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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

digital ordering

McDonald’s May Sell Part of Tech Company Dynamic Yield

McDonald’s is considering selling part of AI startup Dynamic Yield, which it acquired in 2019, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. 

The original intention behind the $300 million Dynamic Yield acquisition was to install the company’s AI tech into self-service kiosks and drive-thru menu boards at McDonald’s locations. With the implementation, menus would become more technologically sophisticated, able to offer things like more personalized recommendations for customers. McDonald’s currently has Dynamic Yield implementations in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

But as WSJ reports, after analyzing the Dynamic Yield platform, McDonald’s has found that the tech “hasn’t delivered the promised sales boost” originally hoped for at the time of the deal. The QSR mega-chain aimed for Dynamic Yield order suggestions to boost drive-thru sales by 1 percent in the U.S. Sources told WSJ that sales have fallen short of that target, and one franchisee said that “the return on investment is just not there.”

The Dynamic Yield platform is just one piece of technology McDonald’s franchisees have called into question recently. Despite the chain’s aggressive push towards digital ordering and all the accompanying technological changes, franchisees have pushed back on how much they must pay for all this tech. Ernst & Young is currently conducting an audit of these technology fees, while franchisees have paused all non-essential communication with McDonald’s corporate.

Still, missed sales targets and franchisee tensions don’t spell the end of Dynamic Yield’s platform as part of Mickey D’s operations. McDonald’s said it would keep parts of the company, including those that service the chain’s drive-thrus and kiosks. While details are few and far between, McDonald’s shift towards stores with more drive-thru lanes and less dining room space suggest Dynamic Yield’s tech will continue to provide at least some value going forward. 

McDonald’s is currently “exploring” the sale of a portion of Dynamic Yield. There is no set timeframe for a deal, and it is entirely possible that no deal at all will happen.

Yelp Upgrades Its Waitlist Feature to Manage Takeout Orders

Yelp today announced a bundle of new features that will, according to a company press release, “help restaurants’ front-of-house operations.” Among those new features is one aimed at improving operations around takeout orders by extending the capabilities of Yelp’s existing Waitlist tool. 

Waitlist has been in Yelp’s restaurant tech arsenal for a few years. Up to now, the feature has been most useful to dine-in customers looking to “get in line” virtually and avoid having to cram in the restaurant lobby or bar to wait for a table. 

But when the COVID-19 pandemic halted dining room service last year, some businesses began using Waitlist to manage takeout and even drive-thru orders. Without going into great detail, Yelp noted in today’s press release that the issue was that the original Waitlist “wasn’t built to meet this growing need.” 

The need to more easily fulfill takeout orders is not certainly going away. Recent data from a Paytronix and PYMTS survey found that takeout orders accounted for $486 billion, or 63 percent, of restaurant sales in 2020.

In response to takeout’s leading spot among off-premises formats, Yelp will now allow restaurants to manage all to-go orders via Waitlist. 

From today’s press release:

“[Restaurants] can easily enter and keep track of all takeout orders in the app – whether the orders were received via phone or website — and can input relevant information, such as type of car to accommodate for curbside pickup. Repeat diner information is stored for easy autofill of pertinent details, such as phone number and dietary preferences. From there, the host can text consumers when their order is ready, allowing them to maintain social distancing when picking up.”

The system offers some automation of the pickup process. For example, instead of having to manually input a text to the customer when the order is ready, a restaurant staffer simply triggers an automatic notification.  

Today’s press release did not mention any further automation of Waitlist, though it seems a necessary next step in a restaurant industry getting quickly saturated with solutions with which to digitally manage takeout orders. Right now, further automating the takeout process is a big opportunity for restaurant tech companies.

Yelp announced a few other new features today, including one called Guest Profiles, which lets restaurants store information about their guests (e.g., dietary preferences) in the system. The company also announced a point-of-sale integration, improved analytics, and some incremental upgrades to the consumer-facing Yelp experience. You can read the full list of new features via a company blog post.

Waitlist for takeout, meanwhile, is available at no extra charge for restaurants with nine or fewer locations. For those with 10 or more units, pricing varies.

Restaurant Tech Company Olo Files to Go Public

Restaurant SaaS platform Olo filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC late Friday and hopes to raise $100 million in an initial public offering. A representative for Olo confirmed this news to The Spoon today.

