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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Elo

In Through the Outdoors? Restaurants Hit the Pavement as They Reopen

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Not so long ago, outdoor space at a restaurant was just a nice-to-have feature some restaurants could afford to offer. Surprise surprise (not), the pandemic is changing that. With new guidelines and requirements around safety and social distancing, more restaurant experiences are moving outdoors. And it’s not just for dine-in customers, either.

This week, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced the Shared Spaces Program, which in part allows restaurants to use public space like sidewalks, whole or partial streets, and parks to fulfill restaurant pickup orders. Restaurants can apply for a permit for free, and once the city approves dine-in service for outdoor space, those areas can be used to seat customers as well.

San Francisco isn’t alone. San Jose this month approved its “al fresco plan” that will allow restaurants to use some public spaces to fulfill takeout orders and eventually hold more seating. In Rotterdam, The Netherlands, restaurants will be allowed to convert parking spaces in front of their buildings to do the same.

While these measures could help restaurants eventually boost dine-in traffic once they reopen, at present, they may actually help restaurants run smoother to-go operations. Trying to run an ad hoc takeout business is challenging for many restaurants that have previously only operated under a dine-in model. In some cases, selling to-go orders has caused outright mayhem as crowds of people gather to wait for their to-go orders and staff dart around trying to determine which meal belongs to which angry customer.

Make no mistake: there will be operational challenges using public spaces, too. In fact if it’s not managed correctly, the whole thing could become its own social-distancing disaster. Viewed through a more optimistic lens, it could provide more space for customers and delivery drivers waiting to retrieve their orders. 

And you know what would really enhance the public spaces restaurant experience? Some technology. Earlier this week, I spoke with two companies, hardware manufacturer Elo and software startup Clicksys, about a new self-service kiosk they’re trialing at a restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden. 

In summary, the idea is to have a kiosk installed into the front wall or window of a restaurant, much like a bank ATM, so that folks passing on the street can simply stroll up, order, pay, and wait for their food without having to actually enter the restaurant.

There are a lot of good use cases for this idea, and these newfound public spaces are one of them. If we’re talking about relieving operational mayhem, an automated system would cut down on the amount of people milling around in said public space. Staff would not need to man an order station, since the kiosk processes ordering and payments. And since the system texts users when their meal is ready, those customers would be able to better time their entrance and exit and not have to stand around playing the waiting game.  

The Elo-Clicksys machine is currently only available in Europe, but there are plenty of restaurant tech companies in the U.S. that should take note of this concept. Right now, front-of-house technology is having to truly prove its worth in a world without dining rooms. Self-service kiosks (with hand sanitizer next to them, please) built for the outdoor world could prove lucrative in the coming months. 

Off-Premises Sales Are Back Up

Another reason the forthcoming Shared Spaces could get a lot of use this summer: sentiment around off-premises orders is back up. Nation’s Restaurant News reports that after taking a big dip at the beginning of May, when many restaurants began to reopen dining rooms, sales of takeout orders are back up.

Restaurant analytics firm Black Box Intelligence, which provided the source material for NRN’s post, said that early in May, customers complained of long wait times for curbside pickup orders but that “guest sentiment trends have started to recover as of week-ended May 24, with off-premise sentiment returning to similar levels as were seen in April.”

Presumably, people got excited about going back to restaurants instead of ordering takeout, then realized what a pain in the a$$ dine-in service is going to be for a long time to come. Guidelines vary from state to state in the U.S., but almost all of them include reduced capacity, reduced party sizes, no buffets, and in some cases a mask requirement. Add to that the trepidation most of us wear with our masks these days anytime we set foot in public, and it’s not exactly a recipe for a packed house.

While Black Box didn’t cite the specific reason for the uptick in off-premises orders this month, my guess is that folks are still more comfortable waiting for a to-go box than eating at a sparsely populated dining room fraught with anxiety. 

DoorDash Launches an E-commerce Platform for Indie Restaurants

Ever looking to capitalize on this boost in off-premises orders, DoorDash this week announced a new e-commerce platform for independent restaurants. It’s called the DoorDash Storefront, and it’s supposed to offer restaurants a way to build out their own digital storefronts through which they can process orders and payments. Restaurant sign up with the platform and get their own website/app for takeout and delivery orders — powered, of course, by DoorDash’s system. The digital storefront also plugs into DoorDash’s fulfillment network of drivers, so the food can actually get delivered.

DoorDash is actually addressing a need here. Sophisticated mobile apps that process orders, payments, and loyalty points are expensive and complicated to build. Small restaurants and restaurant chains generally can’t afford them, which is a negative in a restaurant industry that was just forced to go almost entirely off-premises. DoorDash said in a press release that about 40 percent of its restaurant customers do not have their own e-commerce platform.

What isn’t mentioned is what the storefronts will cost the restaurants. In bold-faced text, the company’s blog post stated that restaurants “control and own the customer experience.” It does not say customers own the data — a major issue with using a third-party delivery platform — nor does it go into exactly how the restaurant owns the customer experience. However, it’s worth noting that the blog post also states that restaurants “do not pay a commission to DoorDash on orders they receive through their Storefront.” 

