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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

contactless payments

Amazon Expands Palm Payment to Go Store in New York City

Amazon announced today that its pay-with-your-palm technology, Amazon One, is now available at the Amazon Go store at 11 W 42nd St in New York City. This marks the first time the contactless payment tech has been available outside of the Seattle area.

Amazon One lets participants use their palm as a biometric key to pay for items and, in the case of Amazon Go, gain entrance into the store. To sign up, shoppers insert their credit card in an Amazon One device and hover their palm over the scanner. After that, when shopping at One-enabled stores, shoppers just hover their palm over the device at checkout to pay. Palm scans can also be associated with existing Amazon and Amazon Prime accounts.

Amazon introduced its palm payment technology back in September of last year, rolling it out to a number of Amazon-branded stores like Amazon Go and Amazon 4-Star. With its implementation at the the New York Go store, Amazon One is now available in 14 Amazon-related locations including Whole Foods Markets.

Today’s expansion to New York marks the first time Amazon’s palm payment system has left the confines of Washington state. Amazon has not been shy about its ambitions around selling the technology into third-party retailers. Getting the technology into New York will help expose it not only to Amazon shoppers, but potential retail customers as well.

Amazon One is arriving at the right time. The pandemic has retailers looking to create more contactless shopping experiences that reduce touchpoints in the store. Hovering a palm over a scanner certainly does that, as there’s no terminal for a customer to touch, or a staffer to wipe down.

The bigger question around Amazon One, however, is how willing people will be to give up their very personal biometic data to Amazon. You may not mind the e-commerce giant knowing exactly how bad your addiction to Spindrift seltzer water is, or even letting the company open up your garage so a delivery driver can place groceries in there when you aren’t home. But customers may not be willing to, err, hand over their individual palm print for Amazon to have on file.

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.    

Amazon Expanding it Palm Pay System to More Amazon Stores in the Seattle Area

Amazon said today via an email to The Spoon that it is bringing its Amazon One pay-with-your-palm biometric identification and payment system to an additional three physical retail locations in the Seattle area.

Launched last September, Amazon One scans a user’s palm for things like gaining entrance to a store or facilitating payment at checkout. Users just need to hold their hand over the Amazon One device and associate their palm print with a credit card and mobile phone number (or an Amazon account, of course).

With this expansion, 12 Amazon retail locations will be using Amazon One including a number of Amazon Gos, Go Grocery, Amazon 4-Star, Amazon Books and Amazon Pop-Ups.

Admittedly, the addition of Amazon One payment to just three of Amazon’s own stores is not earth-shattering news. But it adds to what has already been an incredibly busy year in the cashierless/contactless checkout space. Startups like Nomitri and IMAGR have come out of stealth. Standard Cognition raised $150 million. And AiFi partnered with Wundermart to build a thousand cashierless checkout stores.

Amazon, however, remains the 800-pound gorilla in the cashierless checkout space. It kicked off the movement in earnest with its first Go convenience stores a little more than three years ago. And Amazon is licensing its cashierless checkout tech to other retailers. Airport store chain, Hudson, recently opened its first cashierless store powered by Amazon, with plans to open more. Amazon’s marketing flat-out says the company has big plans for expanding the use of its palm payment to other venues like stadiums, restaurants and more. So it could find its way into more non-Amazon stores in the near future.

We’re also starting to see biometrics implemented in other cashierless checkout systems. Zippin’s latest store in Japan adds a layer of biometric technology from Fujitsu that allows users to scan their palm to gain entrance and facilitate payment.

Of course, it remains to be seen just how willing consumers are handing over their biometric data to Amazon. Knowing what I purchase on a regular basis is one thing. Knowing the fine details of my exact palm print? That’s quite another.

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.

Technomic: Over Half of Restaurant Operators Will Spend More on Tech in the Future

Of all the things in the restaurant industry accelerated by the pandemic, technology adoption has been one of the biggest. That’s unlikely to change in the near future, a point underscored by new survey data from Technomic that notes 68 percent of restaurant operators “believe their technology spend will either somewhat or significantly increase” over the next few years.

The research firm’s recently released report, “The State of Foodservice Technology 2020,” surveyed restaurant operators in order to uncover both the factors accelerating tech adoption for restaurants and those hindering it.

