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off-premises orders

The Case for More Conveyor Belts in Restaurants

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Spoon Editor in Chief Chris Albrecht posed an interesting question this week for restaurants to consider: Will we see more conveyor belt-style food delivery systems as consumers head back to dining rooms?

The short answer is yes. For now, the concept is most associated with sushi. But new developments in restaurant tech and operations over the last year suggest the conveyor belt will have many uses for many different food types moving forward — sushi or otherwise.

Conveyor belt sushi, better known as kaiten sushi, emerged in the 1950s when an Osaka, Japan restauranteur named Yoshiaki Shiraishi developed the concept to keep labor costs down at his restaurant and ensure quick service for customers.

Labor costs and shortages as well as improving speed of service are two major priorities in the restaurant industry right now, especially as restaurants continue to struggle financially from the pandemic and at the same time have to juggle multiple meal formats, from in-dining room to curbside pickup to drive-thru. And seeing as we’re still in a pandemic, many see limiting the human-to-human contact as another necessary priority. 

Managed properly, conveyor belt systems could easily address all three of the above elements: labor, speed, and safety. In a growing number of cases, they already do.

UK-based chain YO! (née Yo! Sushi) helped to popularize the conveyor belt concept in Britain long before the pandemic. And it seems the chain has made some some pandemic-related changes to its system over the last few months, including integrating it with QR code-based digital ordering. Rather than customers choosing what they want from a rotating display, they scan a QR code at the restaurant and choose and pay for items digitally. The conveyor belt then brings chosen items to customers. Speaking to BBC in 2020, Yo Sushi CEO Richard Hodgson said the belt system takes the place of a waiter, and “rather than using it to showcase the food, we’re using it to deliver the food straight to you.” 

Kaiten sushi never really went out of vogue, so it’s unsurprising we’re seeing more of these systems pop up in the age of social distancing. But the concept is rapidly spreading outside of sushi restaurants, too. As Chris noted a few in his post:

At the Country Garden robot restaurant complex in China, food is carried from the kitchen to the table via an overhead rail system and then dropped down by tether to the customer. At Alibaba’s Robot.he restaurant, also in China, automated robots on tracks deliver food directly to a table. The Robo Cafe in Dubai has a similar system of Roomba-like robot waiters for customers sitting at the counter.

Down the street from me, in Nashville, Tennessee, a mother-daughter duo opened a cheese-and-charcuterie conveyor belt restaurant called Culture + Co.

And with more restaurant orders going off-premises, the conveyor belt is becoming a back-of-house staple, too. Crave Collective, a combination ghost kitchen/virtual restaurant, runs a conveyor belt system through the middle of its facility that shuttles delivery orders to drivers waiting to deliver the food. Both Burger King and McDonald’s have introduced the conveyor belt as a delivery mechanism for getting food from the kitchen to drive-thru and/or pickup customers, though both examples are still just design concepts right now.

It goes hand-in-hand with the move towards less interaction between staff and customers, or at least less handing back and forth of physical things. As some of the above examples show, the format seems especially well suited to getting off-premises meals to drive-thru and curbside customers. I’m not the only one to think so, either. A growing number of restaurants, ghost kitchen operators, and other individuals in restaurant tech have all suggested we’ll see the conveyor belt in more of these scenarios in the future in addition to having them in the dining room.

If you’re interested in the future of restaurant automation, you should attend our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics virtual conference on May 18! Get your ticket today!

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Drive-in burger icon Sonic is currently testing in-app tipping features through which customers can tip the folks that bring out their food. The company said being able to tip Sonic’s so-called “bellhops” via the chain’s app has been one of the top two requests from customers.

P.F. Chang’s announced this week a partnership with guest engagement and CRM platform Wisely. The latter provides marketing automation tools as well as table and waitlist management features to restaurants, with the underlying goal of creating “more personalized” restaurant experiences for guests.  

