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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

digital menus

Raydiant Teams Up With Toast to Make Menu Management Easier for Restaurants

Digital signage platform Raydiant announced today it has joined Toast’s Partner network and will now integrate with the latter’s digital menu app. The main goal of the partnership is to provide restaurants with an easier, faster way to keep menus updated across every single channel through which orders arrive.

Nowadays, restaurants juggle an increasing number of order channels compared to even one year ago — delivery (third-party and in-house), curbside, pickup, and drive-thru, to name a few. The task of updating the menu across all these different digital properties is an obvious candidate for automation, considering the time it would take to manually change each individual menu (not to mention, the risk of human error).

Raydiant’s SaaS tool syncs a restaurant’s menu with Toast’s POS system so that any changes — pricing, promos, 86’d items — will automatically change across all a restaurant’s different digital channels. For restaurants with multiple units, the changes apply across all locations.

Via the same interface, restaurants can also create QR codes for ordering and payments in the restaurant or at the drive-thru.

This automated, all-in-one approach to menu management became something of a “must-have” last year thanks to the ever-changing dining room restrictions related to the pandemic and the addition of new sales channels. When front-of-house-focused restaurant tech companies started releasing their so-called “contactless” tech bundles for the dining room, automated menu management started to become more commonplace. Sevenrooms, Paytronix, and several other companies in Toast’s partner network also offer similar functionality. In other words, there is a lot of competition in this particular area right now.   

Raydiant raised a $13 million Series A round in January of this year. The company said it more than tripled its revenue in 2020, and increased its customer base by 60 percent.

Restaurants Hate Third-Party Delivery Services, Actually

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When it comes to talking about the year 2020, one of the things third-party delivery services like to say is that they were “a lifeline” for restaurants that might have otherwise had to shutter permanently due to dining room closures and restrictions. 

Plenty have disputed this over the last several months. But perhaps no one has lately been more to-the-point about the matter than Recode’s Kara Swisher, who hosted Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on her Sway podcast this week.

“You’re not allowed to get away with saying you’ve been a lifeline to restaurants,” she told Khosrowshahi early on.

Swisher noted the oft-cited figure, that delivery services charge restaurants commission fees of up to 30 percent of a single transaction for use of their services. Khosrowshahi countered by saying Swisher’s math was “incomplete” and that the 30 percent is “untruthful” when it comes to representing what restaurants are actually on the hook to pay delivery services. According to his math, restaurants pay Uber Eats 13 percent per transaction “net of the courier.” If restaurants want to use their own couriers, the commission cost is “about 15 percent.”

But as Swisher suggested, even those lower numbers are harmful to restaurants, which typically operate off margins that are about 3 to 5 percent. That irreconcilable math is one of the reasons cities across the U.S. have introduced mandatory caps on commission fees, some as low as 10 percent.

Pre-pandemic, the argument was that if a restaurant took issue with high commission fees, they could simply opt out of doing delivery. That argument holds no water now, though, since the pandemic essentially forced restaurants into doing delivery and most do not have the money or expertise to build an in-house delivery business. Actually, most can’t even afford their own courier fleet.

It’s also worth pointing out that while Khosrowshahi called the 30 percent commission fee “untruthful,” he never actually offered a hard number around how high an Uber Eats commission fee reaches when a restaurant is using a courier, as most are. If anything, his cagey response of “13 percent net of the courier” seems to confirm the 30 percent commission fee’s existence.

Uber Eats had a big year in 2020. It more than doubled its revenues and even acquired a competitor, Postmates, towards the end of the year. Khosrowshahi himself said the service had a $40 billion-plus run rate and would be larger than the company’s mobility business in 2021.

Conversely, the restaurant industry has lost $240 billion in sales and is still 2.5 million jobs below pre-pandemic levels, according to the National Restaurant Association. A total of 110,000 restaurants in the U.S. have closed, which is about 17 percent of the nation’s restaurants total.

Khosrowshahi defended his company’s approach to restaurant commissions, using words like “reasonable” and “fair” to describe them. To which Swisher simply pointed out that most restaurants she speaks with disagree, and only use the Uber Eats and Caviars of the world because the pandemic has forced them to.

“They hate you,” she concluded, flatly, before using the phrase “menace economy” to describe the environment in which restaurants must now operate to stay in business.

