restaurant tech companies are able to provide some breathing room and help businesses keep the lights on one more week.

New Restaurant Restrictions Put the Value of Restaurant Tech to the Test

States and cities across the U.S. have imposed new restrictions and in some cases lockdowns that will once again shutter indoor dining. As they’ve done in the past, these restrictions once again call into question how restaurant tech can help restaurants pandemic-proof themselves and stay in business.

A stay-at-home order for Chicago residents goes into effect today. Restaurants must close by 11 p.m. each night and may only offer delivery, takeout, and outdoor seating. The city didn’t completely shutter indoor dining; it’s allowed so long as tables are within eight feet of an open window. But given Chicago’s typical wintertime temperatures, neither that nor patio seating will likely be popular options for diners right now.

New Mexico, and Oregon have imposed far tighter restrictions. Effective last week, Oregon restaurants and bars must return to takeout- and delivery-only service. New Mexico has similar restrictions as residents shelter under a two-week-long stay-at-home order.

Likewise, restaurants in Washington State and Michigan must halt indoor dining and stick to takeout and delivery models. Other states, including Minnesota and New York, have imposed curfews on restaurants, and for everyone, the threat of another lockdown looms large.

One difference this time around is that unlike in March, restaurants have more tools at their disposal when it comes to fulfilling off-premises orders. Since the early days of the pandemic, most restaurant tech companies have offered so-called “contactless” solutions that minimize human-to-human contact. Some parts of those packages, like QR-code-based ordering for the dining room, will be of little help right now, since there is no dining room in many places. But other features, such as software to power online order processing, could help restaurants fulfill takeout tickets faster and in a more organized fashion. Elsewhere, delivery integrators a la Chowly and ChowNow are now more widely used than in March and help restaurants manage delivery orders coming through multiple sales channels (DoorDash vs. Uber Eats vs. Caviar, for example). 

The option to go virtual is also more widely available. That point was underscored recently in the massive $120 million sum Ordermark raised for its NextBite platform, which pairs restaurants with kitchen space to help them develop and operate virtual restaurant brands. Along those lines, countless options for ghost kitchens have sprung up from the likes of Zuul, Virtual Kitchen, ShiftPixy, and many others. Still others, like restaurant chain Wow Bao, offer creative takes on the ghost kitchen/virtual restaurant concept that could benefit not only themselves but other local restaurants.

These and other tech solutions will undoubtedly help restaurants as they navigate new lockdowns and restrictions. The unknown factor is whether they will be enough. Big-name QSR brands have the deep pockets to turn their drive-thrus into digital innovation centers and reinvent their physical footprints, and restaurants with a certain level of demand will find ghost kitchens useful for pandemic-proofing operations. 

The indie restaurants will, however, struggle more than any other restaurant type. These are businesses that have neither the money to invest in sophisticated tech solutions nor the demand to justify a big ghost kitchen operation. Fee caps may help as far as delivery orders go: cities across the country have implemented mandatory caps on the commission fess third-party delivery services can charge these businesses, and if stricter lockdowns ensue, other municipalities may do the same. 

None of this guarantees a future for independent restaurants. One thing that hasn’t changed, not yet anyway, between previous spikes in the pandemic and this one is that off-premises remains a lifeline for restaurants, not the lifeline. Many restaurants still grapple with the fact that they were built — from the food they serve to the atmosphere they provide — for an on-premises experience. Developments to turn on-premises experiences into those suited for takeout and delivery are moving fast. Unfortunately, the pandemic is moving faster. Seen in that light, restaurant tech’s big priority right now should be helping smaller restaurants complete the transition from the dining room to the living room.

Apple App Clips is Out Today, Right in the Middle of the Contactless HeyDay

Apple’s iOS 14 drops today, which means a bunch of new features are coming to your iPhone. Among the batch of goodies to be found in the update is the release of App Clips, which could help accelerate the adoption of mobile contactless payments across the food retail and restaurant space.

