• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Skip to navigation
Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Connect
    • Custom Events
    • Slack
    • RSS
    • Send us a Tip
  • Advertise
  • Consulting
  • About
The Spoon
  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Advertise
  • About

Facebook Messenger

June 18, 2020

Chipotle Forges New Ways to Reach Digital Customers With Its Concierge Bot

The pandemic hasn’t done much to slow Chipotle’s digital business, which just had its best quarter ever in terms of sales. In the wake of that, the chain has steadily continued releasing new features to its app and this week brought a few more, including the launch of the Chipotle app in Canada and yet-more features for all users of the chain’s mobile app.

The standout of those new features is Pepper, a so-called Concierge Bot, which customers can use via Facebook Messenger to order food. Once a user selects the “message us” button on Chipotle’s Facebook page and gives Pepper their location, the bot will pick the nearest available Chipotle store and walk the customer through the order process. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, that process is supposed to mirror Chipotle’s in-restaurant make line, where guests move down the assembly line specifying which ingredients they want and how much of each to include. Alternatively, customers can use a natural language option and simply describe what they want to Pepper. Guests can pay directly through Pepper.

This new channel for customers to order, pay, and receive their meals introduces Chipotle’s mobile order ecosystem to yet-another potential digital audience. And while Facebook is a third-party platform, orders placed via Pepper get funneled through Chipotle’s own Page, allowing the restaurant to directly interact with those customers. Chipotle said in its release today that this new feature is meant to make “online ordering easier and more convenient for fans.” But I’ll wager it’s as much about taking back control of customer relationships (and data) as it is about giving Facebook diehards an easy way to order burritos.

The addition of Pepper also makes Chipotle the latest big-name restaurant chain to start reeling certain parts of delivery and digital ordering back under its own roof. For the last few years, managing the order-pay-dropoff process for off-premises orders has largely been the territory of third-party services like DoorDash and Uber Eats. But in the last few months, that’s started to change. Several chains, including Panera and Bloomin’ Brands restaurants, use hybrid delivery strategies, where third parties only handle a piece of the delivery operation. In some cases that’s the technical infrastructure; in others, it’s supplying drivers for the last mile. Others, notably Panda Express this week, have launched their own in-house delivery stack that manages the entire process, from ordering to dropping off.

For a deep-pocketed brand like Chipotle, this business of slowly shifting off-premises in-house is probably most about getting back control of customer relationships. The pandemic has forced restaurants to rely a whole lot more on their digital properties. Through those properties, brands must be able to offer contactless ordering and payment functionalities, and they must be able to clearly communicate with customers about those features. That’s a little tough to do if your entire customer base resides on a third-party platform like DoorDash that’s merely telling you to make the food. As one industry executive noted when we spoke a couple months back, restaurants ” need to rethink how they’re connecting digitally with their customers.”

Other announcements from Chipotle this week also emphasized Chipotle’s digital strategy and how it wants to connect with its customers in a post-pandemic restaurant industry. As well as Pepper, Chipotle also released a new group-ordering feature where multiple people can hop on the same order and everyone has the ability to track their food. 

For all digital orders placed via the Chipotle app, guests will be able to round up their order total to the next highest dollar amount and donate the extra to “organizations advocating against issues like systematic racism and inequality,” according to the press release. Chipotle will kick this program off with donations to the National Urban League.

And, as mentioned above, Canadian Chipotle fans can now use the Chipotle app or order food via Chipotle.ca, Uber Eats, and DoorDash.

Chipotle’s business didn’t suffer terribly during shelter-in-place orders, largely because so much of the chain’s work over the last two years has been around developing an insanely ambitious digital strategy. This week’s news suggests the company isn’t planning to rest on its laurels anytime soon.

June 23, 2017

Behind The Bot: Meet Sure, A Chatbot That Recommends Instagram Food Hotspots

While some people get downright grumpy when it comes to seeing food pics posted in their Facebook and Instagram feeds, I’m one of those that actually enjoys them. In fact, when I see someone showing off a tasty platter from a local restaurant on Instagram, I’ll often make a mental note to check that place out if it’s in my town or somewhere I plan on visiting soon.

If you use Instagram food posts as a restaurant discovery tool like me, I have good news: there’s now a bot that looks for Instagram hotspots and surfaces them in the form of restaurant recommendations. The chatbot is called Sure, and it’s a Facebook Messenger chatbot that curates the most Instagrammed food and drink spots in your neighborhood.

I interviewed the Juraj Pal, the CEO of Sure, to hear about how the idea for the bot came together.

Where did you get the idea for your bot?

Our motivation was simple. We weren’t satisfied with the existing restaurant discovery and travel apps and we quickly started believing that we can build a much better product for the next generation, already spending more time in messaging apps.

Having grown up with internet, we have soon learnt that virtually anything was accessible on our fingertips. It opened up a whole world of opportunities for us. But at the same, it made us feel overwhelmed with choices and options.

At first we actually started with a spreadsheet full of restaurants, cafes and bars that we curated ourselves. And to validate the idea, we launched a simple SMS bot where users would text our number and we would reply manually to each message, recommending a spot from our spreadsheet.

By tying visual social content to specific food locations, are you tapping into how you think this is how Millennials and others choose food?