Here’s How the Restaurant Biz Survived 2020

I know most of you would rather forget 2020 ever happened, but it never hurts to look back before going forward, which is just what the National Restaurant Association did this week. The trade group published a list of top trends it says kept many restaurants in business last year while the pandemic wreaked havoc on the industry.

The 10 trends that made the list were based on those found in a survey The Association did of more than 6,000 restaurants and 1,000 adults. The majority of the trends on the list are directly related to helping restaurants “keep their businesses open and employees on the payroll,” as The Association puts it.

The full research post is worth a read. This being The Spoon, I’ll highlight a few items that made the list that illustrate how tech-forward the pandemic has made the restaurant biz in recent months:

  • “Streamlined menus.” Part of this is related to the actual food: restaurants needed a way to reduce inventories and fulfill items faster, and “pare down your menu” became a mantra for many early on in the pandemic. However, streamlined menus also have to do with offering food that travels well, for pickup and delivery orders, and not overwhelming digital customers with choice paralysis as they view menus via their own mobile devices.
  • “Off-premises foodservice takes precedence.” The Association noted that before the pandemic, 80 percent of full-service restaurant traffic was on-premises. The change restaurants were forced to make to delivery and takeout formats in March, when shutdowns first started, rippled across the entire industry and is now more or less ingrained in operations. Which is to say, even when restaurants are operating at full dining room capacity once again, off-premises will be an important part of any restaurant’s strategy. 
  • “Selling groceries.” This started early in the pandemic when restaurants began selling inventory unused because of shutdowns, and doing so via off-premises channels like delivery and drive-thru. The Association’s survey found that “more than half of consumers” would consider buying grocery staples (produce, dairy, meat) from restaurants themselves if those items were offered. Little wonder, then, that third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats added grocery delivery to their businesses in 2020.

Other trends in the restaurant industry — ghost kitchens, virtual restaurants, better back-of-house tech — are woven into the more general trends on The Association’s list. For example, a shift to off-premises foodservice will inevitably mean more ghost kitchens. Pull up a virtual restaurant menu from just about anyone these days and you’ll find it’s decidedly streamlined. 

“We now know that three things are certain: the pandemic tested the limits of operator creativity and knowhow, accelerated tech adoption and emerging trends, and confirmed that customers sorely miss their restaurant experiences,” says the report.

With a widespread vaccine still months away (at least) and restrictions still in place for the majority of dining rooms, these trends that helped us survive 2020 will also start to shape 2021 and beyond. 

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Panera is the latest major chain to announce plans to go all-in on ghost kitchens. The brand said this week it also has mobile kitchens, redesigned drive-thru lanes, and a virtual catering business in the works.

Fat Brands, meanwhile, is doubling-down on its existing ghost kitchen strategy. The company said at an ICR presentation this week that it plans to open a dozen ghost kitchens in 2021.

Restaurant tech provider Perfect Company raised $6 million for its solution that brings automation to the front of house, back of house, ghost kitchens, convenience stores, and other foodservice areas. 

Chipotle’s App Puts a Positive Spin on Measuring Ingredient Sustainability

Chipotle today launched the Real Foodprint tool on its app to help customers better track the sustainability of the 53 ingredients it uses in meals. According to a press release from Chipotle, this also holds the quick-service brand “accountable” for its actions and choices around farming and sourcing ingredients. 

The Real Foodprint tool compares the average values of Chipotle’s 53 ingredients against the restaurant industry average in five areas: “Less Carbon in the Atmosphere,” “Gallons of Water Saved,” “Improved Soil Health,” “Organic Land Supported,” and “Antibiotics Avoided.”

To get that data, Chipotle has partnered with research firm HowGood, which aggregates ingredient sustainability information from Chipotle’s suppliers. It then compares that information to data on industry-standard ingredients via information from the United States Department of Agriculture, the World Health Organization, and the United States Food & Drug Administration, among others. The score Chipotle users see for each ingredient is “the difference between average data for each ingredient based on Chipotle’s sourcing standards and conventional, industry average standards,” according to today’s press release.

Chipotle may be the first restaurant brand to partner with HowGood for this level of data, but it’s not the first to bake ingredient sustainability information into its menu. Panera recently introduced “cool food” badges to its menu that indicate which items have a low carbon footprint. Also in 2020, Just Salad introduced a carbon footprint score for each menu item.

