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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

geofencing

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. 

Domino’s Takes a Cue From Grocery With Its New Carside Delivery Feature

Mega pizza chain Domino’s today launched yet-another way for mobile order customers to retrieve their pies. “Domino’s Carside Delivery” is now available across the U.S., according to a company press release. 

The carside delivery option functions just as you would expect. It works only for those ordering via the Domino’s mobile app, right now between the hours of 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. Customers order and pay for their pizza, and also give their vehicle color, make, and model, which Domino’s will use to identify them when they arrive at the store. Customers also note where they want the order placed: trunk, back seat, etc. Upon arriving, they can hit the “I’m here” button on the Domino’s Tracker app and a staff will bring their pizza out. 

“It’s carryout, delivered,” Dennis Maloney, Domino’s senior vice president and chief innovation officer, said in today’s press release. 

But could it be simpler? Over in the grocery sector, major retailers like Safeway and Walmart have seen demand for their versions of carside pickup spike during the pandemic. My colleague Chris Albrecht has tried a bunch of them and found that Walmart’s is the fastest and simplest because of the geofencing technology the company adds to the pickup process. There is no number to call, no “I’m here” button to hit. Walmart’s system simply knows when you’ve arrived and alerts the staff so they can bring out your groceries.

Panera has also implemented geofencing for its curbside pickup process, which suggests there’s a future for it in the restaurant industry, especially with dining rooms closing again and off-premises still being the major lifeline for business.

One of the perks of geofencing technology is that restaurants (or grocers) can move more customers through faster. For Domino’s, that would translate into selling more pies. It could also help the chain better predict demand because geofencing would give it access to data that says how far people are traveling to get to the store, how long it takes them, etc.

Domino’s made no mention of geofencing tech in today’s announcement, but it would not be surprising to see the chain adopt it in the future to remove an extra step — the “I’m here” button — from the curbside process.

Ok so having to hit an “I’m here” button is not an actual problem to have in the grand scheme of things, which is to say, I doubt it will hinder customers from ordering carside via Domino’s. But the quest for simplicity in the curbside/carside pickup process grows every more important for restaurants, and before any technology around it gets standardized, we’ll see many different features claiming to be the simplest solution out there.

Be Like Walmart and Swing for the Geofences

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Prior to the pandemic, I never grocery shopped at Walmart. It was too far away and I wanted to support my local supermarket. Throughout this pandemic, however, I’ve been at Walmart every week for my curbside grocery pickups. One reasons I’m such a frequent Walmarter now is that they make the whole process of getting groceries via curbside easy. I place my order, schedule my pickup time and when my groceries are ready, they send me a notification on my phone.

Part of that notification asks me to check-in with the Walmart app to let the store know I’m on my way. As I pull into their parking lot, the app automatically recognizes that I’ve arrived, thanks to the GPS on my phone and Walmart’s geofencing technology. Once I specify my parking stall, a Walmart staffer is out with my order and bada-boom, bada-bing, in minutes my trunk is loaded, no human contact has occurred and I’m on my way back home to shelter in place for another week.

Contrast Walmart with the curbside pickup experience at my local Safeway, which is a lot closer than the Walmart but does not have geofencing in its app. When I arrive at the store, I have to call a special number to let them know I’ve arrived, they ask me what stall I’m in and then send someone with my order out. Obviously my calling a number isn’t a huge deal, but it’s one extra step, and one more thing for a human staffer at Safeway to deal with all day while dealing with all the other changes this pandemic has brought with it.

Contactless is going to be the word of 2020, especially as it relates to food delivery and curbside pickup, and geofencing is going to play an increasingly important part of that. Yesterday, Panera announced geofence-enabled curbside pickup for orders, and IBM has been touting Safe Queue, a virtual line app powered in part by geofencing that was created for Big Blue’s Call for Code Global Challenge contest.

As a technology, geofencing has actually been around for long time. But it will take on more importance as restaurants and grocers look to efficiently maximize their revenues while reducing human-to-human contact. Restaurants that must operate at reduced dine-in capacity need a robust off-premises plan, including curbside pickup, and people are still scared of going into the grocery store itself, requiring pickup options as well.

Geofencing means orders can be fulfilled more quickly because the restaurant or supermarket knows when you’ve arrived. Walmart may have huge parking lots and plenty of space for cars pickup up orders, but a lot of restaurants and independent grocers don’t. They’ll need to make the most of their physical takeout/pickup space. The faster a curbside order is handed off, the faster cars turn over in the parking lot and the more orders can be fulfilled.

