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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

digital restaurant

Taco Bell to Launch New Drive-Thru-Centric Store Prototype

Via a partnership with longtime franchisee Border Foods, Taco Bell is set to launch a new store design the QSR chain says will “simplify drive-thru time significantly,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Dubbed Taco Bell Defy, the initiative was first announced at the beginning of 2021, when the store prototype surfaced.

Border Foods enlisted Minneapolis-based design firm Vertical Works to assist with conceptualizing the new building, which will be restaurant number 230 for Taco Bell and Border Foods, and the pair’s 82nd new build.

Speed of service via digital means is the emphasis here. The Defy location will include four drive-thru lanes, three of which will be dedicated to mobile orders and pickups for delivery. (One lane will function like a traditional drive-thru lane.) For these mobile-order lanes, customers will check in and order via QR code, then retrieve their food from a lift system that eradicates the human-to-human touchpoint during a traditional food handoff. The kitchen itself, meanwhile, will be elevated above the drive-thru lanes and staff able to communicate with customers via audio and video features.  

Aspects of the Defy location are reminiscent of store design plans from another major QSR, Burger King. The Home of the Whopper unveiled a store prototype last year that also featured suspended kitchens, multiple drive-thru lanes, and a conveyor belt system that would deliver food to customers without an actual human-to-human interaction. 

Other chains, including McDonald’s, have announced various initiatives over the last several months aimed at digitizing more of the drive-thru operation and in the process speeding up service times. Wait times at the drive-thru have progressively increased over the last several years, and the latest data shows that total wait time in 2020 was about 30 seconds longer than 2019 across the QSR sector. 

So far, only the designs themselves have surfaced for these various store concepts. We have yet to see how these ideas function in real time, in real life, and just how widespread they wind up being in terms of the population’s QSR experience.

Taco Bell breaks ground this month in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, with plans to open by summer 2022.

Choco Raises $100M to Digitize Restaurant Food Procurement

Restaurant tech company Choco announced today it has raised $100 million in in Series B funding led by growth equity firm Left Lane Capital. Insight Partners along with existing investors Coatue Management and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Choco has raised $171.5 million to date.

The company’s mobile app effectively digitizes the relationship between restaurants and their suppliers, allowing the two groups to chat with one another through the app. Restaurants can place orders directly through the Choco app as well as view and edit all order sheets. Choco also released a new feature at the beginning of 2021 specifically designed for multi-unit restaurants to give them a more comprehensive overview of not just what they’re ordering but where it comes from and who is in charge of that relationship. At the time, Choco’s Global Industry Advisor, Chelsea van Hooven, said multi-unit restaurants make up about 40 percent of Choco’s current user base.

The company’s original pitch was around fighting food waste in the restaurant industry. While that remains a part of Choco’s overall benefits for restaurants, wasted time and money are also now part of the overall package of benefits the company is pitching. Replacing siloed paper-and-pen processes with digital ones, where all data is viewable from a single place, has the potential to cut hidden costs in the back of house and in doing so improve restaurant margins. 

Digital was largely seen as a “nice-to-have” feature before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Now, many claim that digitizing operations is a “must have,” and that those who don’t will wind up getting left behind.

While that may be true for large chains (think McDonald’s or Chipotle), it remains to be seen how much this full digitization of the back of house can actually help smaller independent restaurants. In other words, we have yet to see whether the cost to implement and run technology is worth the returns it brings to these smaller restaurants.

Choco says demand for its platform is up and partly driven by the pandemic pushing more restaurants to go digital. The company currently has over 10,000 active restaurants and suppliers on its platform. It will use the new funding to expand within its six current markets: the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, and Belgium. The company will also expand into several new markets, and has plans to double its head count by end of the year.

Restaurant365 Acquires Back-Office Software Company Compeat

Restaurant management platform Restaurant365 announced this week it has acquired Compeat, which makes software to help restaurants manage their workforce and the back office. Restaurant365 will continue to support Compeat products and customers after the deal goes through, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Restaurant365 is itself a back-of-house-focused company, with a cloud-based software platform that gives restaurants a single, digital place to manage their accounting, payroll, scheduling, inventory, and other back-office tasks. The system integrates with other tools in the restaurant, including POS, vendor, and banking systems. 

Compeat offers a similar set of cloud-based tools for restaurants. In addition to its technology, the company will bring its own rather robust list of restaurant clients as well as some hotel chains to the partnership. 

Both companies offer a similar promise to hospitality businesses: to digitize and therefore simplify back-office tasks and in doing so save businesses time and money.

Restaurant365’s announcement comes right on the heels of Toast’s acquisition of another back-office/back-of-house management platform, xtraXCHEF. Other deals, mergers, and acquisitions are bound to follow. The last year has devastated many restaurants’ businesses. For those that managed to survive, keeping a tighter grip on costs is an imperative right now. Many restaurant tech companies claim that digitization and better management of the back of house can help restaurants maintain better margins.

The combination of Restaurant365 and Compeat will serve over 28,000 restaurants. Restaurant365 CEO Tony Smith will lead the new business. 

In the meantime, expect more consolidation for restaurant tech over the next several months as the industry continues its slow recovery phase.

Yum China’s New Program Will Teach Digital Skills to Children in Rural Areas

Yum! Brands spinoff Yum China is investing in more digital education for underserved areas. The company today launched its Digital Classroom Initiative that gives children in rural parts of China access to online classes that will teach coding and other digital skills. 

The digital divide between China’s urban and rural populations has narrowed somewhat in recent years. Still, the COVID-19 pandemic once again highlighted its existence, showing the disadvantages the rural population is at when it comes to online learning and, in some cases, access to the internet. 

Yum China says it will use its newly launched Digital Initiative program to provide children in the Hunan province with free computer equipment and instructor-led virtual coding courses. 

The company has been involved in bringing digital education to remote areas since 2019 when it began establishing digital classrooms with help from Leap Learner and the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation. Yum China has been quietly expanding the program ever since, first in the Ningxia and Hunan provinces and now in the Hunan province. 

While highlighting his company’s own evolution in an increasingly digital restaurant industry, Yum China CEO Joey Wat talked in today’s press release of preparing rural youths with “much-needed skills to thrive in a digital world.” Increasingly, restaurants are part of that shift. The march of technology into restaurant kitchens, dining rooms, and off-premises experiences will create new types of digital jobs in these settings. Some companies are now training underprivileged groups with the kinds of skills they would need for such jobs but may not have the opportunity to gain on their own. Over in Berlin, Germany, Delivery Hero highlighted this recently when it launched its own program, the Tech Academy. 

For its part, Yum China says it will eventually expand its program across more rural areas of the country.