But as I wrote at the time of Just Salad’s news, it’s unclear if labels like “0.41 kg CO2e” and “0.77 kg CO2e” will have any kind of impact on consumer purchasing habits, since not all consumers even understand that “C02e” is the standard unit for measuring carbon footprints. Chipotle’s approach, which explains each number in layman’s terms (e.g., “gallons of water saved”) might be more accessible for mainstream consumers at this point.

The fact that Chipotle has also opted for positive language is unique so far among restaurants tracking sustainability on their menus. And it could set a new standard. Research has found that positive reinforcement can be a much more effective motivator than negative feedback or shaming. So telling someone how much water they’re saving on an order could make the idea of eating sustainable much more attractive.

Since the Real Footprint tool just launched, it is far too soon to tell if Chipotle’s “positive change in impact,” as the brand calls it, will lead to more customers ordering lower carbon footprint orders. If it does, we will certainly see similar efforts from other major chains in the coming months.

Augmented Reality Bites

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Virtual food hall, meet the augmented-reality restaurant menu. You’ll soon be best friends.

Hear me out.

Over these last few weeks, multiple news bites around virtual food halls have surfaced. These food halls are collections of restaurants that exist online and where meals are only available for delivery and pickup. They are in many ways a natural effect of the pandemic shutting down dining rooms and the restaurant biz going off-premises.

The latest one comes from Lunchbox. This week, the company integrated its online digital order platform into C3’s virtual restaurant brand ecosystem to bring a bunch of different delivery-only eateries under one virtual umbrella.

Being able to order a plant-based burger, chicken, and maybe a rice dish through a single digital interface sounds great until you zero in on that word digital. One of the potential problems with this new wave of virtual food halls is that customers will never have the chance to actually visit these restaurants in person. Your introduction to their food comes in the form of 2D thumbnails you have to scroll through on your phone and squint at to even get an inkling of what you’re about to order. If you’re familiar with the restaurant that’s less of an issue, but most virtual food halls and brands are new, and ordering from them is something of a culinary gamble.

Enter augmented reality (AR), a technology some say is the next great innovation for restaurant menus. Modern Restaurant Management ran a piece this week exploring the possibility of customers using their own smartphones to display 3D models of the food they are about to order. With AR, instead of a small, flat, 2D image, a user could “see” how the dish looks on their table, zoom in on it and view it from multiple angles to get a much better idea of what they’re about to buy.

I should note that the Modern Restaurant Management Post was authored by Mike Cadoux of augmented reality platform QReal. In other words, Cadoux’s has skin in the AR game.

But he makes a good point when it comes to thinking about AR in the context of the new off-premises reality in which restaurants now operate: “Early adoption of AR was hindered by the problem of getting the experience to the customer. People are loath to download apps, and delivery platforms had to service thousands of restaurants, most of which wouldn’t have access to 3D models. Now a restaurant or brand can push their own content to the customer. They would be wise to utilize all the smartphones capabilities and showcase their food with the next-generation of content.”

Spoon Editor Chris Albrecht actually spoke with Cadoux back in August, when QReal released a study with Oxford University’s Saïd Business School that found participants were more likely to order an item if they could view options in AR. “It’s like a test drive for a car,” Cadoux told The Spoon at the time. “Same way when you buy food, you want to think about what it’s like to eat it.”

The tech makes especially good sense for virtual food halls. As I said, these restaurants do not have dining rooms, so customers are relying solely on the digital realm to learn about the food. If, for the sake of argument, Lunchbox and C3 were to integrate AR into their ordering platform, they could better showcase the “fine dining” aspects of their food and in doing so make their meals more appetizing. Everyone else, from Zuul’s virtual-only sandwich chain to Steve Aoki’s pizza brand, could also reap the benefits of AR in the virtual restaurant realm.

AR is not yet mainstream, and its presence in the restaurant industry is still largely forthcoming. But since one pandemic year seems equal to five normal ones, an AR-powered food hall may be closer than we think.

Uber Engineer Says “No” to Uber’s Prop. 22

Californians, take note. One of the things those in the Golden State will vote on come November is Prop. 22, a $180 million ballot measure that would allow third-party delivery services to classify drivers as independent contractors. The measure would effectively override California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), which was signed into law last year and dictates that Uber, Grubhub, and other gig-economy companies must classify drivers and couriers as employees. 