Major U.S. restaurant chains reported sales declines in February according to the latest update from NPD’s CREST Performance Alerts. The decline was in no small part due to snowstorms, rainfall, and ice in many parts of the country during the month of February. 

Report: November Was ‘The Worst Month’ For Restaurant Industry Sales Since August

Restaurant sales struggled in November, according to Black Box Intelligence, which shared the information in a post on Nation’s Restaurant News this week. The stumble coincides with both rising cases of COVID-19 and colder weather that has made outdoor dining unrealistic. 

From Black Box Intelligence: 

Same-store sales growth was -10.3%, which represented a 3.8 percentage-point drop from October’s year-over-year sales growth rate. November’s -16.3% same-store traffic fell by 3.3 percentage points compared to the previous month’s performance. This was the worst month for the industry since August based on year-over-year losses in sales and traffic.

Sales worsened throughout November, with same-store sales during the last week of November the worst the restaurant industry has experienced in almost four months. Black Box Intelligence suggests this could mean we are “in the middle of a new restaurant downturn.”

These numbers arrived the same week the National Restaurant Association shared new findings on the restaurant industry via a letter sent to Congressional leadership. In that letter, the Association noted that restaurants of all types are in “economic freefall,” with sales declining and more layoffs and furloughs expected in the coming months.

Without large-scale measures, like a relief package from Congress, the restaurant industry’s situation will only get worse, particularly since we’re only at the beginning of winter. Outdoor dining options won’t be possible for at least a few months in many places. Off-premises channels, like delivery and takeout, are important, but as we discussed at length this week, running a restaurant entirely through these channels is economically and operationally challenging for most businesses.

Black Box Intelligence did note that despite poor sales in November, guest satisfaction was higher. Positive reviews of restaurants online grew by 7.0 percentage points compared to the same month in 2019. Intent-to-return scores have almost returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Toast Launches a Tech Suite for Contactless Restaurant Payments

Restaurant management platform Toast today launched what the company is calling its “contactless payments suite” that includes two new social distancing-friendly ways for customers to pay for their meals: Toast Go 2 and Toast Order & Pay. The products aim to minimize staff-to-customer interactions for both off-premises orders and those that take place in the dining room, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Toast Go 2 is the latest iteration of the company’s existing handheld POS device. This time around it includes the option for contactless payment forms from Apple, Google, and Samsung. Because its handheld, it can be used in more locations than the dining room, curbside pickup and drive-thrus being two obvious places. Toast said in today’s release that this latest version of Toast Go has processing speeds that are “three times faster” than previous generations.

Meanwhile, Toast Order & Pay is the company’s take on the contactless payments technology most restaurant tech companies now offer. With it, customers can browse menus, select food, and pay for it from their own mobile device. Toast’s version follows similar offerings from Presto, Paytronix, Zuppler, and many others.

However, all of these companies are trying to push contactless tech for the dining room when there aren’t many restaurant dining rooms to speak of at the moment. New pandemic-related restrictions are sweeping across the U.S. and either limiting or shutting down indoor dining once more. While demand for more contactless tech indoors will likely exist over the long term, there may be less use for it over the next several months.

Toast, then, is wise to diversify its contactless platform with the addition of Toast Go 2. Making off-premises orders more efficient (i.e., faster) is a huge priority for restaurants large and small nowadays — as lengthening drive-thru wait times and a surge in to go orders can attest. That factor will stick around long after the pandemic leaves us, making handheld POS tech a valuable play for the longer term. 

Chipotle Finally Launches Its Own Take on the Ghost Kitchen Concept

QSR brand Chipotle is a known leader in the restaurant industry’s current transition from dining room to off-premises formats, but the company has for the most part been quiet in the conversation around ghost kitchens. Up to now, that is. The company today revealed its Chipotle Digital Kitchen a pickup- and delivery-only restaurant that is essentially its own homegrown take on the ghost kitchen concept.

