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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

drive-thru

ConverseNow Acquires Drive-Thru Voice AI Specialist Valyant AI

Today, ConverseNow announced that it has acquired drive-thru conversational AI specialist Valyant AI. According to the announcement about the deal – the terms of which were not disclosed – the entire Valyant AI team will be retained post-acquisition.

Until now, ConverseNow has largely succeeded in winning restaurant chain business through call center voice automation. With this deal, ConverseNow brings a drive-thru AI specialist into the fold, jumpstarting its efforts to penetrate the growing market for AI-voice-assisted drive-thru technology.

Valyant AI, which started quickly out of the gate in 2019 with a win at a Techcrunch automation and AI pitch competition in 2019, has since run trials with its Holly voice AI at CKE and Checkers. The company’s technology, which is differentiated from ConverseNow’s in that the AI runs locally on proprietary hardware (ConverseNow’s AI runs in the cloud), also includes a generative AI training application called AI Employee Assist, which restaurant staff can ask questions and receive instant responses. According to the announcement, the Valyant AI technology will be integrated into both the drive-thru and tables by the end of Q3.

The deal is another signal that the restaurant voice AI and automation is heating up. Other providers, such as Presto and Soundhound, have been growing their installed base for both phone and drive-thru automation solutions, while large chains like Wendy’s have been developing their own voice AI technology. McDonald’s, which had been running a trial of voice assistant powered by IBM, recently announced they were sunsetting the initiative and would evaluate other voice AI technologies and select another solution by the year’s end.

Beyond the obvious employee cost-saving benefits of voice automation, QSRs also see opportunities to increase total order size through upselling capabilities. According to ConverseNow, its technology can detect conversational nuances and personalize orders based on contextual data and information gained in real time during the order process.

Checkers To Roll Out AI-Powered Voice Tech to 267 Restaurant Drive-Thrus By End of 2022

This week restaurant chain Checkers & Rally’s announced a deal with Presto, a maker of restaurant technology, in which the drive-thru focused chain will roll out Presto’s AI-powered voice assistant technology chain-wide by the end of the year.

The announcement comes after early trials showed a 98% order accuracy for the voice assistant technology. And now, according to Checkers President and CEO Frances Allen, the chain plans to roll out Presto’s voice technology to all 267 store-owned and operated locations by the end of 2022. She also indicated that many franchise locations are expressing interest in the technology.

“We had a vision two years ago that we wanted what I would call ‘Alexa at the drive-thru,'” said Allen.

And now, with Presto, they have it. According to Allen, about 80% of the chain’s total business comes through a drive-thru, so the company’s management felt transitioning to a high-accuracy automated drive-thru could significantly impact the business.

“Anything we can do to improve operations, streamline for our guests and our employees, we wanted to do.”

You can hear the Presto voice assistant taking an order at a Checkers drive-thru in the video above. The Presto bot sounds, well, bot-like as it says “Welcome to Checkers, this drive-thru microphone is monitored and recorded for quality assurance.” In fact, the entire exchange sounds like something you might hear on an automated customer service line.

Expedite’s Kristen Hawley thought so too and asked during the press briefing if customers could access live humans at any point during the interaction.

“There are 2% of orders where the system says ‘you know, I don’t quite understand that,'” said Presto founder and CEO Rajat Suri. “If the person is insistent on talking to a staff member or operator, the system will escalate to the human in the restaurant.”

When asked if the broader rollout of Presto’s technology will result in a permanent reduction of headcount, Allen said no. Instead, she said, Presto’s technology helps fill roles left empty by the persistent shortage of workers the entire restaurant industry has been experiencing since the pandemic began.

“Our motivation is to fill the gap between the people that are available to us working in restaurants and where we need to focus that human labor,” said Allen. “In an ideal world, maybe we have five people at any shift right now. We probably have three or four available. And so this (Presto’s voice assistant) is like a fifth person that is coming in to help.”

“Our motivation here is not to replace people with robots.”

Virtually Staffing the Physical Drive-Thru

Generally speaking, restaurants with drive-thrus have often fared better than most over the last year and a half of shutdowns, dining room restrictions, and overall uncertainty. But even as demand for this format rises and major QSRs say they’ll focus more on it in future store designs, wait times at the drive-thru have gotten longer, the accuracy of orders more dubious.

Lots of companies are throwing tech at the problem to try and solve it. One of the more interesting we’ve come across recently is from Bite Ninja, which supplies restaurants with “virtual” cashiers and drive-thru operators that can take orders remotely. This has the potential to speed up the order-taking process and simultaneously addresses the labor issues currently impacting the restaurant industry.