Classifying them as independent contractors means delivery drivers would lack access to workers comp., paid sick leave, and other benefits W-2 employees receive. It goes without saying that a lot of folks are against Prop. 22. One of them is an employee at Uber.

Kurt Nelson, who’s been a software engineer at Uber since 2018, penned an op-ed at TechCrunch this week that argues drivers should be classified as employees. Nelson, who still makes deliveries for app-based companies in order to understand the gig economy, writes that Uber “refuses to obey” AB5 and instead prefers to “write a new set of rules for themselves” with Prop. 22. 

Among many other notable lines, there was also this gem about the gig economy: “I’ve met drivers who have to sleep in their cars, risk financial ruin over a single doctor’s appointment or go without life-saving medication. There’s no way around it. Uber’s Prop 22 is a multi-million effort to deny these workers their rights.”

You can read the piece in its entirety here. Uber has yet to make any public response to Nelson’s op-ed, so stay tuned.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Kitchen United CEO Jim Collins has stepped down to “focus on personal endeavors,” according to Nation’s Restaurant News. Collins played a major role in turning KU into one of the leaders of the ghost kitchen space. Michael Montagano, KU’s former chief financial officer and treasurer, has been named CEO.

Mobile POS platform GoTab launched an integration with hospitality labor management system 7shifts. The combined offering gives restaurant owners/operators the ability to view sales and labor data from the same interface.

Meal prep software company Meallogix announced a partnership with DoorDash this week. A press release sent to The Spoon notes that the deal gives Meallogix’ customers the option of using the third-party delivery service to manage their routes for the last mile of delivery.

Just Salad Launches a ‘Climatarian’ Menu for Digital Orders

Fast-casual chain Just Salad announced today that it will launch its “Climataraian” menu on September 17. The menu, available exclusively for orders placed via the chain’s app and website, will collect and feature those Just Salad items with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, according to an email sent to The Spoon. It will also display the carbon footprint and GHGs for each item.

The Climatarian menu will have two categories. The “Carbon Counter” is for customers wishing to have the bare minimum of carbon emissions associated with their meal. The “Conscientious Carnivore” is for “meat-eaters concerned about climate change.” The carbon footprint of each item in these categories will be displayed via the digital menu.

Just Salad hasn’t limited this carbon labeling to just menu items on the Climatarian menu. As the company announced back in June, all menu items on the Just Salad app and website will now come with a corresponding carbon footprint, which reflects total GHGs associated with the production of each item. The official rollout of these labels will happen alongside the launch of the Climatarian menu and apply even to “build your own” offerings. 

These menu additions seem aimed at taking some of the guesswork out of eco-friendly eating for consumers. It remains to be seen if seeing “0.41 kg CO2e” and “0.77 kg CO2e” labels on a menu will actually motivate customers to choose the more climate-friendly option in the same way they might choose the lower-calorie option when faced with the numbers. Carbon labeling on restaurant menus is practically unheard of at this point, so it’s reasonable to expect an adoption curve. 

Both the carbon labeling and the Climatarian menu offer us a glimpse of how versatile the digital menu of the future could be in terms of the information it provides. For example, carbon labels could automatically adjust in real time to include GHGs associated with last-mile delivery. And with more restaurant menus going digital and the sustainable restaurant discussion again becoming a priority, Just Salad likely won’t long be the only chain offering environmental info on its menu items. 

This week’s news folds into Just Salad’s larger sustainability goals, which include ditching single-use plastics and sending zero waste to landfills by 2022.

A (High-Tech) Sign of the Times

Of all the reinventions the restaurant is undertaking right now, menus are one of the more fascinating. Between calls to action about paring down the size of their menus, offering disposable ones, or, preferably, going full-on digital and contactless, restaurants have a lot of choices and decisions to make when it comes to how they will present their menus in the future. It’s not a question of wanting to or not. The pandemic, social distancing guidelines, and new regulations for restaurants have, as I wrote a couple weeks ago, rendered the reusable menu null and void.

In some cases, a simple sign that connects customers to the menu might be the best way forward, at least for now.

A boat-load of third-party restaurant tech companies now offer contactless tech bundles that include digital menus, but I was intrigued this week after talking to Larry Oberly, CEO of SpreedPro.