The new restaurant, located in Highland Falls, New York, will open this coming Saturday (Nov. 14). Chipotle said in today’s press release that the Digital Kitchen is meant to drive business in “non-traditional locations” such as dense urban centers that can’t hold a full-service restaurant.

While the restaurant does feature a small lobby with a few seats, there is no assembly line from which to order food and no cashier to ring orders up. Instead, customers must place orders digitally via the Chipotle app or website, or through a third-party delivery platform. Guests retrieve their orders from the aforementioned lobby that is “designed to include all of the sounds, smells and kitchen views of a traditional Chipotle restaurant.” The location can also fulfill larger catering orders.  

Chipotle’s news comes the same week McDonald’s unveiled plans for its own to-go-centric store format that will consist of a kitchen surrounded by drive-thru lanes and parking spaces for curbside pickup. Since Chipotle’s Digital Kitchen is, initially, at least, focused on urban settings with space limitations, it does not accommodate a drive-thru lane. That said, the company has been very public about its intentions to incorporate that format into its stores, and today’s release notes that the new store format “allows for flexibility with future locations.” Drive-thru may not be part of this first location, but it’s undoubtedly on the way as the company opens more of these new store concepts.

With the future of the dining room still very much unknown, there’s something of a mass exodus from that format happening among well-known quick-service brands. Burger King, Wendy’s, Dunkin’, Popeye’s, and Tim Horton’s are just a few names on the growing list of restaurants changing up their store formats.

Chipotle has been trekking towards this shift for some time. In December of 2019, the company announced a few different store format designs for to-go, drive-thru, and delivery orders. 

Make sure to join The Spoon’s Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive event on December 9th. Register here!

Ordrslip Adds Postmates Integration to Its Mobile App Software for Restaurants

Restaurant tech company Ordrslip announced today it has partnered with Postmates to add delivery integration into its mobile app software, according to a company press release sent to The Spoon. Per today’s announcement, Ordrslip’s software lets restaurant customers “create custom-looking whitelabel mobile ordering applications via Ordrslip.”

It’s no secret that, since the pandemic pushed the restaurant industry to off-premises formats, usage of mobile apps for ordering and payments is on the rise. It’s also pretty commonly known at this point that sophisticated apps a la Starbucks are far too expensive and resource-consuming for most independent restaurants and chains to create themselves. Hence the growing selection of tools (see below) various third parties offer to get restaurants the digital properties they need without decimating their already decimated margins.

The Ordrslip approach is this: Ordrslip creates a branded mobile app for the restaurant with all the features needed to fulfill pickup and delivery items, including order-ahead capabilities, payments, iOS and Android compatibility, POS integration (only with Square and Clover for now), and order tracking. You can read the full list of features here. The app looks and functions as if it belongs to the restaurant but is powered by Ordrslip’s softare in the background. As of today, there is the option to add Postmates integration in order to fulfill the last-mile delivery end of the operation.

The promise is that by using Ordrslip with the new Postmates integration, restaurant customers can bypass the controversial per-transaction commission fees they normally get charged by third-party delivery services. Ordrslip pricing is $100/month per location or $1100/year per location, with one-time setup fees of $1,000 and $750, respectively. (The setup fee applies to all locations a restaurant might operate.)  

On the one hand, those are high numbers for already struggling restaurants, which would have to be doing enough delivery to surpass $100/month in commission fees per transaction. On the other, there’s a pandemic happening and folks are staying at home and ordering more delivery. In other words, $100 in commission fees to Grubhub Et al is probably on the low end these days, though restaurants still have to pay some commission to Postmates for delivering the order.

Ordrslip is one of a growing number of companies offering restaurants workarounds to 30 percent commission fees on delivery orders. POS platform Toast, ChowNow, and many others have various tools in the market that let restaurants process orders and payments through a separate platform so they only need to use the delivery service for actual deliveries. Another company, ShiftPixy, bypasses delivery services altogether and provides the drivers itself. And even the delivery services themselves are participating in this trend. Uber Eats is piloting a tool that lets restaurants process orders through their own platforms, though Uber Eats retains the customer data.

