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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Ghost Kitchens! Fee Caps! Igloos! Tracking the Restaurant Biz’s Changes Over the Last 12 Months

For the majority of restaurants around the U.S., last week marked the one-year anniversary since stay-at-home mandates initially forced dining rooms to close down. What’s followed has been 12 months of great uncertainty, loss, and struggle. But it’s also been a time of astounding resilience and creativity, with restaurants and restaurant tech companies alike have pivoted and shape-shifted to survive the times. 

We’ve been checking in with individuals from both spheres to see where these businesses are now and what’s most useful in terms of tools and tactics as dining rooms slowly reopen and the world goes back to some version of “normal.” 

But to better appreciate how far we’ve come and how much work has gone into this industry’s survival over the last year, I’d like to pause and take a brief look back in time at some of the major stories from these last 12 months.  

March 2020

  • States across the U.S. mandate dining room shutdowns. Restaurants large and small scramble to make the overnight shift to delivery and takeout formats.
  • Restaurant tech companies start offering software and services free of charge to restaurants. Third-party delivery services like Uber Eats and Postmates waive some fees — though not without some controversies.
  • Restaurants like Canter’s Deli, Wahoo’s Fish Tacos, and Torchy’s Tacos discuss strategies for going off-premises. Some include paring down menus, prioritizing takeout meals, and going DIY when it comes to the drive-thru.

April 2020

May 2020

June 2020

  • Some restaurant chains, including Panda Express, start to launch their own in-house delivery services.
  • Restaurants get really creative with their ideas on how to safely reopen dining rooms.
  • This Latin American startup teaches us how to run a restaurant from a mobile phone. (Hint: everyone will do this in the future.)

July

August

September

October

  • The in-house delivery versus third-party delivery debate further heats up, with many encouraging restaurants to take back control of their digital orders.
  • Crave Collective and others put a fine-dining spin on the ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant concepts.

November

  • California passes Proposition 22, which lets third-party delivery services classify their couriers and drivers as independent contractors and keeps these companies from having to pay workers comp, health insurance, and other benefits.
  • Investment in back-of-house technology grows as both restaurants and restaurant tech investors realize the foreseeable future of the industry is in the kitchen, not the dining room.

January 2021

Feburary

March

Obviously this brief timeline isn’t comprehensive, since there’s no way to really capture the true scope of the last 12 months in a single newsletter. It is meant to be a snapshot only of the change and turns the industry took over the last year.

Which is where you, readers, come in. Whether you’re part of an eating establishment, tech company, or an avid foodie, we would love to hear your restaurant experiences over the last year. Drop us a line at tips@thespoon.tech.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Nation’s Restaurant News has a new gallery showcasing stories “from the front lines” of the restaurant industry — that is, the restaurants themselves. NRN has compiled first-hand accounts of owners, managers, brand executives and others about their experiences from the last year.

Restaurant Dive has an ongoing analysis of the state of restaurants one year later across a number of U.S. cities. Available so far are in-depth looks at Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle. More to come.

Grubstreet looks at lessons the New York City restaurant scene has learned over the last 12 months, and what comes next.

BlueDot Releases Two Features to Make Takeout Orders More Efficient

Location tech company BlueDot today announced two new features the company says will improve speed of service as well as personalization for restaurant customers, according to an email sent to The Spoon. Dubbed Hello Screens and Wave, the two features are geared towards pick up and curbside service — formats that have become a mainstay of doing business over the last year.

San Francisco-based Bluedot’s location and geofencing technology already powers a number of digital initiatives from QSRs, including McDonald’s, Dunkin’, and KFC. The company raised $9.1 million in July 2020. Around that time, it also released its Tempo feature, which is essentially a predictive arrival technology that helps restaurants better understand when to start fulfilling an order, so that food doesn’t sit waiting for a customer to arrive.

The new features build on this idea of making the pickup process more efficient. Wave is a simple arrival notification feature that lets customers alert the restaurant when they have arrived to pick up their order. Upon walking inside or pulling into a curbside parking space, the customer simply hits the “I’m here” button, which sends a notification straight to the kitchen, so a staffer can bring the order out. Wave can be added to any channel of the restaurant’s through which customers order, including mobile apps, SMS, and email.

Simultaneous to that process, Hello Screens alerts the restaurant when a customer is en route to the restaurant, giving an estimated time of arrival. The in-browser feature gives both visual and audio cues and can run off a tablet, computer, phone, or other device. 

Speeding up all three of those formats has become more important over the last year, since they’ve been the only options through which restaurants can serve customers. Dining rooms are beginning to increase their capacity volumes now, but the general consensus is that customers will continue to want to-go food as well, preferably made as quickly and efficiently as possible. BlueDot itself released a survey recently that found long wait times are a “dealbreaker” for many consumers nowadays.