SpeedPro isn’t a restaurant-tech company; it’s a large-format printing service with locations around the U.S. and Canada. Over the phone, Oberly explained that the company recently started offering these large-format signs with its new technology, called InfoLnkX, embedded into them. Customers just hold their phones up to the NFC-enabled decal on the sign, which pulls up the restaurant menu on that person’s device.

Oberly said the tech is highly customizable, which means different signs could take users to different digital places: the menu in one instance, a promotion coupon in another, a video somewhere else. Remember the days of strolling down the sidewalk and pausing at a random restaurant then asking to view their menu? Were a restaurant equipped with something like SpeedPro’s signage, a person could simply hold their phone up to a sign outside and pull up that info themselves instead of cramming around a bunch of other people to all view the same menu posted in the window.

Social distancing is obviously the motivator behind the tech. While an InfoLnkX-enabled sign isn’t quite as technically flashy as, say, a contactless dining bundle from a restaurant tech company, it could very well have it’s own place in the future of restaurants. Besides lessening the number of people crowding around to view the same menu, being able to browse a menu from their own device would help customers decide on what to order before they ever set foot in the restaurant, hopefully lessening the number of people in line and making the entire order process faster.

For restaurants struggling to stay afloat and trying to adjust to dozens of new operational realities, the best interim solution for the menu issue might be a case of simpler is better.

Disney, Dole Whip . . . Delivery?

At some theme parks, the food is as much a part of the experience as the rides. We’re getting neither at the moment, thanks to the pandemic, but that might change soon, at least where food is concerned.

This week, Disneyland asked its annual passholders if they would like theme park food items delivered to their home. Think funnel cakes, churros, and the ever-popular Dole Whip, not to mention more substantial meal items found at restaurants around the park.

Disney hasn’t made any promises or shared any plans beyond the survey question. And while I thought the news was odd at first, the more I sit with it, the more it actually makes sense. Hear me out.

Disneyland has yet to set a reopen date for its Anaheim, CA theme park, and a note on the site from this week said that date “has not been identified.” Giving diehards a chance to order their favorite foods from the park would in a small way keep fans locked into the Disney ecosystem. It would also help generate some sales for the theme park, which has obviously lost revenue since it closed up due to COVID-19. And if memory serves me correctly, much of the fare you get (sandwiches, salads, pretzels, popcorn) at Disneyland would travel well, making the items easier to deliver.

Again, there’s no official word this is happening, but if enough passholders are missing their Dole Whip and can’t adequately recreate it at home, Disney may have a new sales channel on its hands. That could in turn set a standard for other theme parks with memorable food items. Harry Potter World Butter Beer, I’m lookin’ at you.

Restaurant Tech Around the Web

DailyPay adds CYCLE to its instant pay app for restaurants. The app, which lets restaurant workers access their earnings immediately instead of waiting for a paycheck, now lets restaurants provide bonuses, termination pay, or other “off-cycle payments” to employees instantly.

To-go sales grew in May. Black Box Intelligence shared new data at the Restaurants Rise conference this week indicating an increase in sales for restaurant to-go orders for April (66.8 percent) and May (96.4 percent). “Everything that was lost in the way of dine-in sales, in some cases, was made up by … to go and off-premise,” Kelli Valade, Black Box Intelligence CEO and president, said during the conference. 

Popeyes is getting a makeover. Chicken chain Popeyes plans to open 1,500 worldwide that feature an updated design (see image above) and lots of high-tech bells and whistles to make its operations more efficient. 

Just Salad’s Latest Menu Innovation: Adding Your Carbon Footprint to Your Meal

One of our favorite topics here at The Spoon right now is the reinvention of the restaurant menu. Social distancing and new guidelines around restaurant reopenings are forcing businesses to forgo the standard reusable menu and adopt digital versions customers can view on mobile devices. It’s a big switch and not without its operational headaches. But it also opens up a lot of doors in terms of the kind of information that could eventually be available on the restaurant menu. 

For example, the carbon footprint of your lunch.

Fast-casual chain Just Salad announced today it will now label all of its menu items with a corresponding carbon footprint. The score for each menu item is calculated in partnership with a team at the NYU Stern School of Business, and will reflect “the total estimated greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of ingredients in each menu item,” according to a press release from Just Salad.