Olo is best known for its software platform that consolidates digital orders coming from different channels (web, kiosk, mobile, etc.) into a single ticket stream for the restaurant. Founded in 2005 in NYC, It was one of the original companies to help restaurants eradicate the so-called “tablet hell” scenario for restaurants. Prior to companies like Olo, staffers would have to manually input information from, say, the tablet processing Grubhub orders into the restaurant’s main POS system. 

The company has added its Dispatch service, which helps restaurants process delivery orders from their own websites and mobile apps. Another service, Rails, helps restaurants manage their relationships with third-party delivery providers, including negotiating a restaurant’s preferred providers and pricing strategy.

“Consumers today expect more on-demand convenience and personalization from restaurants, particularly through digital channels, but many restaurants lack the in-house infrastructure and expertise to satisfy this increasing demand in a cost-effective manner,” states the S-1 filing. “Our platform and application programming interfaces, or APIs, seamlessly integrate with a wide range of solutions, unifying disparate technologies across the restaurant ecosystem.” 

The Olo platform is specifically suited to restaurant brands with multiple locations. Among the companies customers are Five Guys, Wing Stop, Shake Shack, Denny’s, The Cheesecake Factory, Jamba Juice, Dairy Queen, and many others well-known names in the restaurant biz.

The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, has only heightened the urgency for restaurants to organize their off-premises orders (takeout, delivery, drive-thru, etc.) to increase the speed and efficiency at which those can be fulfilled. Olo said in its S-1 filing that in response, the company “reprioritized” its strategic roadmap “to address the most important solutions for [its] customers.” Notably, that has included takeout and curbside options.

Currently, Olo works with about 64,000 individual restaurant units across 400 brands. In its filing, Olo said it processed $14.6 billion in gross merchandise value in 2020.

This is the second major piece of news around restaurant tech IPOs today. Earlier this morning, the Wall Street Journal noted that restaurant-management platform Toast could go public in 2021 with a $20 billion valuation. 

For Olo, no price or timeline has been set as of right now.     

McDonald’s Agrees to Third-Party Audit of Disputed Technology Fees

Ernst & Young will conduct an independent audit of the new technology fees McDonald’s assigned to franchisees at the end of 2020, according to a report from Business Insider.

The review, requested by a group of McDonald’s operators called the National Franchisee Leadership Alliance, will look into the $423-per-month technology fee McDonald’s announced in December of last year. Franchisees contest they owe this fee and have paused non-essential communications with corporate in response.

The monthly technology fee, which corporate would begin charging franchisees next month, is part of a $70 million debt McDonald’s claims its operators owe for a “lag” from an old payment structure. McDonald’s controls most of the technology in its stores and charges franchisees a fee for use of that tech. Tech has been an ongoing point of friction between McDonald’s and its franchisees for years now, with operators with operators increasingly frustrated over how much they must pay. 

This is further aggravated by the sheer amount of tech getting implemented at McDonald’s restaurants nowadays, from Dynamic Yield’s artificial intelligence system in the drive-thru to the increasingly popular McDonald’s mobile app. And McDonald’s is just getting started when it comes to digital ordering, drive-thru tech, and other digitization efforts of its business.  

According to Restaurant Business, franchisees argue they do not owe back pay for tech such as the mobile app. McDonald’s corporate, on the other hand, says it has “absolute confidence” that these fees are owed to the company. 

Franchisees will start talking with McDonald’s field officers over the issue, but non-essential communication with corporate remains paused. Restaurnat Business noted that the end of these talks between corporate and franchisees could well mean that the dispute eventually goes to court. 

While McDonald’s seems to have more disputes with its franchisees than most major QSR chains out there, the ongoing battle highlights some of the complications of digitizing a QSR brand. The pandemic’s impact on the restaurant industry has shifted the bulk of business for QSRs to off-premises meal formats, which increasingly rely on digital ordering. Whether other QSRs that rely on a franchise-based model encounter some of these issues as they digitize their businesses remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the Ernst & Young review is expected to take a few weeks at the very least. 

MealMe’s App That Compares Food Delivery Services Is Set to Expand Across College Campuses

MealMe, a company known for its app that aggregates and compares all the major restaurant delivery apps, is headed to the college market. It will soon launch at Syracuse University and is currently available at Indiana University. 