We knew that others tried to solve this problem and the space is crowded with big players like Yelp or Foursquare. But we truly believe that for the new generation, they just don’t get it.

We quickly learned that millennials trust their friends and influencers more than reviews from strangers on Yelp. Rather than providing endless results like Google, we turned to Instagram as our primary source of all recommendations.

Why did you choose to use Facebook Messenger vs other platforms?

Other than having 1.2B monthly active users, Facebook Messenger is inherently social which makes it easy for people to share with their friends.

The social aspect has however been important also from another angle. When it comes to choosing a place to eat out, majority of the people ask their friends or influencers who they can relate to. By being on a platform where our users naturally chat with their friends, chatbot has the potential to blur the lines between tech algorithms and word of mouth recommendations.

What is unique about developing for a chatbot vs. other AI platforms?

We’ve seen different roles evolve as we were building the chatbot. We for example spend much more time on copywriting and building the bot’s persona and empathy than designing flows.

Building chatbots also costs less and happens much faster. And this in turn allows us to ship our product faster and iterate based on feedback we get. And what I love the most about this experimentation is that we’re focused on value delivery, rather than building potentially useless product features.

Why a food-focused bot?

We decided to start by answering the ‘Where shall we eat?’ question once and for all. Food is a highly personal choice that represents who we are and ties us with a community. Also, in the digitalised world we live in today, eating out is one of the few experiences that we cannot replicate online.

And since people are used to asking their friends for food recommendations on Messenger, we though we could be that concierge friend for everything when you’re out an about.

What have you learned since people have started using your bot?

A lot! There are literally 1000 ways how a person can ask for a restaurant recommendation and trying to support that with natural language processing is hard. Based on this we decided to switch to more pre-defined text and using more GUI elements.

Also, people love to test the boundaries of a bot and eventually they want to break it. Hence it’s equally important to educate our users how to talk to a bot, as it is building a responsive bot.

Finally, the speed in which we were able to capture learnings and improve the experience based on real usage was incredible. As opposed to cross-platform app development, we can instantly ship updates to all of our users without any disturbance.

Tell us a little about yourself – is this your first bot? 

I’ve founded and sold a startup in the food tech space in the past but this is my first chatbot.

What do you have in store for Sure?

After we launched on Product Hunt and expanded Sure to 22 cities around the world 2 months ago, we joined the Just Eat food tech accelerator in London.

We’re currently working on bringing the Sure experience into group chats and making it even more contextual as we grow to become the ultimate concierge for everything when you’re out and about – from choosing a restaurant to ordering an Uber to get home from a bar.

Tell us about your recently launched Sure extension for Messenger

We know that the way we discover restaurants is often by asking one of our friends. But many times, choosing a place to go with your friends can turn into a frustrating argument. This was the main motivation for launching our latest feature, the Messenger Chat Extension. This allows all our user to take the Sure bot with them to any group chat on Messenger and instantly share our recommendations with their friends. With this, we’re hoping to put an end to the “Where should we eat?” ordeal.

April 24, 2017

MasterCard Sees Bot Applications As A Way To “Go Where Consumers Are”

We know the potential for the chatbot interface to be one of the defining stories of connected living in 2017 is there. Mike has covered the variety of ways that “social messaging chatbots” will impact the smart home and of course, the smart kitchen. MasterCard isn’t new to the smart home game – you might remember that they are the financial provider backing grocery ordering on Samsung’s FamilyHub smart fridge.

They’re clearly betting on bot applications as a way to encourage the easy use of their products on the Masterpass platform. Last week at Facebook’s developer conference, MasterCard announced a chatbot for Facebook Messenger, allowing customers to order from select retail and food vendors by chatting with the AI-powered interface. Similar to the on-fridge ordering partnership on the FamilyHub, MasterCard will work with Fresh Direct for chatbot grocery needs and also announced Cheesecake Factory and Subway for takeout food services.

MasterCard has prioritized chatbot integrations, releasing its bot API to developers earlier in the year. According to their developer site, MasterCard wants to make it easy to incorporate their “digital payment technology into conversational commerce experiences.” Beyond food ordering, the platform could be used to order from any retail partner in the future – giving Facebook an easy way to compete with online commerce giants and keeping consumers on the platform longer.

Masterpass-Enabled Bots

Facebook is increasingly interested in bot technology and sees its Messenger platform as a way for brands to reinvent customer communications and e-commerce. Facebook advertising, an increasingly popular way for brands to reach consumers by taking advantage of all the data Facebook collects on its users and serving them up personalized ads. Brands that advertise and have a large presence on the platform often use Facebook Messenger to communicate with customers, sending order and shipment information after a sale and answering questions. You can envision a future where as ad served up to someone who had recently been browsing for new shoes takes them to a chatbot that can offer custom selections and complete the sale right in the interface.

The opportunities in using natural language processing and artificial intelligence to communicate with us wherever we’re used to having conversations – whether that’s via text or in different messenger apps – are huge. Since Facebook introduced the concept, over 11,000 bots have been introduced on Messenger.

Whether it’s helping consumers cook their favorite recipe, ordering food or even communicating with their home, chatbots are definitely here to stay.

Primary Sidebar

Footer

  • About
  • Sponsor the Spoon
  • The Spoon Events
  • Spoon Plus

© 2016–2025 The Spoon. All rights reserved.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
 

Loading Comments...