These carbon footprints will first rollout on the chain’s website. Since digital menus are becoming the norm, it’s unclear if those changes will make it to physical menus, or indeed if those will even be in stores in the future. An exact date for the carbon footprint info on online menus has not yet been set.

Just Salad’s online menu is already fairly robust in terms of the nutritional information it provides customers about their meals. Hovering over an item pulls up the same nutrition facts one might read on the label of a box in the grocery store, and, for build-your-own salads and wraps, updates itself based on each ingredient you add to the mix. 

Since the carbon footprint scores for Just Salad’s menu items aren’t yet live, we don’t quite know what they’ll look like in digital format. I imagine they’ll be merged with the ingredients interface in some way so that a customer can view the nutritional and sustainability info of their meal in a single place. And while there was no mention of it in the press release, one imagines food traceability information could also eventually make its way into this new format. 

The carbon scores are a small step in menu development, but very telling in how this mandatory push to digital menus could welcome a new era of transparency when it comes to knowing where our food comes from and how our eating impacts the planet. In the ongoing quest for silver linings to come out of the current restaurant industry upheaval, this is definitely one of them.   

Hold the Phone. Soon it Will Be Your Restaurant’s Menu

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A couple of years ago I came across a restaurant in Dallas, Texas that featured a menu written entirely in emojis. It was unexpected and creative, yet clear enough that a server didn’t have to come over and re-explain everything on the page.

I’m not (necessarily) advocating we battle the current restaurant industry fallout with emoji menus, but maybe we could use some of that outside-the-box thinking when it comes to revising menu formats to fit the new reality we live in. 

Since reusable menus are basically germ repositories, it’s no surprise they’re out now that dining rooms are reopening. The CDC’s recently released guidelines for reopening suggest restaurants “avoid using or sharing items such as menus” and to “instead use disposable or digital menus. . .” The National Restaurant Association’s guidelines tell restaurants to “make technology your friend” and suggest mobile ordering, and every other restaurant tech company that contacts me these days is offering up some form of digital menu for restaurants to integrate into their operations. 

A lot of restaurants will definitely start out by offering simple disposable menus. Paper is cheaper than software most of the time, and typing up and printing out a menu is faster than onboarding your business to a new tech solution.

Over time, though, that could change. As more emphasis gets placed on digital ordering for everyone, we’ll access more restaurant menus through our own phones and mobile devices. That opens up a whole world of possibilities in terms of what restaurants could one day offer on their menus beyond just the food items themselves.

Just a few examples: Menus could provide in-depth information the ingredients in a dish, like where that cilantro came from and how many months the apple traveled before it hit your plate. Menus might also include ratings from other customers, and Amazon-esque “you might also like” recommendations could show up on the screen. Maybe you could dictate the portion size you want, thereby reducing food waste.

With AI making its way into restaurant tech more and and more, restaurants could also build dynamic pricing into menus, based on time of day, foot traffic, weather, and offer coupons and promotional offers in real time. And sure, if someone really wanted to, an emoji menu would probably fly right now in more than a few places.

Most of these things exist already, though they’re not widespread and some are still in conceptual stages. The massive overhaul of the restaurant menu is a chance to start bringing those disparate pieces together to revamp the way we order our food.

Kitchen United Is Open for Business in Austin

One effect of this whole pandemic is that we’ve seen an uptick in to-go orders, and that trend won’t subside anytime soon. That makes now a good time for restaurants — some of them, at least — to consider adding a ghost kitchen to their operations. 

Those in Austin, TX can add Kitchen United to their list of choices when it comes to choosing a facility. The company, which provides ghost kitchen infrastructure (space, equipment, etc.) to restaurants announced this week its new location near the University of Texas is open for business. 

A number of restaurant chains have either already moved into the space or plan to do so in the coming weeks. Kitchen United has also allocated one of the kitchens in the new space to Keep Austin Fed, a nonprofit that gathers surplus food from commercial kitchens and distributes it to charities. As part of the deal, Keep Austin Fed will be able to “rescue” food from restaurants with kitchen operations inside the new KU facility. 

A press released emailed to The Spoon notes that “additional kitchen space is currently available” for restaurants that want to expand their off-premises operations. On that note, a word of advice for restaurants: make sure your restaurant is actually in need of a ghost kitchen before signing up with one. Kitchen United’s own CEO, Jim Collins, told me recently that restaurants need a certain amount of customer demand in order for the economics of a ghost kitchen to make sense. It’s not a small demand, either. In times like these, where the future of all restaurants is uncertain and what little money there is needs to be spent carefully, it pays to exercise some caution, even when it comes to an enticing new trend like ghost kitchens. 