The MealMe app, which the company calls “search engine for food delivery,” compares the various delivery apps like Grubhub and Postmates as well as some smaller, more regional services. Upon opening the app, users can search for a restaurant or food type and compare pricing, delivery times, and other elements across the different services.

The app aims to streamline the process of comparing pricing, wait times, and other elements across the different delivery apps, and to connect users with the best deals in their area. In the last year, the MealMe team has also added a checkout function to their app, so that a user doesn’t actually have to leave the MealMe interface to order from, say Grubhub.

That said, MealMe is strictly an aggregator and does not charge people for use of the app, although users can add a “MealMe” tip to their order. The company has deals with the major third-party delivery providers.

The app originally launched in 2016 as a kind of social network for food. The idea struggled to gain much traction, and MealMe reinvented itself in March of 2020 right after the pandemic struck the U.S. and subsequently forced restaurants to shift to delivery and takeout orders. That same year, the company was accepted to the TechStars Atlanta accelerator program.

While the MealMe app is running across the country, the college market is an area the company’s founders are specifically targeting. It launched at George Washington University in January, and has since added Syracuse and Indiana Universities to its roster. “Although we are live, technically, we want to form relationships with individuals at every university and do a hard launch at every school so that people know about MealMe,” MealMe president Matthew Bouchner told Syracuse-centric news site The Daily Orange.

MealMe joins a number of companies developing different ways to bring more food delivery to the college and university sector. Recently, hospitality platform C3 announced a deal with Graduate Hotels to bring virtual food halls to many a college town across the U.S. Starship, maker of the autonomous six-wheeled rover bot, has been delivering food to students for a couple years now. Even legacy players are involved, the best example being Aramark and its 2019 acquisition of order-ahead app Good Uncle.

College campuses have long been an important market for the food delivery sector. Having a presence at a university means potential exposure to tens of thousands of people from the student body population. Additionally, the major delivery services already deliver to college campuses, so MealMe’s new audiences will most likely already be used to getting their meals via digital- and delivery-centric channels. 

Sweetgreen to Launch a ‘Drive-In’ Store Format in 2021

Sweetgreen joins the ranks of restaurants reformatting their store concepts to accommodate more off-premises operations. The fast-casual chain announced today it will open its first “drive-in” restaurant, the company’s own take on the drive-thru format.

According to sweetgreen materials sent to The Spoon, the new store, set to open in 2021 in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, will focus on digital orders placed via the sweetgreen app. Off-premises formats will include a traditional drive-thru lane “for optimized digital pickup” as well as a drive-in area where customers can park and are attended by a dedicated “concierge.” 

Based on the information sweetgreen provided, the new store format looks to be all about keeping customers in their cars. The company said the Highlands Ranch location “allows guests to access sweetgreen without ever having to leave their vehicle,” and that it provides a glimpse of what’s happening in the kitchen without requiring customers to ever enter the store. Large windows will look into the restaurant’s food prep space so customers can watch as the staff prepares orders. The company did not explicitly say whether there is any indoor dining attached to this location, though there does not appear to be based on the information sweetgreen provided. A small patio will provide some outdoor seating.

The pandemic has accelerated moves by fast-casual and QSR restaurants to revamp their store formats to cater to more to-go and delivery orders. McDonald’s, Burger King, El Pollo Loco, and Chipotle are just a few of the major names on the list. But sweetgreen said the plan to evolve its physical store format was in motion before COVID-19, citing the chain’s digital growth (more than 50 percent of orders are placed digitally) as the big driver.

Sweetgreen said it is already looking to expand this format to other parts of the country once the Highlands Ranch location is open. That includes expansion to new suburban areas of the U.S. in addition to the urban centers where the brand is best known. 

Requiem for the Dining Room

Welcome to our weekly restaurant tech newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

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.

Survey: More Than Half of Restaurant Sales Will be Digital by 2025

Digital sales will make up more than half, or 54 percent, of all quick-service and limited-service restaurant sales by 2025, according to new survey numbers from market research firm Incisiv. That’s 70 percent higher than pre-COVID estimates, the firm notes.