Uber Eats also just announced its plans to buy Postmates for $2.65 billion, a deal that is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. That deal is unlikely at this point to affect a partnership like the one Ordrslip announced today.

Ghost Kitchen Network Virtual Kitchen Raises $20M

Virtual Kitchen, a company founded by two ex-Uber executives, has raised $20 million in new funding, according to a filing with the SEC (h/t Restaurant Dive). The round was led by Founders Fund and brings Virtual Kitchen’s total funding to $37 million. 

Virtual Kitchen runs multiple “delivery-optimized kitchens” where restaurants can rent space and also take advantage of the company’s technology to scale up operations quickly. Delivery fulfillment is done through partnerships with Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates, DoorDash and other third-party services. 

It’s unclear at this time what Virtual Kitchen will do with the new funds, though Restaurant Dive suggests the San Francisco-based company is likely to focus on expanding its network of ghost kitchens.

Now would certainly be the time to do that. As we detailed in a recent Spoon Plus report, the market for ghost kitchens is enormous — trekking towards $1 trillion by some accounts. As a business model, the ghost kitchen was already becoming an attractive option for more and more restaurants before the COVID-19 pandemic ever hit and decimated the restaurant industry. Since then, delivery and other off-premises formats have become priorities for large chains and mom-and-pop joints alike, and there’s no setting more logical for fulfilling all these to-go orders than a ghost kitchen. 

Given all that, the recent activity in the ghost kitchen space shouldn’t surprise. Kitchen United continues to expand across the U.S. Kitopi raised $20 million this year. Zuul raised $9 million for its NYC-focused ghost kitchen operation, Dubai-based iKcon raised $5 million, and that’s but a smattering of the recent developments in this sector. 

Virtual Kitchen’s new funding follows last year’s $15 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Base10 Partners. 

Floating Kitchens of Burger King

Now that its apparent even contactless tech won’t bring back the glory days of the dining room, restaurant chains are on a tear to refit their existing stores to better serve to-go formats. Efforts run the gamut, from dumping the front of house altogether to geofencing the premises for faster pickup orders to building more drive-thru lanes.

Burger King just one-upped all those efforts. The decades-old burger chain has has compiled all of the above and then some into a whopper of a design prototype for future restaurants. Per a BK press release from this week, the new design — which hasn’t actually been implemented yet — is meant to serve multiple order and delivery formats and will be 60 percent smaller than a traditional BK location.

BK plans to accomplish that with the following:

  • A drive-in area where customers scan a QR code then order and pay through the app. Food is delivered to the car. 
  • Curbside delivery and pickup lockers for customers who order ahead via the BK mobile app. The only element missing from this is geofencing tech for the curbside service, which other QSRs are now using to speed up operations.
  • On-premises service. No surprise that this will be a much smaller part of the overall plan moving forward. In one design, BK swapped out the traditional dining room for a covered patio. See below for the other option.
  • Double- and triple-lane drive-thrus. There will also be a walkup window and a view of the kitchen inside.
  • Suspended kitchens and dining rooms are by far the most intriguing addition, and one we haven’t yet see from another QSR. The kitchen and dining room will hang above the drive-thru lane, cutting down on the restaurant’s overall physical footprint. For drive-thru guests, at least, orders are delivered via a conveyor belt system. This particular design also includes a dedicated drive-thru lane for delivery drivers and is, according to the press release, “a 100% touchless experience.”

The first real-life buildout of these designs will be in Miami and the Caribbean in 2021. 

And while we wouldn’t expect other QSRs to produce a carbon copy of the design, it does feel that BK has raised the bar in terms of both standards and innovation when it comes to reformatting the restaurant experience. Some of the elements, like curbside pickup, are already fully established formats across most QSRs. Others, like triple drive-thru lanes, are more an anomaly. The hanging kitchen is, to the best of my knowledge, unheard of at any other QSR. 