Bite Ninja essentially lets restaurants outsource their staffing needs for the drive-thru lane to gig workers that take orders from their own homes, or wherever they happen to be. Workers — also known as “ninjas” — sign up for a shift via the Bite Ninja platform, which manages the scheduling and logistics of getting the worker set up with their shift at the restaurant. It also trains workers on both the technology (it’s Bite Ninja’s own proprietary system) and how to take a restaurant order, both generally and for specific brands. 

Customers pulling into the drive-thru lane will see the cashier’s face appear on the ordering screen. The cashier will then walk the customer through the ordering process. From a customer experience perspective, the drive-thru process isn’t significantly altered. You just happen to be talking to a person that’s not actually at the restaurant (and through a system with reportedly better audio quality).

Bite Ninja’s cofounders are no strangers to the QSR world. The idea for the platform started at one of cofounder Will Clem’s own restaurants, Baby Jack’s in Tennessee. Clem, who is also one of the original cofounders of cultivated meat company Memphis Meats (which as since rebranded as Upside), decided to use his laptop and a videoconferencing tool one evening to take orders at his drive-thru remotely. After realizing how well the concept worked, he and cofounder Orin Wilson decided to try offering the Bite Ninja platform to the wider industry. 

Clem and Wilson say their platform can increase order accuracy and upsell rates for restaurants. For workers, it’s a way of making extra money without having to clock in at the actual restaurant. And it goes without saying that having your drive-thru cashiers work remotely is more social-distancing-friendly than on-premises work.

While the technology is currently only up and running at Baby Jack’s, Clem and Wilson told The Spoon they have been contacted by “most of the major fast food restaurants in America” and are currently onboarding a few of them. (Actual names of brands will be disclosed once a trial period is completed.) And drive-thru isn’t the only place we may soon be able to find Bite Ninja. The company says its platform is also currently available as a front-of-house kiosk, and that curbside, phone, and online ordering capabilities are in the works.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about Bite Ninja’s place in the restaurant industry, join The Spoon and guests on August 17 for a virtual Restaurant Tech Summit. Bite Ninja will join the likes of Wow Bao, Fat Brands. Sevenrooms, Kitchen United, and many more companies and individuals from the restaurant industry. Grab a ticket here, and come ready to ask some questions. 

More Headlines

86 Repairs Nabs $7.3M in Funding for Restaurant Maintenance Tech – The Chicago, Illinois-based company says the new funds will help the company build out more products for its maintenance and repairs management platform for restaurants.

Gorillas is Hiring Up to Expand its 10-Minute Grocery to San Francisco, LA and Chicago – The speedy-delivery service is prepping to make a move out west and hiring for a number of different positions across the state of California.

FreshRealm Raises $32M for Fresh, Prepared Meals – This most recent round of funding will be used to expand FreshRealm’s production facilities, with the goal of opening additional facilities throughout the country for increased distribution. 

Grocery, Meet the Ghost Kitchen

One year ago, Euromonitor International predicted the ghost kitchen market could be worth $1 trillion by 2030. 

The prediction, made by Euromonitor’s Global Lead for Food & Beverage Michael Schaefer, reverberated around a restaurant industry that was still deep in the midst of dining room shutdowns and restrictions related to a global pandemic. Little wonder that from that point on, many saw ghost kitchens as a kind of savior for the restaurant industry.

But Schaefer and Euromonitor were looking way beyond restaurants when they made their mega-prediction. At the time, (and later on at SKS 2020), Schaefer suggested the ghost kitchen market could reach $1 trillion because it will grow to encompass all manner of foodservice businesses: grocery outlets, dark convenience stores, and ready-made meals, in addition to restaurants. In other words, restaurants alone won’t push the market to the $1 trillion mark. Instead, it will get there because the lines between ghost kitchens, groceries, and the like will become less defined over time.

That already happening, actually, and was illustrated again recently with GoPuff’s announcement that it’s hiring staff for ghost kitchens. 

GoPuff isn’t a restaurant in any shape or form. It’s a new kind of grocery delivery service that operates in dense residential areas and promises to deliver food items to customers’ doorsteps 24/7 in roughly 30 minutes or less on average. The company’s $1.5 billion fundraise from earlier this year should indicate the popularity that the speedy-grocery-delivery segment currently enjoys. 