We covered App Clips back when the service was announced at Apple’s WWDC event. In a nutshell, App Clips allows you to pull down just a portion of a native mobile app to give you its basic functionality, without needing to download and set up the full app.

Let’s say, for example, you are at a Starbucks but don’t have the Starbucks app installed on your iPhone. Normally, you’d have to download the full app, set up an account and then enter a payment method before you could even start your order. Through App Clips, you can grab just enough of the Starbucks app to order and pay. No need to download the full app, no need for an account and since it uses Apple Pay, no need to enter credit card information.

The big limitation right now is that a cafe, restaurant or retailer has to be participating the program and developed an App Clip. But if/when they do, App Clips can be opened by scanning QR codes, tapping NFC tags, or opening links via Apple services like Messages or Safari. For a full run down of how App Clips works, check out this post from 9 to 5 Mac.

App Clips is definitely arriving at the right time. The COVID-19 pandemic’s sustained presence here in the U.S. is pushing cafes, restaurants and grocery stores towards more contactless payment systems in an attempt to reduce human-to-human contact.

There are a ton of companies bringing contactless payment tech to market. Order for Me, PayJunction and Bbot are among the many startups building contactless payment systems for restaurants. Kroger launched a contactless payment pilot at its QFC store in Seattle last month. And there are a number of other companies doing contactless 2.0, basically through holograms, voice control and pay with your face.

The difference with App Clips, though, is Apple’s massive iPhone installed base. If this catches on, and given it’s utility (no downloading full apps just to get a cup of coffee!), that seems very possible, it could spur vast numbers of people to switch to contactless mobile payments. We just need to see if Apple has the right, well, touch.

The CDC’s New Findings Put Restaurant Tech In the Hot Seat Once Again

The big restaurant news over the weekend was a new set of findings from the CDC that suggest a higher risk for COVID-19 among those who eat in restaurant dining rooms.

The inescapably obvious point is that the findings are worrying for restaurants planning to reopen or increase the capacity of their dining rooms. That in turn brings up a less-obvious point, that the so-called contactless technologies out there that say they’ll make restaurants safer have yet to prove their value.

As has been extensively covered, the CDC’s report found that adults who test positive for COVID-19 were “approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant” than those who tested negative.

These are exactly the types of findings the restaurant industry has tried to avoid, and it has used a lot of tech to do that. When dining rooms first started to reopen, restaurant tech companies rushed to bring contactless “kits” — software that enables digital menus, ordering, and payments — to market. There are now so many of these offerings it’s often hard to distinguish one from the next.

To be super-duper clear, no company is claiming they’ll fend off COVID-19 with a QR-code enabled menu feature. It’s also worth noting that we don’t have extensive data yet on how many restaurants (including those in the CDC study) have actually implemented contactless software, which is expensive and a time-consuming process.

While we don’t know how vast contactless implementations are, we know restaurant tech companies use phrases like “safe,” “contact-free,” and “end-to-end contactless experience” all over their marketing copy and product-speak nowadays. 

But giving a piece of software the “contactless” label and actually eliminating (as opposed to minimizing) human-to-human contact in the dining room are two different things. Customers might be able to browse a menu, order a meal, and pay for it from their own device, but someone still has to run the food to the table, refill drinks, and step in if there is a problem with the order. Humans still cook and plate the food, and even spreading tables further apart won’t necessarily stop the spread of coronavirus. (One study found that infectious droplets can spread up to 16 feet away from the infected person.)

In their current form, contactless restaurant tech solutions can’t totally eradicate human intervention in the restaurant experience. Even if it could, there are still the other diners to contend with (see above), which means contactless tech can’t completely wipe out the risk that someone will get COVID-19 from going out to eat. Hence the CDC’s latest findings.

What contactless tech can do is speed up the order and pay process, help restaurants keep labor costs lower (fewer staff to pay), and even drive more people to restaurants’ native mobile apps instead of third-party delivery platforms. It can also speed up formats like curbside pickup and drive-thru, areas where restaurant operators should perhaps spend the bulk of their energy implementing contactless tech.