There is obviously a privacy tradeoff with geofencing. Some people may not want to hand over their location data to Walmart, Panera or whomever, and that’s okay. Different strokes and all. Privacy is a constant question we come up against in this connected world, and we should definitely hold businesses accountable to being good stewards of our data.

There are lots of changes consumer facing food businesses will need to make (and re-make) in order to survive this pandemic. But if curbside pickups are part of your plan, you should fire up the geofencing now.

Woot! Founder Launches Pasta by Mail

It kinda makes sense that Matt Rutledge, the founder of Woot!, an e-commerce site known for its sense of humor, would choose noodles for a food-related project. I mean, noodles are funny, especially the way Rutledge is selling them.

Rutledge launched PastaDrop, a “pasta as a service” online pop-up that lets you buy random amounts of pasta and have it sent to friends. PastaDrop determines the quantity of noodles being shipped and hilarity ensues (again, because noodles = funny).

Spoon founder Mike Wolf reached out to Rutledge for an email interview to find out more about PastaDrop. You should read the whole exchange (it’s very entertaining), but here’s an amuse-bouche to get you started:

Wolf: Why pasta?

This is our first Pasta experience! What a product! There is a subset of variety with personal opinion. There are amazing recipes to share. It’s a comfort food. It has a long shelf life and can be transported without much risk of damage. It is quite dense and therefore efficient to ship; hundreds of servings can fit in a box. Best of all it can be funny in mass quantities! Oh, and there are pasta puns — we love puns!

Sign Up for Spoon Plus, Our New Membership Insights & Virtual Events Community

Last week we announced the launch of Spoon Plus, our new membership community that gives you exclusive deep dives on food tech trends, original market research, and virtual events with the smartest people in the industry.

You can read Mike’s post about the launch of Plus here to learn about why we’re so excited about it.

There’s a plan for every budget, and if you buy an annual subscription, you get a ticket to Smart Kitchen Summit Virtual 2020, the industry-leading global food tech summit.

Spoon Plus is our chance and yours to connect on a deeper level and engage with the issues in a more meaningful way. We are offering a one-time charter member discount of 40% for those that join by the end of this week. Join today and use coupon code LAUNCH at check out.

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Panera Launches Geofence-Enabled Curbside Pickup

Even as dining rooms slowly reopen, many chains and restaurants are emphasizing curbside pickup when it comes to how customers can get their food. Case in point: today, sandwich/bakery chain Panera announced a new curbside pickup service that, among other things, offers some technological bells and whistles meant to speed up the process.

The Panera Curbside process includes steps you’ll find in many curbside operations these days. Customers order via the Panera app and select Panera Curbside as their delivery option, then include their vehicle’s make, model, and color in the Special Instructions field. For those that prefer it, there’s a standard “I’m here” button they can tap upon arrival. But Panera has also introduced geofencing technology to its curbside process that will immediately notify the restaurant when a guest has arrived, rather than that customer having to find and click a button. Customers, of course, need to be comfortable with getting recognized by a technology system, and so the service is opt in at the moment. 

According to today’s press release, part of the reason Panera is launching curbside pickup is to alleviate some of the congestion that’s been happening in drive-thru lines lately. Drive-thrus have needed an overhaul for some time, as wait times have increased considerably over the last decade. The pandemic just made everything worse. Allowing customers to order ahead or simply pull into a parking space and order directly from their phones could trim down those drive-thru lines.

Over the long term, curbside pickup could and most likely will be a mainstay in terms of ordering options for customers. It wouldn’t be surprising if, at some point soon, companies begin to integrate other technologies, like AI-enabled license plate recognition, into the process.

Curbside is also an obvious substitution for pickup orders, where a customer walks into the restaurant and collects the meal themselves. Though dining rooms (along with everything else) are reopening, many customers will be wary for some time to come about spending too much time in a restaurant, even one with reduced capacity. 

And while curbside will be an important technology to restaurants going forward, it has to actually deliver on its promise of saving time and operational stress in order to be worthwhile to restaurants. A geofence-enhanced app that tells restaurants when a customer has arrived sounds helpful. The test will be whether those notifications help staff or just further overwhelm them, as has been the case at some restaurants.

For its part, Panera already had a robust digital and off-premises strategy at work before the pandemic, which means its back-of-house operations are probably equipped to easily ingest a new technology and ordering option.