But GoPuff’s hiring advertisement calls for chefs as well, which suggests the company wants to add some restaurant concepts to its offerings. GoPuff isn’t alone in this. DoorDash, which began life as a restaurant delivery service, opened its own ghost kitchen in 2019 and now also operates “ghost convenience stores,” which are just as they sound. A Canadian company that’s just called Ghost Kitchens carries limited offerings from QSRs along with a mix of easy-to-fulfill grocery and convenience items like ice cream pints and frozen veggie burgers. ClusterTruck has its own virtual restaurant menu but also operates out of Kroger locations. And there are companies like C3, which operate delivery-only restaurants out of a range of physical locations, including hotels, residential properties, and other non-restaurant venues.

All of these versions of the ghost kitchen prioritize speed above pretty much everything else. They also roll up neatly into a statement Schaefer made this time last year about the trajectory of ghost kitchens.

“As more and more of the foodservice environment becomes optimized for delivery, a generation of consumers growing up with smartphones becomes accustomed and habituated to being able to order literally anything from their smartphone. That is going to drive ever-more innovation,” he said.

In 2021, that innovation appears to be the speedy delivery service. As companies further blur the lines between the ghost kitchen, the grocery, and the convenience store, they’ll launch new formats that are less about having a food experience and more about getting a food item in one’s hands as fast as humanly and technologically possible.   

More Headlines

Following Tensions, McDonald’s Cuts Tech Fees for Franchisees by 62 Percent – The company has changed its stance on the $423-per-month fee for franchisees after a third-party review of of billing. 

DaVinci Kitchen Equity Crowdfunds €500,000 for Robotic Pasta Kiosk – The company’s campaign ran from March to the end of June this year on Seedmatch, with 488 investors participating.

C3 Raises $80M to Expand Its Virtual Food Hall Concept – The $80 million fundraise will go towards further expansion in the form of signing leases with real estate developers at various mixed-use, retail, and hospitality spaces.

McDonald’s Drive-Thru Plans Need to Factor In Franchisees

The big to-do in the drive-thru lane of late is news that McDonald’s is testing automated ordering at 10 locations in Chicago, Illinois. 

The tech is based on an acquisition McDonald’s made in 2019 of voice-tech company Apprente. Through it, intelligent systems, rather than human beings, take the drive-thru customer’s order and send it to the kitchen for fulfillment. At an investor conference last week, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the company is seeing 85 percent accuracy on orders, with only about 20 percent of orders across the 10 stores requiring human intervention.

While Kempczinski is confident we’ll see voice-ordering at all McDonald’s drive-thrus in the next five years, he added that consumers shouldn’t expect to see it widespread as soon as next year. “There is a big leap between going from 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S. with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather — I mean, on and on and on and on,” he said at the conference.

Separate from the technical feats the system must accomplish, there is also a huge number of franchisees to consider in the process of a wide-scale implementation. There are currently 38,000 McDonald’s operating across roughly 115 countries. The majority — 93 percent — are franchisees. Getting them onboard may be no small feat, either.

Disputes over technology have created tension between McDonald’s and its franchisees for years now — going all the way back to when some franchisees argued against having to offer Uber Eats to customers. The latest disagreement between the two groups concerns a $423-per-month fee corporate has been charging franchisees to cover a $70 million lag in outstanding technology fees. The National Owners Association (NOA), a group of McDonald’s franchises that formed a few years back, has gone as far as suggesting it create a technology cooperative to give owners more control over technology-related decisions. Ernst & Young is currently conducting a third-party audit of the fees in question.

All of which is to say, now may not be a great time to attempt a major rollout of what will probably be a costly system. How costly voice ordering will be for franchisees is unclear just yet, but it would presumably require setup and maintenance costs at the very least. And as we saw with McDonald’s Dynamic Yield acquisition, implementation, and eventual downgrade, not all new tech brings a justifiable amount of return on investment for franchisees. 

Labor also presents some urgent items to consider. 

While automating drive-thru ordering via a system like Apprente’s could aid in the current struggle against the current labor shortage, franchisees will still have to spend time and money training their employees to use the tech and work alongside it. In many cases, that means training them to learn when to not get involved.

At the investor conference, Kempczinski said one learning from the existing 10 implementations of the new tech was training crew to “not want to jump in” as soon as there is a question or pause from the system. “We’ve had to do a little bit of training of ‘just keep your hands off the steering wheel, let the computer do its work,’” he told investors, adding that it took time for crew members to learn to “trust” the technology. 