Automating not just the actual pickup process but also elements of order fulfillment operations could feasibly shave seconds off each order coming into the kitchen. While that sounds small at the individual level, when added up, that time saved and make the restaurant operation move a whole lot faster.

Olo Unveils New Restaurant Tech Features for Curbside, Dining Room

Curbside pickup is here to stay, and so too is the dining room, judging from restaurant tech startup Olo’s latest announcement. The company announced two new features this week aimed at smoother, more efficient service for off-premises orders. The new features include arrival notifications for curbside orders and order-ahead capabilities for dine-in guests, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Olo’s main businesses is to make the management of off-premises orders simpler and easier for restaurants. Its software funnels the orders coming from different sales channels (DoorDash versus social media versus an in-house kiosk) into a single ticket stream and directly into a restaurant’s main POS system. That means less juggling of tablets for the staff and a lower risk for mistakes, since humans aren’t manually keying in orders from a delivery service’s tablet to the POS. 

Eight months ago, that kind of streamlined management was a nice-to-have. Thanks to the pandemic, which has shuttered dining rooms across the country and forced the restaurant biz to lean on delivery and takeout, a platform like Olo’s is a must-have. But given the evolving needs of restaurants, no restaurant tech company should rest on its laurels right now. To stay valuable and relevant to restaurants, they too, need to evolve.

Olo appears to be doing just that with its new bundle of features. The need for speed when it comes to curbside pickup is well documented. Olo’s new feature is available as of now for restaurants using the company’s Expo tablet. When a customer arrives and hits an “I’m here” button, the system automatically notifies the restaurant. It’s not as automatic as, say, geofence-enabled curbside pickup, but it saves customers from having to dial an actual phone number and wait for a human to pick up.

The other big feature Olo released this week, it’s Dine-In Support, may get less use in the near term, though it’s a wise long-term strategy. The function allows customers to order and pay for meals they intend to eat in the dining room.

At one point, this particular technology felt superfluous, and at the moment, cities across the U.S. have closed down indoor dining so there isn’t a great need for it. But someday, we’ll be able to eat in an actual restaurant again, and by then, consumer preferences around speed, efficiency, and social distance will have been firmly embedded into their routines, even when it comes to restaurants. While there’s something a little depressing about a restaurant experience based solely on those factors, it’s inescapably the future for many. Seen in that light, Olo is an early mover in what will be a long-term behavior change. (Fellow restaurant tech company Allset is also a known leader in this area.)

The above features are both available right now, at no extra cost to existing Olo customers. 

Food Tech News: Grubmarket Acquires Boston Organics, Surplus Food App Karma Pivots to Delivery

Here are some things that have been making us feel good lately: pancakes on weekdays, video calls with family, and foodtech news.

We can’t help you with the first two, but we’ve got the latest lineup of foodtech-y stories ready to go. This week we rounded up stories about grocery e-commerce acquisitions, food waste service pivots, and curbside grocery pickup.

Grubmarket acquires Boston Organics
Grocery delivery service Grubmarket announced its acquisition of Boston Organics, an online farm-to-table delivery service, earlier this week. Boston Organics is the first east coast foothold for Grubmarket, which is based in San Francisco. According to a press release this acquisition is part of Grubmarket’s plans to expand nationwide. Over the past year alone, Grubmarket has acquired other artisanal grocery delivery services Doorganics and Eating with the Seasons.

Weis Market and Hannaford restart curbside grocery pickup
East coast grocery chains Weis Markets and Hannaford have restarted their curbside pickup services (via GroceryDive). Both retailers hit pause on curbside pickup in March as COVID-19 started spreading rapidly, but are resuming the service to cater to customers who want to avoid crowds in grocery stores. To minimize contact, cstomers are asked to remain in their vehicles during the pickup and store employees will not accept cash or paper coupons. Both grocers have stated that some items might not be available due to high demand.

Photo: Karma.

Surplus food resale platform Karma pivots to delivery + food boxes
Before COVID-19, Sweden-based startup Karma’s platform partnered with restaurants to sell their surplus food for pickup at a discount. Now, with many foodservice establishments struggling or closing down altogether, Verdict reports that Karma has pivoted to delivery. The service provides its own drivers to deliver cooked restaurant meals, priced at half off, to customers who place an order on the app. Deliveries are available on weekdays up until 7pm, within a 3km radius of the restaurant. Karma is also launching Karma Box, a fruit and vegetable box sourced from their foodservice partners.