Systems that enable contactless payments are one area of restaurant tech we’ll see a whole lot more of in the future. More than half, or 51 percent, of operators surveyed for the report said they already have contactless payments in place, and another 31 percent plan on implementing it. 

What’s incredible is that less than one year ago, the word “contactless” barely existed. Now it’s a regular part of the restaurant vernacular. Front-of-house-focused restaurant tech companies rolled out “contactless” dining room kits in droves this year, all of which included the ability for a customer to pay via their own mobile device. “Contactless delivery” is now the norm, and major QSRs are redesigning their store formats to provide a more contactless experience to customers.

None of this is terribly surprising, seeing as we’re currently fighting a deadly virus that’s spread through human-to-human interaction. Investments in contactless technologies will be the norm going forward, even after the pandemic subsides.

That said, the model isn’t without its challenges, the biggest one being that it takes more than a mobile app or QR code to make a process truly “contactless.” Moving into 2021, we’ll see more restaurant tech companies attempting to solve this bigger-picture issue.   

 

Requiem for the Dining Room

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At one point most figured it would take about five to 10 years for off-premises to become the industry-wide norm in the restaurant biz and for QSRs to change their store formats accordingly. Instead, those changes around restaurant store formats have unfolded in a matter of months and are soon to be everyday realities.

Ever since Burger King unveiled a new store design with space-saver kitchens suspended over drive-thru lanes and conveyor belts handing food to customers, we’ve seen a non-stop stream of announcements from fast-casual and QSR restaurant with similar plans. Two more chains joined the list this week — El Pollo Loco and La Madeleine. But rather than simply list the new features slated for those brands’ revamped store formats, it’s now worth our while to comb through all the major announcements in this realm and find the common denominators driving these new store formats. There may be a lot of unknowns in the restaurant industry right now (aka everything), but the following developments give us a pretty good hint at some certainties for the future.

With the biz going virtual at a blinding clip, it’s only natural that future store designs will have a smaller physical footprint. From the aforementioned Burger King to El Pollo Loco, more brands are significantly reducing the size of their dining rooms or getting rid of them altogether. The fast rise of ghost kitchens, which cater to takeout and delivery orders only, is partly responsible for this trend. The pandemic and ongoing lockdowns across the country are an even bigger driver, and one that’s accelerated the timeline of these smaller store formats.

But of all the concepts fast becoming the norm for QSRs, it’s the multiple-drive-thru-lane scenario — that is, stores are being designed with double and triple lanes (or more) to accommodate the uptick in customers. KFC, McDonald’s, Chipotle, El Pollo Loco, and Shake Shack are some of the top names on the list of restaurant chains literally expanding their drive-thrus. La Madeline is actually adding drive-thru for the first time, and Dunkin’ was doing the whole multi-lane concept long before the pandemic. There’s a good reason for the widespread emphasis on this particular format: with the pandemic keeping us out of dining rooms and in our cars, the length of time one spends waiting in the drive-thru is getting longer.

Anecdotally speaking, I’ve visited three drive-thru lanes in the last week where the wait time was longer than 20 minutes. (Joke’s on me for staying in line that long.) More lanes, some of them dedicated to mobile order customers, will go some way to alleviate this problem. More commonly used developments, like extra parking spaces for curbside pickup and geofencing technologies, could also reduce some of the drive-thru congestion.

Meanwhile, predictive selling technologies aren’t widespread at the moment, but they will be. McDonald’s was first to put this concept — which involves using AI, machine learning, and other tech to analyze customer preferences and upsell relevant items — on the industry’s radar when it acquired Dynamic Yield. Over the last few months, Restaurant Brands International, which owns BK, Tim Horton’s, and Popeye’s, announced plans to use something similar in its drive-thrus, and KFC has hinted at using AI as well.

While predictive selling tech doesn’t directly alter store formats, it expedites channels like pickup and the drive-thru, which are integral parts of the QSR of the (near) future. It’s also a good example of how technology will influence the physical restaurant going forward. Tech that makes off-premises channels faster and more efficient will help drive more sales through those channels. That in turn will make those off-premises channels more valuable than their dining room counterparts, both now, during lockdowns, and long into the next decade. That makes these new developments in store formats less of a trend than a really big step into the restaurant industry’s next version of normalcy.