DoorDash has actually been less awful to restaurants than its third-party competitors during the pandemic. The company waived commission fees for a time independent restaurants when the dining room shutdowns first took place. Still, commission fees are coming back, and offering restaurants their own digital storefronts means those restaurants will be firmly locked into the DoorDash ecosystem when it’s time to pay up.

All of which is to say, read the company’s seemingly altruistic blog post with a magnifying glass in one hand and a dose of healthy skepticism in the other.   

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Off-Premises and Outside: Two Tech Companies Have a New Take on the Standard Self-Service Kiosk

Of all the challenges restaurants face right now, this is one of the biggest: being able to serve enough customers to generate some kind of revenue while still keeping everyone safe and socially distant.

Touchscreen technology shared among clientele isn’t the first thing that springs to mind to combat the issue. But two companies, international hardware manufacturer Elo and Swedish software startup Clicksys, have devised a way to make the concept more palatable to wary restaurant customers and help businesses fulfill more orders in the process. Combining their respective technologies, the two companies have created a touchscreen kiosk that allows customers to self-order without ever setting foot inside the restaurant.

Over a Zoom chat this week, Clicksys’ CEO Aleksandar Goga and Sonal Apte, Elo’s VP of Retail and Hospitality Solutions, explained to me how the system works. 

The kiosk uses an open frame capacitative touchscreen monitor that can be installed flush against a windowpane. Because the touchscreen is projected capacitative, it can sense touch even through thick glass, such as a window. That means restaurants can display a kiosk to the outside world without actually putting the machine outside. 

In the restaurant world, one use case for the technology is with Sushishop in Stockholm. The restaurant is one of those small establishments in the middle of the city that holds few tables and normally accommodates a line of about nine people inside waiting for pickup orders. After social distancing guidelines, that meant Sushishop was only allowed to accommodate four people inside — not exactly a booming business model.

The restaurant teamed up with Clicksys and Elo and installed a kiosk against its front window, providing a way for customers to place orders without actually having to go inside.

Mikael Shaaya, the owner of Sushishop, told me over email that when coronavirus first hit, the restaurant was not able to serve any customers because of its inherently limited capacity. “Thanks to Clicksys and Elo, we can handle more guests while still being able to more easily follow the rules of the public health authority,” he wrote. Guests can order and receive their food outside and are “happy they don’t have to crowd into the restaurant.”

A small shop in a city center is one use case for the technology, and a good one. These kiosks could also have a huge impact on restaurants outside dense urban centers, where either drive-thru congestion needs to be alleviated or people would prefer to just order from an outdoor kiosk and then wait in their car for their food. Goga likens it to a more digitized version of Sonic, where customers can park a car, order via the touchscreen, then wait until a staff person brings out their meal.  

For restaurants, another plus is that they don’t need their own digital properties to power the order and pay functions of the kiosk. As we discus a lot, sophisticated mobile apps and order systems a la Starbucks or McDonald’s are financially out of reach for smaller restaurants and even smaller chains. A mom-and-pop store that simply needs a way to efficiently offer takeout orders could install the touchscreen, which would include their logo and branding throughout the user interface. As a bonus, customers would not have to download yet-another app with which to order food. The system simply collects a user’s phone number and sends them a text once the order is ready.

The kiosks haven’t come stateside yet, though they may at some point in the future. Goga said right now the company has its sights set on London, then the wider U.K. for the near-term future.

Of course, all this talk of touchscreens during a pandemic brings up questions of safety and cleanliness. Will customers want to order from a screen 10 people have touched before them, even if through glass?

“What I see here is that the fear of meeting people is bigger than having to touch something,” said Goga. “Better to touch something and be alone than to stand in front of another person.”

Apte added that when it comes to sanitization, social distancing, and the new standards the pandemic has placed on the restaurant industry, there are three Cs to keep in mind. The first is “clean frequently.” “Think about every touchpoint on that journey,” she says. After that, restaurants should “communicate that cleaning” with their customers. Finally, “Allow your customers control.” For example, Sushishop offers a hand sanitizer station next to the kiosk.

Practices like the ones above will be important for restaurants moving forward when it comes to reassuring customers and also offering them alternatives to sitting in the dining room. In the U.S., states have allowed dining rooms to reopen, but at a reduced capacity that’s as low as 25 percent in some cases. Countries like Spain and Italy are allowing some areas to reopen, but again, with reduced capacity and in some cases only outdoor seating. Even a place like Sweden, which did not shut down like other countries, has enacted social distancing guidelines for bars, cafes, and restaurants. Meanwhile, 66 percent of U.S. consumers recently polled said they would not immediately go back to a restaurant once it reopens.

In all likelihood, the practical nature of kiosks in terms of being a digital ordering device will outweigh concerns about safety in the long term. With off-premises orders expected to drive the bulk of restaurant sales over the next decade, restaurants small and large will need to offer some kind of kiosk technology to accommodate spur-of-the moment orders from customers driving by in their cars or passing on the sidewalk outside. And the pandemic has, in Apte’s words, “greatly accelerated digital transformation.” For the hundreds of thousands of restaurants that aren’t digital behemoths like Chipotle or McDonald’s, a kiosk like this one could go a long way in helping them make that transformation.