For now, at least, all signs point to off-premises formats like drive-thru and takeout as the areas where restaurants should be spending the bulk of their energy, period. The National Restaurant Association just released new figures that note one in six restaurants have closed either permanently or for the long term. I doubt the CDCs findings will make that number any less bleak anytime soon. For the present, restaurants should continue to focus on developing their off-premises formats, whether that’s faster curbside service via contactless tech, a ghost kitchen, or even a makeshift drive-thru lane.

As far as the dining room is concerned, it may be time for bolder moves than a QR code. By that I mean more robots to do things like run food and wash dishes, and more creative ways of arranging the dining room layout. In other words, it’s probably going to take more than iterative tech to get the restaurant biz back on its feet.

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. 

Survey: Restaurants Should Expect to Serve 4 Types of Customers in the Coming Months

Roughly one in three Americans look forward to dining in restaurants again over the next three months, but different customers have different standards for what the new era of eating out should look like. So says restaurant tech company Sevenrooms, which today released a new survey entitled “Restaurant Reckoning: Dynamic Diner.”

The survey, conducted with third-party research firm YouGov PLC, polled 1,327 U.S. restaurant customers at the end of July. As its title suggests, the pandemic has created new types of diners with different sets of priorities. Sevenrooms has divvied these up into four categories:

  • “The Pick-Up Patron:” More than one in four survey respondents, or 27 percent, said they will not feel comfortable eating in a restaurant dining room until a vaccine for COVID-19 is found. Nearly one in four, 23 percent, will stick to takeout orders for the rest of 2020. 
  • “The Safety-Savvy Consumer:” More than one in five, or 22 percent, of those surveyed want a detailed outline of a restaurant’s safety protocols, including physical barriers between tables, at-table hand sanitizer, and having their food covered when brought to the table.
  • “The Tech-Conscious Contactless Diner:” A smaller percentage, 13 percent, said they would only dine in a restaurant that uses contactless dining solutions like virtual waitlists, QR code-enabled order and payments, and contact tracing technology.
  • “The Carefree Guest:” Despite nationwide restrictions around indoor dining, a healthy number of respondents, 29 percent, said they are comfortable with the format. Another 42 percent said they are comfortable with outdoor dining.

The outdoor dining stat, though, is an important reminder of a situation most restaurants around the U.S. will soon face: winter is on its way, and once it arrives, outdoor dining will be uncomfortable in some locations, impossible in many more. It may very well be that colder weather will mean the Pick-Up Patron category gets a lot larger and the number of “carefree” guests lowers alongside the temperature.

The survey also recommends that restaurants double-down on collecting customer data that can better tell them which of the above customer types they serve most. That directive makes sense, given that Sevenrooms is a guest management platform that emphasizes the value of restaurant customer data. But it brings up a good point: with the restaurant experience going more and more digital, it’s time for restaurants to rethink their relationship to customer data.

Speaking in today’s press release, Sevenrooms CEO Joel Montaniel also suggested that agility is crucial for restaurant operators right now: “Our research has made one thing clear: operators need to be flexible,” he said. “Whether it’s in regard to outdoor dining, virtual waitlists or contactless order and pay – every guest has different needs.”

With colder temperatures and a lot of uncertainty around both the pandemic and the future of the restaurant industry, that flexibility will remain a must-have for restaurants for the foreseeable future. The good news is, since restaurants were allowed to slowly reopen their dining rooms, we’ve seen no end of creativity when it comes to serving guests while keeping them socially distanced. No doubt we’ll see even more of that as the restaurant industry transitions into a new season.

Can Ghost Kitchens Save the Vanishing Restaurant Biz?

“Perhaps we should stop using the term ghost kitchen. Ghosts are rarely seen, but ghost kitchens? Well, they are popping up everywhere.”

Spoon Editor Chris Albrecht was half-kidding when he wrote that line earlier this week, but he might have been onto something. Ghost kitchens, a concept that only really started turning heads one year ago, are practically unavoidable these days in a conversation about the restaurant industry. 

