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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

devices

Presto Raises $30M Growth Round For Its Front of House Restaurant Tech

Presto, whose tech suite helps restaurants organize and manage their front of house, announced today it has raised $30 million in growth funding. The round was led by Recruit Holdings and Romulus Capital, with participation from I2BF Global Ventures, EG Capital, and Brainchild Holdings.

In an interview with The Spoon, Presto founder and CEO Rajat Suri said the new funds will go towards further developing the company’s products, which it expanded earlier this year to include Presto Wearable and Presto A.I., in addition to the company’s tabletop terminal, PrestoPrime.

Suri, who is also the cofounder of Lyft, launched Presto in 2008 after a year spent working in restaurants and prototyping the PrestoPrime based on his observations. The device, which lives on restaurant tabletops, lets guests order, pay, leave feedback and play games while waiting for their food.

If the restaurant is also using Presto’s wearable technology, the terminal can notify a server directly when a guest has a specific need, whether it’s about a soda refill or an undercooked steak.

Those wearables come in the form of an app that’s compatible with any Android device. As Suri points out, wearables like smartwatches make the most sense, since restaurant managers don’t love servers having their phones out and since those devices would be cumbersome anyway during a fast-paced dinner rush. The plus side of having wearable tech sending instant notifications is that it can help a restaurant catch issues as they arise. If that undercooked steak arrives and the guest files a negative comment, it will be able to address the issue in real time, before the customer leaves. If a guest asks for a side of sour cream, the request reaches the server in the form of a digital notification, which is a lot harder to forget and could even help create more accountability, since everything has a digital footprint.

There’s an obvious downside to these real-time updates, though. Guest ratings via technology can affect a server’s bottom line if the manager starts scheduling that person for the slowest shifts due to low ratings. Maybe in some cases that’s justified, but anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant knows, unhappy customers aren’t necessarily the fault of the server waiting on them.

Suri, of course, has his own restaurant experience, which he’s clearly putting to good use when it comes to how Presto positions these wearables in its array of products. Rather than notify the server (or the GM) about every single activity and issue, Presto Wearable is about important notifications only. “Wearables are meant to cover the biggest gaps, not every gap,” he notes.

And even if an operator wanted their employees to get every last piece of data in the restaurant, that would be impossible for humans to do in any meaningful way. “There’s so much important information coming from various different sources that staff workers can’t make sense of it,” explains Suri of the restaurant operation nowadays. “[Workers] can’t improve on their predictions in a systematic way.” AI, on the other hand, can, and Presto A.I. does the heavy lifting where most of the data is concerned. If it’s Tuesday afternoon, the system can pull weather data or data about external events and make predictions for the Friday night shift. Maybe that college football game around the corner will increase traffic that night. Perhaps bad weather will lessen the number of guests. Presto’s system processes all this data and makes such predictions to help operators better predict and accordingly.

Restaurants who use Presto can pick and choose which of its technologies to use, though as Suri points out, smart restaurants should at this point be making some kind of investment in technology to improve front-of-house operations. “The industry is ripe for change,” he says. “Labor has never had so many options as they do now and the industry has to change because of that to stay relevant. A lot of our partners realize that, and that’s why they’re adopting a lot more solutions.”

Presto currently partners with, according to the company, “five of the top 10 restaurant chains.” Suri wouldn’t go into specific companies (Applebees and Red Lobster are clients), only adding that the company “doubled last year we expect to double again this year in terms of revenues in terms of team size.”

Which Smart Appliances Will Survive the Kitchen Countertopacolypse?

You could see the growth of our Smart Kitchen Summit this year just by looking at the sponsor section. Back in 2015, the sponsor area was a few tabletops scattered around the back of the room. Four years later, we had an entire promenade featuring three demo kitchens with full appliances and a host of smaller startups.

Among those showing off their wares were: June, Brava, Markov and the Rotimatic. These are all sizeable countertop cooking devices that are too big and bulky to store in a pantry or shelf, so they have to be semi-permanent fixtures on your kitchen counter. Which got me thinking, how many appliances can one kitchen fit?

Because it’s not just those companies vying for your counter space. There’s also: Tovala, Suvie, Amazon’s Microwave, Bartesian, Picobrew U, and Breville’s new Pizzaiolo, not to mention whatever coffee maker you have, a stand mixer, and maybe a food processor or blender.

Phew!

That doesn’t even include the amount of counter space you need just to prepare food. A quick search shows that the average kitchen only has 26 to 30 square feet of workable countertop space. My June alone takes up 2.6 square feet, almost a tenth of the square footage for an average American countertop.

At least the June does multiple things (oven, toaster, heaven-sent re-heater of pizza). As much as I’d love a Rotimatic, I can’t quite justify the counter space (or the $1,000) for something that only makes flatbread. Same goes for the Pizzaiolo.

The Brava and the Markov are interesting because of the new technologies they bring to traditional devices (light and AI, respectively), so they at least have the potential to change how we cook and replace existing devices.

But will these new appliances attract sizeable enough audiences? Will they achieve such a level of permanence in our cooking life that we will change the way kitchens are architected?

I rarely use my traditional oven, but I can’t imagine a kitchen without one. Perhaps that’s just my age showing, but it seems like we’ll always have the big, bulky, cooktop + oven combo (if not two ovens) and a fridge, and work out from there. Then again, maybe countertop induction burners can replace a traditional cooktop as well, allowing you to cook anywhere in the kitchen (and freeing up counter space!).

But who knows, the kitchen as we know it may be dying. Perhaps between more on-demand delivery of groceries and restaurant food, and the potential rise of prepared meal kits in supermarkets, we just won’t need the traditional appliances that we grew up with. Maybe the space once reserved for our oven(s) can now be freed up for something else, something more unitasking like a Rotimatic or a dedicated pizza device.

The point of all this is, is that there are a lot of devices coming to market, and none of them are cheap. In the case of the kitchen, it is a zero sum game. The addition of one device means less room for another, so when the kitchen counteropocalypse comes, there will be winners and losers.