The design does raise some questions around what the company will expect of its franchisees. As we saw last year with McDonald’s, retrofitting stores is an expensive, sometimes frustrating endeavor for franchisees. If Burger King wants this wonder of the QSR world to set the new standard for restaurant chains, it will need to ensure new build outs and existing store updates are as pleasant an experience for franchisees as they seem poised to be for customers. 

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

NPD: Drive-Thru Visits Increased 26%

If there’s one true off-premises lifeline for QSRs during the pandemic, it’s the drive-thru. (Sorry not sorry, delivery.) The NPD Group underscored that point this week when it announced that drive-thru visits increased 26 percent in April, May, and June, and that this format “will be key to the industry’s future.”

It’s common knowledge at this point that those restaurants equipped with drive-thrus are faring much better than those that have traditionally focused on dine-in service. And some QSRs and fast casuals that historically never really offered drive-thru service are now doubling down on that format, including Chipotle and Shake Shack. 

Even in July, when more restaurant dining rooms were opened, the number of drive-thru visits increased by 13 percent, according to NPD. That number represents the highest increase among all service modes in the restaurant (e.g., dine-in, takeout, delivery).

David Portalatin, a food industry advisor to NPD, said we should expect to see more chains switching to drive-thru in the future. Whether all of them come with a hanging kitchen and conveyor belt setup remains to be seen. 

Fee Caps ‘Round the Web

This week, Santa Clara, CA moved to finally cap the commission fees third-party delivery services charge restaurants at 15 percent. The ordinance is effective immediately and will last “until the end of the pandemic.”

NYC extended its own emergency fee cap of 20 percent to be in effect 90 days after restaurants are allowed to operate dining rooms at full capacity. Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to that distant day.

Back on the Left Coast, Los Angeles also extended its fee cap with the same criteria as NYC. Fees must remain at 15 percent or lower until LA restaurants can operate dining rooms at 100 percent capacity.

Report: The Restaurant Industry Could Lose $300B by the End of 2020

Technomic has revised its forecasts for the rest of 2020 and into 2021, according to a news release the firm sent out this week. The reason for these new numbers? You guessed it: the pandemic. Speaking in this week’s announcement, Joe Pawlak, a managing principle at Technomic, said to expect “continued decline” in restaurant sales for the rest of the year but “aggressive growth” in 2021.

“Few industries have felt the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic quite like foodservice,” he wrote, adding that restrictions (e.g., reduced capacity, no bar seating) “are wreaking havoc, especially on the segments that depend upon on-premises consumption.”

In light of that, the firm has made revised forecasts based on Best, Middle, and Worst Case scenarios. While the bulk of those numbers are behind Technomic’s paywall, the firm did release some telling facts based on the new forecasts:

  • Based on the Middle Case scenario, the restaurant industry will grow by 21 percent in 2021, but sales will still be down 11 percent compared to 2019 sales.
  • The restaurant industry is expected to lose between $250 billion to nearly $300 billion in sales for 2020, depending on the scenario.
  • QSRs are faring the best of any restaurant type at the moment; full-service restaurants and bars are struggling the most.

The firm also notes that the state of the industry’s prospects are “directly tied to medical advances related to COVID-19” such as a vaccine. 

It’s no secret that spikes in COVID-19 cases are in part tied to the reopening of states’ economies, of which restaurants are a major part. Just this week, the New York Times noted that “Data from states and cities show that many community outbreaks of the coronavirus this summer have centered on restaurants and bars, often the largest settings to infect Americans.” In a separate article, it also noted that indoors, the six-feet-apart rule for social distancing is misleading because “people think they are protected indoors and they’re really not.” Little wonder, then, that the CDC lists indoor dining as the highest-risk setting of all restaurant formats for spreading of the virus. the virus becomes easier to spread at a restaurant that offers on-site dining, even with reduced table capacity, according to the CDC.