That projected growth isn’t hard to understand. It’s been an all-out dumpster-fire of a year for restaurants, with hundreds of thousands of restaurants permanently shuttered and billions of dollars already lost. Currently, restaurants across the country are reverting to off-premises-only models, which lend themselves more to minimal interactions between restaurant staff and customers.

But as we saw early on in the pandemic, even limited/quick service restaurants struggled to manage the sudden influx of takeout, curbside pickup, drive-thru, and delivery order channels. Bigger brands with money to burn and existing digital strategies have obviously fared better over the last eight months than those without many tech investments in place. As of July, Chipotle had increased its digital sales by over 200 percent thanks to the brand’s pre-COVID focus in that area. Another example is Starbucks, which as publicly said 80 percent of its orders before the pandemic were already for to-go channels.

Separately, Incisiv notes that while restaurant chains are making investments in tech, they are “not necessarily addressing the highest priorities nor the solutions that will deliver the best maximum ROI across diverse customer expectations.”

It’s a point we make all the time here at The Spoon. There are seemingly endless options for businesses when it comes to tech, but they’re not all equal in terms of the value they provide to a businesses trying to serve customers quickly, safely, and with the same quality they would get in the dining room. For example, the so-called “contactless” kits that address the in-dining room experience may become a staple of the future, but they can’t exactly add value when dining rooms are shut down. On the other hand, focusing tech investments on tools that will make digital ordering and fulfillment easier and cheaper should be a priority. To that end, Incisiv’s report urges restaurants to “make enhancements in digital tech.” Those that do, according to the report, “will be better positioned should another shutdown occur.” Which, if you hadn’t noticed, is happening as we speak.

As noted above some of the bigger QSR brands are clearly leading the charge when it comes to digital sales trends, but Incisiv says there is plenty of area for both growth and improvement. Customer satisfaction actually remains low in a few key areas. Only 40 percent of survey respondents were satisified with their pickup experience; that number drops to 25 percent for delivery. Half of guests prefer paying with a mobile wallet, but fewer than 20 percent of QSRs provide expanded payment options.

The survey found that “close to 70 percent” of restaurant chains have “stated their intent” to increase investments in mobile ordering. Over the long term, digital sales are expected to dip slightly once in-dining room service is resumed with some semblance of its former days. However, the return of the dining room won’t mean the end of off-premises, not if recent developments around condensed store formats and expanded drive-thru lanes are any indication. Incisiv also notes that share of delivery sales is expected to grow 23 percent by 2025 versus a pre-COVID forecast of 15 percent.

As the report notes, if all of this holds true, it will be QSR chains making the most progress in terms of digital ordering and setting the example for the rest of the industry. 

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. 

KFC Is the Latest QSR to Ditch the Dining Room in Favor if Digital Drive-Thru

KFC unveiled two new designs today for future stores that emphasize off-premises order formats and minimal dining room space, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. The Louisville, Kentucky-based chain is the latest major QSR to revamp its store format in response to the pandemic’s impact on the restaurant industry.

One design is for an “express” store format with no indoor dining space. Clocking in at about 1,300 square feet, the design is intended for use in crowded urban locations where space is both limited and expensive. This is a tactic also used by chains like Starbucks and, most recently, Chipotle. 

KFC’s other design is all about the drive-thru, which the company said grew 60 percent year-over-year in Q3 of 2020. The format includes multiple drive-thru lanes, including those dedicated to mobile orders, a small outdoor seating area, and designated parking spots and entrances for customers and delivery drivers picking up digital orders.

These new prototypes have actually been in development since last year. Chief Development Officer Brian Cahoe told NRN today that the company hit the “pause” button on these projects when the pandemic hit in order to learn and apply new requirements the pandemic would bring to the restaurant experience.

More obvious safety measures are one thing. The new KFC stores will include automatic doors and more space between tables. And of course, with the emphasis on digital ordering, a more contactless pickup or drive-thru experience is also on the menu. The company said some stores would also have a digital cubby system in future.

The QSR has in the last couple months become ground zero for testing out new restaurant tech. Besides digitizing the drive-thru, which everyone from McDonald’s to Tim Horton’s is doing, brands are introducing features like geofencing, conveyer belt meal delivery systems, and AI-powered menu boards to the restaurant experience. Many are also ditching the dining room in favor of drive-thru-only locations and ghost kitchen facilities. 