While McDonald’s hasn’t officially confirmed this, it’s likely franchisees would be in charge of training for the above. That in turn would mean operators and manages must first get comfortable with the tech themselves. And, given the high rate of turnover in QSRs, this could potentially eat up a lot of time if a manager were continually having to train new hires.

Many see the digitization of the drive-thru as essential. The drive-thru lane has become progressively slower over the years. The pandemic didn’t help that latter point, since lockdowns turned the drive-thru into one of the main order channels for restaurants, making overall wait times even longer. Other QSRs, including Chipotle, KFC, and Burger King, have all announced plans to make their drive-thrus more high tech to speed up wait times and improve order accuracy. Clearly McDonald’s needs to compete. This time around, though, it also needs to make sure it thoroughly considers its franchisees’ needs in the process.

More Headlines

Presto Launches a Bundle of Tech Tools to Help Restaurants Reopen With Fewer Staff – Restaurant tech platform Presto today launched a new product bundle it says is meant to help restaurants keep their operations up-to-par in the midst of the ongoing labor shortage.

Tesla May Soon Open Its Own Restaurant – Tesla has filed a trademark under restaurant services, which suggests the automaker may be finally working to realize its dream of combining its charging stations with an old-school drive-in restaurant.

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. 

McDonald’s Testing AI-Powered Drive-Thrus in Chicago

McDonald’s has started testing out drive-thrus that use artificial intelligence systems, rather than humans, to take orders. CNBC reported yesterday that the new automated drive-thrus are in use at 10 Chicago McDonald’s locations.

The new system is based on the voice platform built by Apprente, which McDonald’s acquired in 2019. According to McDonald’s, restaurants using the system are seeing an 85 percent order accuracy rate, with only about one-fifth of orders requiring human intervention.

AI-powered drive-thrus can reduce customer wait times and allow restaurants to shift its in-store workforce. A computer that understands natural language is always on and available to take orders. It could also be tied in with other automated systems that know a customer’s purchasing history to automatically make recommendations. With improved understanding accuracy, a restaurant would no longer need a dedicated person to take (or confirm) a drive-thru order, allowing more people to do more customer service or expedite orders.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski told Alliance Bernstein’s Strategic Decisions conference that a big issue ahead for the AI-powered drive-thru is scaling. CNBC reports Kempczinski as saying “Now there’s a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S., with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather — and on and on and on.”

The Apprente acquisition appears to be working out better than Dynamic Yield, which McDonald’s also acquired in 2019. Dynamic Yield generated automated menu recommendations based on factors like weather, and was supposed to be integrated into self-service kiosks and drive-thrus as well. However, this tech didn’t yield the results McDonald’s was looking for and in March of this year The Wall Street Journal reported McDonald’s was looking to sell part of Dynamic Yield.

While McDonald’s Apprente acquisition may have pre-dated the pandemic, last year certainly accelerated the need for enhanced drive-thru technology as dining rooms were forced to shut down. In a February 2021 survey, BlueDot reported that 91 percent of respondents said they had visited drive-thrus the previous month and that long wait times were a “dealbreaker.” Most major QSRs have been doubling down on their drive-thru capabilities to meet this demand, adding capacity and building restaurants around takeout rather than dine-in.

In addition to adding AI assistants, McDonald’s has previously said that it will add other features to its drive-thru such as express lanes for digital orders and conveyor belts to carry food out to customers.

Kempczinski also told the conference that McDonald’s is also exploring ways to automate parts of the kitchen such as the grill or fryer. However he said any such move in the back of the house is still a more than five years out as the technology is too expensive right now.

Datassential: 10% of U.S. Restaurants Have Closed Permanently

A total of 10.2 percent of all U.S. restaurants have permanently closed since the start of the pandemic, according to new research from food industry intelligence firm Datassential.

The report finds that of the 778,807 restaurants of all types in the U.S. that were open at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 79,438 have closed for good as of today. (The figure includes restaurants launched during the pandemic.)

Food trucks have suffered the most of any category, with 22.5 percent of them permanently shuttered. Chains with less than 501 units have also seen high rates of permanent closures, and the report finds that chains with between 51 and 100 units have see the highest closure rate (16.2 percent).

Unsurprisingly, larger QSR chains have come out of the last year with the fewest closures: 9.8 percent. Because these businesses were already set up to cater to off-premises orders like takeout and drive-thru, they were inherently better able to weather the figurative storm that shuttered dining rooms in 2020 and forced an industry-wide shift to off-premises formats. As well, large QSR brands like Chipotle or McDonald’s had the money to further invest in digital ordering tools and new(ish) formats like delivery. 