None of that makes for an exactly encouraging scenario restaurants face in the coming months. Even in a Best Case scenario, full recovery will be slow at best. As we putter towards that prospect, businesses are best advised to keep their foot on the gas when it comes to offering off-premises formats.   

Updated: Whataburger’s Food Truck Set to Tour the U.S. in 2021

Iconic Texas-based QSR chain Whataburger announced this week it has upped its off-premises game with a 36-foot-long food truck that will take a multi-state tour in 2021. 

The forthcoming Whataburger food truck will be a totally mobile kitchen the chain says has “the same kind of burger-making power as a brick-and-mortar restaurant.” Whataburger developed it in partnership with Cruising Kitchens, a well-known food truck manufacturer that has made mobile kitchens for everyone from Hard Rock Cafe to the LA Dodgers. 

Whataburger also says the truck can be used for disaster relief, and honestly in this day and age it isn’t hard to imagine the company reformatting the truck at some point to serve frontline healthcare workers or communities impacted by, say, a hurricane. 

The truck will “tour” U.S. cities where Whataburger already has a presence, as well as those the chain is planning to expand too. That’s in keeping with the general aim of ghost kitchens, which a growing number of QSRs are using to reach customers in new markets or serve more off-premises orders in existing ones. 

While there’s undeniably something fun about a bright orange touring burger truck, it’s also a fairly practical move on the part of Whataburger. Like other chains, it’s had to pivot more of its business to off-premises over the last several months as well as increase its capabilities around mobile ordering. It’s currently operating dining rooms with limited seating, but with the trajectory of the coronavirus still uncertain (and still rising), it’s not unreasonable to think dining rooms might have to shut down in full again before this is all over.

While it’s not technically a ghost kitchen, the forthcoming food truck more or less serves the same purpose, which is to help the chain reach a wider audience and keep operations going even in the face of unprecedented global crises. According to this week’s announcement, Cruising Kitchens founder Cameron Davies has wanted to build a food truck for more than a decade. With the restaurant industry sitting squarely at the crossings of off-premises, ghost kitchens, and more mobility, now seems the perfect time for a test drive.

Note: The original version of this post incorrectly stated that Cameron Davies was CEO of Whataburger.

Yelp: 60 Percent of Closed Restaurants Have Shuttered Permanently

Today, Yelp released its Q2 2020 Economic Average Report, which tracks business closures (temporary and permanent) to analyze how industries like retail foodservice are being impacted by the ongoing pandemic. Sadly, the latest findings around the restaurant industry are nothing to celebrate.

According to the report, which The Spoon was sent a copy of, the restaurant industry surpassed retail in having the highest total business closures. Of those closed restaurants, 60 percent are shuttered permanently.

From the report:

“As of July 10, there have been 26,160 total restaurant closures, an increase of 2,179 since June 15. Of the all closed restaurants in July, 15,770 have permanently closed (60%), accounting for 2,956 more permanent closures, a 23% increase since June 15.”

The report also notes that “Overall, permanent closures have steadily increased since the peak of the pandemic with minor spikes in March, followed by May and June.”

At the same time, however, consumer interest in restaurants, bars, wineries, and other food-related businesses is returning to pre-pandemic levels, according to the report. That makes sense, as we’ve all been cooped up at home for months now and more people are eager to resume their normal activities outside the house.

Those “normal” activities, though, seem like an increasingly bad idea, as Yelp noted a statistically significant correlation between an increase of consumer interest in restaurants, bars and nightlife, and gyms in May and an increase in COVID-19 cases in June.” Once the data for July comes in, I doubt much changes. 

In the restaurant biz, that could mean more permanent closures, and it’s not hard to see why. Restaurants have historically operated off extremely thin margins. And even before the pandemic hit, the move to off-premises orders was steadily gaining momentum with delivery, drive-thru, and other to-go-centric formats. Restaurants that have historically never had to focus too heavily on the off-premises side of things now find themselves in a position where they must offer these formats or risk going out of business. Even when they do, the logistics, not to mention the cost, of doing off-premises can be so burdensome it can in some cases cause more harm than good.