In the past few weeks alone:

  • Foodservice distribution giant US Foods launched its own ghost kitchen service that will provide restaurants “guidance and resources” to open their own kitchens.
  • Gig economy engagement platform ShiftPixy unveiled a ghost kitchen incubator that connects restaurants with physical kitchen space and the tech to run a ghost kitchen.
  • Dubai-based iKcon, raised $5 million to expand its kitchen network and the proprietary tech stack that goes with it.
  • Fat Brands announced that Johnny Rockets, a brand it intends to purchase for $25 million, will expand via ghost kitchens, many of them inside the kitchens of other Fat Brands restaurants.
  • Sweetgreen said it is testing the ghost kitchen concept out by working from a Zuul kitchen in NYC.

And those are just the highlights.

What’s noteworthy here is not that a bunch more restaurants and food industry companies have hopped aboard the ghost kitchen train. It’s that there are a fast-growing number of options when it comes to where and how a restaurant can open a ghost kitchen. With a company like iKcon, for example, a restaurant’s ghost kitchen essentially becomes a franchisee. Renting space from Zuul or another third-party kitchen provider is another way. Operating one brand out of the kitchen of a sister brand is perhaps the most intriguing concept on this list, and one we’ll see a lot more of in the future.

Add to all that choices around location, technology, and figuring out if they even have enough demand to warrant a ghost kitchen, and restaurants have a lot to consider in today’s off-premises-centric world.

What’s more, those restaurants are being forced to consider their choices when it comes to ghost kitchens. The pandemic has decimated the dine-in business for both large restaurant chains and smaller independent businesses. Recovery from the fallout will be slow, and the idea of most customers returning to brick-and-mortar restaurants seems less possible each week. Given those factors, more restaurants will have to consider either supplementing their existing operations with ghost kitchens or pivoting their entire model to a virtual, delivery-only one.

I suspect this is just the beginning when it comes to types of ghost kitchens that rise out of the ashes of the on-premises restaurant experience. We’ve already seen restaurants employ countless amounts of creativity when it comes to running a restaurant during a pandemic and trying to create a concrete restaurant experience out of virtual tools. With the pandemic still very much a part of our lives, we will now see that creativity head for the ghost kitchen.

SipScience Raises Money to Reinvent the Bar

SipScience, a data analytics company specifically for the hospitality industry, is preparing to launch itself into the contactless payments realm by launching a new platform, Sip. 

According to a press release sent to The Spoon this week, there are two sides to Sip. The consumer-facing one comes in the form of an app that connects to a user’s digital wallet. The app lets said user find nearby bars and open a tab from their own mobile device, through which they can order and pay for drinks. When it launches, Sip will be available at participating bars and venues across the U.S. Bonus: those who sign up for a subscription will get half off their first 50 drinks ordered through the app.

For venues, such as bars and restaurants, the app is a new way to drive more traffic, and the accompanying SipSync analytics engine gives these places more data on in-venue customers. Brands, too, are provided with real-time purchasing data, which is not something a payments app normally provides.

The company said this week it had raised $1.3 million in SAFE notes. There is no official launch date yet for the app, which makes sense, given the state of in-person hospitality venues. Bars in many states remain closed, as to venues built to hold hundreds of people. 

Granted, no sane person would spend much time in a bar right now. But SipScience’s news suggests that folks start flocking back to their local watering holes, they’ll find a far more tech-driven experience waiting.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Starbucks launched a digital traceability tool this week that lets customers learn more about their coffee, including where it came from and traveled, and the farmers and roasters involved in production.

Domino’s is hiring 20,000 more employees. That’s on top of the 10,000 the pizza chain said it was hiring right after the pandemic hit, and just goes to show you that the company’s delivery-centric business is alive and thriving. 

Grubhub has launched an online petition to commission fee caps and is reportedly going to run an ad campaign that calls the fee caps “food delivery taxes.” Grubhub says fee caps result in higher costs for consumers and ultimately hurt restaurants. 