These companies are also the ones currently leading a quasi-reinvention of the fast food format. Burger King, Shake Shack, the aforementioned brands, and many others have in recent months released designs for new store formats that emphasize more drive-thru lanes, less dining room space, and more ways to automate the order and pickup process. (Conveyor belts!)

Meanwhile, the Small Business Administration will start taking applications next month for grants from the $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund. Restaurants, bars, and other foodservice establishments that are not publicly traded and have fewer than 20 locations are eligible to apply.

Bluestone Lane Expands Its Tech-Enabled Cafes, Adds Drive-Thru Lanes

Bluestone Lane, a coffee chain known for healthy eats and Australian hospitality, announced this week it is expanding beyond major urban centers in the U.S. and will be in suburban locations around the country by the end of 2021.

The chain, founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York City, currently operates more than 50 locations around the U.S., including those in NYC, California, and Washington, D.C. It also has a few locations in Canada. New locations are slated for Manhattan, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but the company is also moving outside of major cities, partially in response to the pandemic-induced mass exodus to the suburbs that’s been happening for some months.

New Bluestone Lane locations will include parts of Orange County and San Diego, suburbs of New York and DC, as well as the chain’s first-ever cafes in Texas.

Bluestone is one of those smaller restaurant chains that was able to quickly react to the pandemic and keep business alive as a result. When we spoke in July of last year, CEO Nicholas Stone told me the company pivoted all of its locations to takeout formats and pieced together a tech stack to build its own in-house app to enable faster service for customers. Multiple different third-party software pieces help power the experience, which, from a customer point of view, is as seamless as any other well-made ordering out there nowadays. Which just goes to show, you don’t need to spend millions of dollars to rig up an effective in-house order and payments platform.

Stone told me last year that the company will continue its focus on tech for the foreseeable future. Supporting that statement, digital ordering will be the norm at new locations Blue Stone opens this year. The company said this week it has also successfully piloted a “mobile-enabled drive-thru experience” in Los Altos, California, and will bring that format to other suburban locations in the future.    

7-Eleven Is Adding Drive-Thrus to Its Restaurant Business

Neither dine-in restaurants nor drive-thrus are commonly associated with the name 7-Eleven, but that many not be the case for long. The convenience store chain announced this week that its first-ever Laredo Taco Company restaurant with a drive-thru is open for business in Dallas, Texas. 7-Eleven purchased South Texas chain Laredo Taco in 2018 and has been slowly expanding it in stores since. This is the first time a drive-thru lane has made an appearance at a corporate-owned 7-Eleven store.

7-Eleven purchased the Laredo Taco Company, along with Stripes convenience stores, in 2018 from Sunoco. The restaurant serves up quick-service Mexican food, which customers can order either in the drive-thru lane or for dine-in seating at this new location. Alcoholic beverages are also available for those eating at the restaurant. For those driving thru, the famous 7-Eleven Slurpee is available along with enough specialty beverages to rival a Dunkin’ location.

The restaurant shares space with a new 7-Eleven Evolution Store. As its name suggests, the company’s Evolution stores are a new take on the concept of a convenience mart and a testing ground for the company’s new store formats and technologies, including restaurants. 7-Eleven currently has six of these stores open in the U.S., with three of them being Dallas.

For this newest store, 7-Eleven is also testing its mobile checkout system, where customers skip the cashier line entirely and simply pay for goods on their phones via the 7-Eleven app. Products from the store, including meals from the Laredo Taco Company, are also available for delivery. 

Outside of the Laredo Taco Company restaurants, 7-Eleven has offered delivery from its convenience stores for a few years now. In 2020, the chain expanded those capabilities last year through partnerships with Instacart and DoorDash.

Meanwhile, the lines between QSR, convenience mart, and grocery store continue to overlap. Wawa also has a delivery partnership with DoorDash and has added plant-based meals and other non-convenience-store food to its roster. The concept of the “ghost convenience store,” a delivery-only mashup of a convenience store, grocery, and restaurant, has also become popular in the last year thanks to DoorDash and, across the Atlantic, delivery service Glovo.

7-Eleven will continue building out its delivery, but also has big plans for its Evolution stores. Future stores are slated to open later this year in North Texas and Manassas, Virginia, as well as other yet-to-be-named locations.