Upcoming Event: The Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive

Is now the right time to adopt a ghost kitchen strategy? The epic fallout of the restaurant industry suggest yes, but before you take the plunge, there are many things to consider. How much will it cost? What kind of set up do you need? How do you scale a virtual restaurant business?

Join The Spoon on Dec. 9 to discuss these things and more at our latest virtual event, The Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive. Throughout the day, we’ll be joined by Reef, Kitchen United, Ordermark, Fat Brands, Wow Bao, and many other companies enabling big changes in the ghost kitchen space.

General admission is free. Register for a Gold Ticket and get special networking opportunities, a month of free access to Spoon Plus content, and exclusive live tours of some real-life ghost kitchen operations. 

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

California imposed new stay-at-home orders for certain regions in the state late this week. Looks like it’s back to takeout- and delivery-only meals for Golden State restaurants for the foreseeable future.

Uber completed its $2.65 billion acquisition of Postmates this week, and the two companies have started to integrate their U.S. operations.

Restaurant tech platform Allset this week launched a new feature, Dietary Preferences, to its takeout and contactless dining app. Customers can add their dietary needs and preferences as well as any food allergies to their search to further refine results on the app.

Toast Launches a Tech Suite for Contactless Restaurant Payments

Restaurant management platform Toast today launched what the company is calling its “contactless payments suite” that includes two new social distancing-friendly ways for customers to pay for their meals: Toast Go 2 and Toast Order & Pay. The products aim to minimize staff-to-customer interactions for both off-premises orders and those that take place in the dining room, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Toast Go 2 is the latest iteration of the company’s existing handheld POS device. This time around it includes the option for contactless payment forms from Apple, Google, and Samsung. Because its handheld, it can be used in more locations than the dining room, curbside pickup and drive-thrus being two obvious places. Toast said in today’s release that this latest version of Toast Go has processing speeds that are “three times faster” than previous generations.

Meanwhile, Toast Order & Pay is the company’s take on the contactless payments technology most restaurant tech companies now offer. With it, customers can browse menus, select food, and pay for it from their own mobile device. Toast’s version follows similar offerings from Presto, Paytronix, Zuppler, and many others.

However, all of these companies are trying to push contactless tech for the dining room when there aren’t many restaurant dining rooms to speak of at the moment. New pandemic-related restrictions are sweeping across the U.S. and either limiting or shutting down indoor dining once more. While demand for more contactless tech indoors will likely exist over the long term, there may be less use for it over the next several months.

Toast, then, is wise to diversify its contactless platform with the addition of Toast Go 2. Making off-premises orders more efficient (i.e., faster) is a huge priority for restaurants large and small nowadays — as lengthening drive-thru wait times and a surge in to go orders can attest. That factor will stick around long after the pandemic leaves us, making handheld POS tech a valuable play for the longer term. 

Square Is the Latest to Launch QR-Based Software for Restaurant Dining Rooms

Payments company Square today launched a new feature for Square Online customers that will enable self-service ordering and payments features for guests inside the dining room.

Square’s feature is QR-based, meaning customers simply scan a QR code (usually on the tabletop or restaurant signage) with their own mobile phone to access a restaurant’s menu. Doing so takes them to the restaurant’s online order page where they can browse the menu and pay for their meal. The order goes directly to the kitchen.

In today’s press release, the company said the new feature will also allow restaurants to collect more sales data and in doing so own more of the customer relationship — a must in this age of the digital restaurant experience.

Square’s new feature is just the latest in a long line of “contactless” products that have emerged since dining rooms slowly started to reopen. It joins similar offerings from the likes of restaurant tech companies Presto, Bbot, Paytronix, and others. And at this point, even third-party delivery aggregators are trying to grab a piece of this very competitive space. Uber Eats recently unveiled its own contactless order and pay features for take-out and dine-in orders.