How many states have to follow California’s lead and re-close parts of their economies will further impact the number of permanent restaurant closures over the next few months, and probably for the rest of the year. The hope is that by the time Yelp releases its Economic Average Report for Q3, the numbers for restaurants won’t be so dire. At this point, though, that hope is far from certain.

Starbucks to Close Some Sit-down Cafes to Focus on Pickup-only Locations

Starbucks is accelerating its plans to shift many of its stores to a takeout-only format, according to an article today from the Wall Street Journal. The coffee mega-chain will “close, renovate, or move” 400 traditional cafes in the U.S. and Canada over the next 18 months and open 40 to 50 pickup-only stores over the next year and a half.

While the pandemic has accelerated the pace towards this to-go model, the shift itself isn’t new for Starbucks. In 2019, the chain opened its first Starbucks Now stores featuring very limited seating, an automated pickup system, and a focus on digital orders. And in a letter from the end of May, company CEO Kevin Johnson said the company would be reformatting many stores to cater to off-premises orders as part of its “Bridge to the Future” reopening plan. 

Starbucks has also claimed that 80 percent of its orders were to-go before the pandemic, hence plans to shift its model towards off-premises formats. As the WSJ said, Starbucks “expects that portion to grow as the pandemic changes commutes and routines.”

The company is focusing on New York City, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and other “dense urban areas” for the shift to pickup-only locations. 

Starbucks is also probably leading what will be a widespread trend in the restaurant industry. Dining rooms may be reopening, but they’re doing so at reduced capacity, and many consumers are still wary about actually sitting down in a restaurant. As well, a study released this week by Washington State University’s Carson College of Business found that a number of consumers won’t go out to eat until there are improvements in testing and tracing COVID-19 cases. Others are skipping the dine-in experience until a vaccine is found.

All those factors make to-go ordering a more important strategy than ever for many restaurants. Yes, the jury is still out on how much off-premises orders can make up in lost sales. And no, not every restaurant has the money and resources to completely re-outfit their stores to be more to-go friendly. But Starbucks helped create the coffeeshop culture that, up until a few months ago, was as commonplace as the grocery store. Now it’s leading the rest of us towards a to-go culture that will soon be as much a part of daily life as its cafes once were.

New Study Shows Why Re-Opened Restaurants Can’t Ease Up on To-Go Ordering

Over half of consumers are still not willing to actually eat in restaurants, according to new research from Washington State University that was sent to The Spoon. If stay-at-home orders are lifted, 61.67 percent of consumers are still won’t dine at a restaurant immediately, according to the new study. That’s still a boatload of people wary about going out to eat, but the figure is actually down 4.19 percent from two weeks ago.

The new research follows up on a previous report by WSU’s Carson College of Business released at the end of May. Both papers examine COVID-19’s ongoing impact on the restaurant and hotel industries.

Other notable numbers from this new report include:

  • 13.06 percent of respondents said it is “very likely” they will eat in a restaurant dining room immediately, up 4.4 percent from two weeks ago.
  • 24.79 percent suggested that they will only feel comfortable to dine in when their communities can better test, trace and isolate COVID19 cases.
  • 14.27 percent said that they will only feel comfortable to dine in at a sit-down restaurant when the COVID-19 vaccine becomes available.
  • 64.71 percent said various technologies at sit-down restaurants will be necessary in order to minimize human-to-human contact.

On that last point, the research lists contactless payments, digital menus, and service robots as a few of the technologies consumers would like to see in their local restaurant going forward, which is in line with many of the predictions about what restaurants will look like in a post-pandemic world. 

WSU’s new research also underscores the need for restaurants to continue with their off-premises orders even with dining rooms reopening. Would-be customers are clearly still wary about sitting down in a restaurant, reduced capacities remain in place for dining rooms, and there’s still no coronavirus vaccine available. All of which is to say, the restaurant industry has a long, slow recovery still ahead of it.