Los Angeles Moves to Cap Third-Party Delivery Commission Fees

Behold, more fee caps for third-party delivery companies. This week, the Los Angeles City Council voted 14–0 to ask attorneys to draft a law that caps the commission fees delivery services charge restaurants at 15 percent. “Why should restaurants, and their customers, be put in a position to subsidize delivery app companies? We need to level the playing field,” Councilman Mitch O’Farrell told the Los Angeles Times.

This week’s proposal would also require that 100 percent of the tips customers leave on delivery orders through these apps go directly to the driver, which is pretty standard nowadays but caused some ruckus in the not-so-distant past. The fee caps would end 90 days after Los Angeles lifts its dining room closures. 

Needless to say, the move — which several other cities have already made — is not popular with delivery companies. Postmates, which is LA’s most popular third-party food delivery service, said governments setting a price on fees threatens jobs and creates “a false choice between local restaurants and the delivery network companies that support them.” The service wants instead to have a fee charged in delivery orders that would assist restaurants. That in turn would translate to yet-another fee for the customer, and be yet-another way in which restaurant food delivery services will suggest/try anything to avoid having to shoulder some of the burden the pandemic has brought on the restaurant industry.

As restaurants slowly reopen and the industry starts to adjust to its new normal, now we’ll begin to see if fee caps actually make a difference for struggling restaurants, and if they are here to stay for the long run.

Finedine Menu Joins 500 Startups’ to Accelerate Its Restaurant Tech Platform

VC firm and seed accelerator 500 Startups just announced the list of companies that made the cut for its 23rd accelerator class. Among them is Finedine Menu, a company which is reinventing the concept of the restaurant menu.

Finedine Menu bills itself as “a digital menu management platform.” Restauranteurs can use it to create digital menus and display them on iOS and Android tablets via the Finedine Menu app. Customers interact with the menu, clicking on items to browse available dishes and order their favorites. The app tracks this sort of behavior, so businesses can view the data and make changes to the menu based on what customers prefer.

The system has two parts: a web-based control panel and a tablet-compatible app. (The app doesn’t work with phones right now.) Once a restaurant signs up for the service, they are directed to the control panel and prompted to design their menu.

Restaurants can choose from three different Finedine Menu plans, which are based on the number of tablets the business plans to use: small is for five tablets; medium for 25; and large for 50.

Since everything is digital, there’s a huge range of info the restauranteurs can put on their menus. They can upload videos and images, change the currency, display the menu in different languages, and add deals and pairing recommendations. The system even has built-in allergen warnings they can select and display. And the beauty of digital menus is that they can be updated in real time, so anything that’s changed on the control panel will immediately change on the app, too. The platform is compatible with most POS systems.

Behind the scenes, the Finedine Menu system gathers and displays data the restaurant can use to improve both the menu itself and the food offered. That includes things like most viewed items, average ticket size, daily sales, and which items sell the most. All of this info can be viewed by restauranteurs on a dashboard in their control panel.

Finedine Menu is hardly alone here. Uncorkd‘s platform is a good example; it’s similar to Finedine Menu, only specifically for wine, beer, and other drink menus. Using the system’s analytics, a business could see things like which red wines are most popular, and how that popularity changes from night to night — and change their menus accordingly. Uncorkd’s system has over 200,000 descriptions for various beverages, which streamlines the order process, and, like Finedine Menu, Uncorkd menus can be updated in real time.

Apito is an iOS-compatible app where guests can view, order, and pay for a meal from an iPad, and even do things like request a server’s attention. The company claims it can help restaurants increase the average ticket size by 15 to 20 percent. A company called eTouch Menu also promises increased profits through upsell opportunities, and is used by the likes of Dunkin’ Donuts, Hard Rock Cafe, and various casinos and airports.

What all these companies have in common is that they’re not so much menus as they are full-on foodtech platforms. So there’s a good reason Finedine Menu also bills itself as “a technology company that serves the hospitality industry.” Digital menus are increasingly becoming sophisticated technology platforms, and it will be interesting to see how the company can further evolve this concept during its time in the 500 Startups program.