The promise of all these systems is that they minimize human-to-human contact in the restaurant dining room, so that the only real interfacing between customer and staff is when someone runs the food to the table, refills a drink, or addresses a problem. Those interactions, of course, mean the restaurant experience is not truly “contactless,” and Square’s been wise to brand its new feature “self-serve ordering” instead. The company says the feature can also improve order accuracy and speed up the entire customer meal journey inside the dining room. The latter is a definite plus, given recent CDC findings that those who eat inside restaurants may be at greater risk of catching COVID-19.

At the moment, Square’s new feature is available at no extra cost to Square Online merchants in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia.   

Amazon Launches Palm-based Contactless Payment Method

You have to, errrr, hand it to Amazon. The e-commerce giant today announced Amazon One, a new contactless payment method that relies on scanning your palm as you enter its store.

Amazon One is now an entry option at two of Amazon’s Go stores in Seattle (the 7th & Blanchard and South Lake Union stores, if you’re in the Emerald City). To use the new system, you insert your credit card into the terminal and hover your palm over the device. The terminal scans your palm print and from that point on, you just need to hold your hand over the One terminal upon entering the store. After that, the Go technology kicks in and automatically keeps track of and charges you for what you take from the store.

You do not need an Amazon account to use Amazon One, just a mobile phone and a credit card. But you can tie your Amazon account to One, should you choose.

In addition to its own physical stores, which include Go convenience stores, Go Grocery stores, Fresh grocery stores, Prime stores and more, Amazon envisions One being used by other retailers. From the blog post announcing the technology:

In most retail environments, Amazon One could become an alternate payment or loyalty card option with a device at the checkout counter next to a traditional point of sale system. Or, for entering a location like a stadium or badging into work, Amazon One could be part of an existing entry point to make accessing the location quicker and easier.

We’ve heard rumblings about some form of pay-with-your palm coming from Amazon for awhile now, so today’s announcement isn’t a surprise. It’s also not a surprise given Amazon’s devotion to speed and efficiency. Scanning your phone to enter a Go store may be easy, but waving your hand over a device is much easier and faster. This, in turn, could entice you to choose an Amazon store over the competition more often.

Amazon One is also coming out during a global pandemic and at a time when retailers are looking for more contactless payment methods. Amazon also licenses out its cashierless Go technology, and combining the two could be an attractive contactless option for retailers

Of course, given Amazon’s increasing dominance in not only retail but many other facets of our everyday lives, people may be reluctant to hand over their biometric data like a palm print. In its One FAQ, Amazon said it chose palm prints because they are more private, and that you can delete your data from the service after signing up.

I don’t need to be a palm reader to see that One will probably play an increasingly important part of Amazon’s physical retail experience, and that we could see it in a lot of other stores in the coming years.

Nutrimeals Launched an App for Contactless Ordering at its Vending Machine

Nutrimeals launched its first vending machine roughly eight months ago in Calgary, Canada. Eight months ago is also around the same time the coronavirus began hitting North America.

That the two happened at the same time wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nutrimeals sells fresh, healthy, pre-cooked meals that just need to be reheated in a microwave. As I wrote earlier this year in The Great Vending Reinvention, the pandemic could provide a boost to automated vending machines like those of Nurtimeals (and Chowbotics and Yo-Kai Express) because they offer convenient full meals on-the-go in a more contactless environment, and there are no human hands serving up your food.

But at the time I also noted that vending machines need to take their current contactless options even further. Many vending machines right now still require you to touch a screen to place your order. Having lots of people paw at the same touchscreen of an unattended vending machine all day seems to negate all the other contactless benefits automated vending machines offer.

Which is why Nurtimeals launched its own app two weeks ago (hat tip to Vending Times). The Nutrimeals app lets customers check inventory of machines, reserve meals and pay for them all through their mobile phones so they don’t have to touch a screen. The meals are even dispensed in such a way that people don’t have to even have to touch the machine to get their food.

Originally the company, like so many other vending services, targeted airports, office buildings and other high-traffic areas as prime locations for its machines. But COVID pretty much shut down air traffic and offices, so now Nutrimeals is targeting residential buildings, and even hotels that don’t have their own food facilities.

Nutrimeals is bootstrapped and its main business remains a D2C meal prep subscription service. It has two vending machines up and running in Calgary and is looking to expand the food options in those machines to include snacks and salads.

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.