KFC will open three new restaurants based on these prototypes in 2021. 

Lunchbox Raises $20M to Expand Its Online Ordering System for Restaurants

Lunchbox, an online ordering system for restaurants, announced today it has closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Coatue. The round also included participation from existing investors 645 Ventures and Primary Ventures, and executives from Venmo, HelloFresh, and Planet Hollywood, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Including this round, Lunchbox has raised $22.1 million to date.

Lunchbox’s software integrates digital ordering, loyalty programs, delivery dispatch, marketing, analytics, and many other features into a single interface, effectively eliminating the need for restaurants to juggle multiple restaurant tech platforms on the front end. Businesses pay a flat monthly fee to use the platform.

The end goal as Lunchbox sees it is to give restaurants more ownership over their digital properties and operations as the restaurant biz moves deeper into the off-premises realm. That includes the all-important customer data, which up until recently was largely held captive by third-party delivery services. In the wake of the pandemic, more restaurants are taking steps to gain more control of this data along with other aspects of the customer relationship.

With the new funds, Lunchbox plans to scale up nationally to meet that demand, as well as add new capabilities to its platform and build out its team.

And while the company may only be 18 months old, it has reached a number of noteworthy deals and milestones over the last year. In September, it struck a deal with Ordermark to integrate the latter’s online ordering platform into the Lunchbox system. Last month, Lunchbox teamed up with Beam Social to let customers donate to nonprofits via their restaurant orders, and the company has also ventured into autonomous delivery via a partnership with Sodexo and Kiwibot.

All that activity and attention isn’t too surprising. The pandemic and its subsequent leveling of the restaurant biz as we know it has forced businesses to go online by adopting digital ordering and payments technologies, mobile apps, more robust rewards programs, and a whole bunch of other tech tools most restaurants can’t afford to build in-house. Lunchbox’s platform is one option restaurants have when it comes to a third-party system that can help them make sense of the seemingly endless tech options out there.

The common denominator for all these developments is off-premises ordering, which is where many restaurants are headed, if not already there. Since we’re still in the midst of the fallout created by the pandemic, it’s too early to say exactly how much of the restaurant industry will be permanently about delivery and takeout. For now, though, much of it is, which gives restaurant tech companies like Lunchbox a competitive edge.

Popmenu Raises $17M to Expand Its Restaurant Software Capabilities

Popmenu, a platform for digital ordering and reservations for restaurants, announced this week it has raised a $17 million Series B round. The round was led by Bedrock Capital, with participation from existing investors Base10 Partners and Felicis Ventures, as well as new investors Mantis Ventures and Chapter One Ventures. This brings Popmenu’s total funding to $22.1 million. 

In a press release sent to The Spoon, Popmenu said It will use the new funds to develop new features for its platform, which currently allows restaurants to manage online ordering and menus, collect direct feedback from customers (as opposed to getting it via third-party platforms), manage reservations, and integrate with delivery and reservations services. 

Right now, one of the company’s main selling points is that it gives restaurants more control over their own branding, which is tough to do in the age of online delivery platforms and user-driven review sites like Yelp and Google. To give restaurants more of that brand control, Popmenu creates customized websites that include the aforementioned features and that allow the restaurants’ customers to upload their own photos, feedback, and reviews.

In response to the pandemic, Popmenu, like other restaurant tech companies, also launched its own version of contactless software that lets guests scan a QR code with their own smartphones to view and order from restaurant menus. 

In addition to contactless features, having more control over their own branding (and customer data) has surfaced as a priority for restaurants since the start of the pandemic. SKS panelists noted yesterday that more restaurants, from large chains to mom-and-pop shops, are starting to bring more elements of the off-premises experience back into their own control. ShiftPixy, a company that provides not just custom-branded websites but also delivery drivers, is a huge supporter of restaurant-controlled customer data. Square just launched a similar function.

Even delivery services, like Uber Eats, now offer restaurants the ability to process orders via their own websites. The catch with that last one, of course, is that Uber Eats still owns the customer data, which kind of renders the whole point of maintaining one’s own website null and void.

As more companies like Popmenu bring features to the table that put branding and data back in the hands of restaurants, there will inevitably be more pushback from third-party delivery.