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

Restaurants, Retailers Launch a ‘Pay-by-Face’ Network Powered by PopID

At the tail-end of last week, a number of Pasadena, CA-based restaurants and retailers announced they had established the first pay-by-face network in the U.S. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, a growing list of businesses in the Southern California city have deployed tech from PopID to let customers make purchases via facial recognition without even having to touch their own mobile phones.

To use PopID’s facial recognition system, customers create a PopID account, which the company says users can now link their credit or debit card to in addition to their face. Then, at participating restaurants, those customers will be able to log into their account not only on their own mobile devices but also at restaurant-operated kiosks at the counter, drive-thru, and other areas of the business. Once the system scans the customer’s face, it automatically pulls up their account where past orders, loyalty points, and payment information are already stored.

What’s especially noteworthy about this news is that the technology enables some restaurant settings to be more contactless than many offerings out there that claim the same. Practically unheard of six months ago, so-called contactless technologies are now one of the most popular topics in the restaurant biz. Thing is, many of these systems, while they minimize or eliminate human-to-human contact, still require a customer to touch a kiosk, credit card machine, or other device handled by other customers. 

Some of PopID’s new deployments at these Pasadena restaurants will still require customers to touch a public-facing screen. Think walk-up or drive-thru kiosks. Others, however, will eliminate the need for customers to touch any device at all. Today’s press release mentions tableside order and payments that can happen with a server scanning a customer’s face with a handheld device. Creepy? Probably, but it still gets closest to providing actual “hands-free” order and payment methods for restaurant customers. 

PopID said the Pasadena launch of this pay-by-face network is the first of “a city-by-city rollout of the contactless payment service.” CEO John Miller said in each new city, the company initially focuses on college campuses and office buildings — which, given the state of the world, may or may not work as a long-term strategy. “As these communities grow comfortable using PopID to check-in, we enlist area restaurants and retailers to offer PopPay for transactions,” he said.

The popularity of Pasadena’s new pay-by-face network as well as subsequent deployments in other cities will tell us how much biometric data users are willing to swap in exchange for the promise of safety. If it turns out to be a lot, the nature of transactions could change must faster than anyone anticipated before the pandemic hit.

Survey: Drive-Thru Orders and Mobile App Usage at Restaurants Are Up

Consumers are using a mobile app more often than just a few months ago to order restaurant food, according to new survey data from Bluedot and research firm SeeLevel HX.

The survey, based on responses from 1,501 U.S. adults between June 23 and July 2, 2020, found that 50 percent of consumers are using restaurant mobile apps “more often or much more often” than they were before the pandemic, up from 42 percent in April. Meanwhile, 64 percent of respondents said they have downloaded at least one or more new apps to purchase restaurant food, up from 51 percent in April.

The spike makes sense, given the rise in off-premises restaurant formats, the push for so-called “contactless” ordering and payments platforms, and widespread consumer concerns around safety and social distancing. 

The report also examines the popularity of off-premises formats among consumers. The drive-thru is far and away the most popular. Seventy-four percent of respondents said they have visited the drive-thru “the same amount or more often than usual” compared to 43 percent in April. Respondents also named drive-thru the “safest” of the to-go formats, which also include curbside pickup and in-store pickup. 

Responses around both mobile app usage and drive-thru visits are in line with developments by restaurants over the last few months. Chains like Chipotle and Shake Shack are reformatting many of their stores to include drive-thru lanes. In many cases, those lanes are dedicated to customers ordering via the restaurants’ mobile apps. 

In many cases, these drive-thrus are one of the main reasons QSRs have fared much better in terms of sales so far during the pandemic.

All that said, the Bluedot and SeeLevel HX report also suggests that drive-thru lines are still frustratingly slow. Of the consumers surveyed, 81 percent said waiting more than 10 minutes in the drive-thru is too long. If you’ve been to a drive-thru recently, you don’t need data to tell you wait times are stretching far beyond that number oftentimes. 

Cutting down wait time in the drive-thru is an old story that pre-dates the pandemic. Making that particular restaurant format more efficient will continue to be a priority for QSRs going forward.