Taco Bell Will Expand To-Go Centric Concepts for Future Stores

Taco Bell today became the latest QSR brand to unveil plans for digital-centric store formats that emphasize off-premises meal formats like takeout, curbside pickup, and delivery, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The biggest forthcoming development for Taco Bell store design is a major expansion of the brand’s Go Mobile concept, which launched last year. Go Mobile stores feature things like multiple drive-thru lanes, “bellhops” for curbside pickup orders, and minimal space for dining in. The concept, unveiled last summer, when cases of COVID-19 were high in the U.S., seems a direct response to the restaurant industry’s seismic shift towards both digital ordering and off-premises meals. “While the brand will continue building destination restaurants, it will simultaneously prioritize digital elements to maximize efficiency for on-the-go customers,” the company said in today’s press release.

Besides GoMobile, Taco Bell also cited a kiosk-only concept set to open in Manhattan, as well as new iterations of its drive-thru Cantina. In 2020, Taco Bell merged its traditional drive-thru concept with its Cantina concept at a location in Danville, California run by Taco Bell franchisee Diversified Restaurant Group. The restaurant offers the full Taco Bell menu along with a full bar for dine-in customers (when they can actually dine in), an outdoor fire pit, and a games area. More such locations are planned for the future.

Revamping store formats has been one of the major trends to come out of the last year for QSRs. From Burger King to McDonald’s to Sonic, there are many different iterations on the concept of retrofitting the QSR for the pandemic era. All share some common denominators, including more curbside pickup, less dining room space, and lots and lots of drive-thru lanes.

Taco Bell is no exception to this, as the above concepts underscore. The company did not provide any specific timeframes for these developments, saying only that it plans to have a total of 10,000 locations — including old and new — open globally in this decade.

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.

Survey: Curbside, Drive-Thru Usage High But Long Wait Times Are a ‘Dealbreaker’

Restaurant-goers continue to head to the drive-thru in droves, according to new survey data from mobile location tech company Bluedot. In the last month, 91 percent of respondents said they visited the drive-thru. An additional 67 percent are getting curbside pickup “as often or more frequently” now compared to 45 percent from last April.

The data is from the third installment of Bluedot’s four-part “State of What Feeds Us” report examining consumer preferences around the restaurant experience, both during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. As Bluedot is a restaurant-industry-focused tech company (KFC, McDonald’s, and Dunkin’ are among its clients), a lot of the information in these reports is around mobile app usage. However, the data also examines some broader trends that have been happening in the restaurant biz over the last several months, including those around drive-thru and curbside pickup.

Though drive-thru usage dipped slightly in January 2021, the number of visits “remain strikingly high,” according to the report: “Consumer drive-thru visits dipped slightly from the last report with a decrease to 68% of those visiting as often or more frequently in January from 74% in August.” That 68 percent, however, is still a 26 percent increase from April 2020 in terms of customers regularly going to the drive-thru.

Those numbers are reflected in recent strategies from restaurants — especially QSRs — to focus more on providing solid drive-thru experiences for customers. Chains like McDonald’s and Burger King, which have always relied on drive-thru for a percentage of sales, are redesigning their entire store formats to accommodate more drive-thru orders. Other chains, notably Chipotle and Shake Shack, are adding the format as an important element to their digital strategies for the first time.

Curbside pickup is a newer entrant to the restaurant industry, but from Bluedot’s numbers a no less important one when it comes to customer expectations. A total of 67 percent of consumers are now picking up via curbside compared to just 45 percent in April 2020. 

Consumers expect to the restaurant’s app to check them in automatically upon arrival at the restaurant and for the staff to bring out their food. Few chains with curbside pickup actually do this right now. Panera is the one major exception, as the company integrated geofencing technology into its curbside process last year that automatically notifies staff when a customer has arrived.

Automatic checkins enabled by tech would also speed up the entire curbside pickup experience, something consumers feel needs to happen in order to improve the experience. Ditto for drive thru. Bluedot’s survey found that “long wait times and lines are a deal breaker,” with 77 percent of respondents saying they would leave or consider leaving if they see a long line. Additionally, consumers expect to wait no more than six minutes, down from 10 minutes in August.

Providing faster service is an element restaurants of all shapes and sizes will have to continue to prioritize for the foreseeable future. As Bluedot and countless others point out, consumer preference for off-premises formats isn’t going away once the pandemic does. The sheer number of QSRs redesigning their physical spaces to be more to-go-friendly is testament to that. Whether those moves as well as more tech can actually cut wait times down remains to be seen.