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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Slice Launches Tiered Packaging for Its Pizza-Centric Tech Platform

Slice, a company fast becoming a go-to piece of restaurant tech for indie pizzerias, announced a new tiered packaging feature for its software offering. With it, pizzerias can choose which level of service they need from the software stack based on their individual business.  

The founders of Slice created the software platform as a way to give independent pizza restaurants some of the same digital tools and advantages the bigger chains — Domino’s, Papa John’s, etc. — can afford. The pandemic may have pushed the restaurant industry firmly over the threshold of the digital realm, but as was noted at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Summit this week, many mom-and-pop stores may not even have a POS system, let alone sophisticated online order and delivery tools.

Slice’s platform now offers such tools via three different levels of service. All levels give pizzerias a listing on the Slice app/marketplace as well as access to marketing tools. Slice Essentials adds access to a rewards program to that bundle.

Shop owners that need more digital capabilities can graduate to the Slice Premium level, which gives them access to online ordering, a customized website, and boosted search rankings on the marketplace. The top tier, Slice Complete, includes all of the above plus Slice’s POS system, which the company launched earlier this year. 

As Slice’s Chief Product Officer, Preethy Vaidyanathan, explained to The Spoon a while back, pizzerias have “specialized needs” when it comes to technology that might not exist elsewhere. Menus are one small example: pizza shops have to accommodate for things like different crust styles, and half-and-half toppings in their online ordering tools. Those capabilities are harder to develop in an interface that it might first seem.

Restaurants pay a fixed cost per order to use the Slice technology, as opposed to the percentage-per-transaction model used by most third-party delivery services. (Slice does not provide delivery drivers/couriers.) Consumers, meanwhile, use the app much as they wold any other restaurant-ordering interface. Slice is currently available in all 50 U.S. states at over 16,000 shops. 

The company raised $40 million in Series D funding this year, which it is using to expand its current line of products. 

2021 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem: Serving Up a Digital Lifeline

In collaboration with TechTable and Culterra Capital, we are pleased to share an updated 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map, sponsored by Back of House, a community of restaurateurs to find and share top-reviewed tech solutions. Download the map here. 

It is an understatement to say that the restaurant industry went through a massive shift since we published our 2019 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map. The pandemic’s economic toll on the industry has been grave, though notably, the toll was not evenly distributed. A higher level of digital maturity was a clear success indicator for most restaurants that survived the crisis (as detailed by McKinsey here). 

Thus, in a year that was challenging for all, we did find one bright spot from the pandemic: many of our past predictions around tech adoption were significantly accelerated, shrinking from years to months. 

In fact, in the past 18 months, technology solutions across the restaurant and hospitality industry evolved at such a fast pace that keeping up with changes proved challenging, even for those of us who work in the space. This rapid rate of adoption in the industry caused even the technophobes in hospitality to rapidly embrace tech solutions. 

The most notable growth areas were in the areas of Ordering/Delivery and On-Premise Ordering/Payments Tech, including kiosks, mobile ordering and payments, and cashierless checkout. In addition to the acrobatic feats from restaurant operators, we also saw tech companies reinventing themselves to stay in business during the pandemic.

With that in mind, we are pleased to share our 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem, which serves as a current heat map of the broader ecosystem (and is clearly not exhaustive). 

Click to Enlarge

In order to help operators, entrepreneurs and investors continue to understand and digest this quickly evolving landscape, we also highlight some of the essential shifts and sector themes below, plus a few predictions for the year to come.

Help Wanted

Finding and securing hospitality staff has never been so challenging. As thousands of hospitality workers were left unemployed by the pandemic, or stymied by the risks of the frontlines, many have moved on to find work in other fields, leaving a huge gap in talent. 

As a result, the urgency to leverage robotics, automation, computer vision, and voice technologies will continue to increase as the hospitality industry aims to do more with less staff. And while discussions around robots within hospitality have always been cautious — because we don’t want to put people out of work — we believe we will continue to see more opportunities in the near-term for human-assisting robots (versus human replacement by robots). 

For example, as restaurant operators seek to offset workforce challenges, there are numerous opportunities for specific task automation of repetitive, dangerous or mundane tasks like dishwashing, precision preparation/cooking, food waste management, bar/food inventory, and quality control.

Another area ripe for automation via AI-driven voice tech includes drive-thrus and digital ordering. When people think of a traditional drive-thru, they likely picture a garbled voice and screaming the order into a speaker, hoping their order is correct. But we are seeing many of the larger chains replacing human voices with automated voice assistants to speed up service, order accuracy, and upsell rates. We’ve seen estimates that drive-thru automation can reduce customer wait time by 10 to 25 percent, which is compelling given that the former CEO of McDonalds previously declared that for every six seconds saved at a drive-thru is equal to an increase of 1 percent in sales.

Ghost Kitchens: It’s Complicated

While many restaurant operators were broadly familiar with the concept of ghost kitchens and virtual brands before the pandemic, these formats are now prevalent in most discussions on the burgeoning post-pandemic restaurant industry. 

Whether part of an existing kitchen or a separate commissary kitchen, the ghost kitchen’s purpose is to fulfill online orders for delivery or pick up. Ghost kitchens have the potential to solve real challenges for their restaurant customers, and there are tremendous variations on the economics, setup, and ideal use cases.

So then what’s so complicated about ghost kitchens? 

The rapid growth in consumer demand for restaurant delivery and the high usage of third-party ordering/delivery apps pushed restaurant operators to explore different avenues to expand their access points and footprint beyond their existing restaurants. 

However success (a.k.a. profitability) within the confines of a ghost kitchen business model is primarily driven by volume of daily orders, average order value, and percentage of direct channel sales versus third-party sales. This is why ghost kitchens are primarily well-suited for larger brands, as most local restaurants simply do not meet the average requirements to warrant a ghost kitchen endeavor. (If you are curious to crunch the numbers, check out this excellent ghost kitchen calculator created by Kitchen Fund.)

Further, the lines are beginning to blur between delivery and ghost kitchen platforms. We are entering a world where these platforms are increasingly supporting their own virtual brands and/or next-gen food courts, oftentimes by using the ordering/menu data captured from current restaurants using their platform. Thus local operators will be battling for market share against larger chains which are using ghost kitchens to extend their reach and volume, as well as additional competition from ghost kitchen platforms themselves.

Enter the The Mobile-Only Experience

Stateside, we’ve increasingly been adopting mobile-first ordering and marketing strategies, but the mobile-only approach (often seen in Asia) wasn’t widely embraced before the pandemic. Now, whether via QR codes, apps or mobile web, there has been a huge shift towards mobile-optimized menus, ordering and payments which eliminate or reduce most employee/customer contact. This can help to improve the guest experience via increased speed and fewer errors. For fine dining, this also saves time/costs in printing and sourcing supplies for paper menus. 

Successful operators will prioritize their tech strategy to capture as much digital data as possible in order to personalize offers, segment customers and influence behavior, and a mobile-first/mobile-only approach creates a compelling opportunity to increase both first-party and third-party data capture.

As it can be dizzying for operators to decide how to best leverage their digital data, we predict high growth for the tech partners which are helping operators utilize customer data to better uphold their brand, funnel customers into more profitable channels, and make better decisions about merchandising, pricing, and promotions.

Aggregators Will Continue to Disrupt the Customer Journey

While many of the technologies we discuss here are more operational, we also want to address the customer search and discovery experience. While this was an important topic in pre-COVID times, it is all the more so now, when disruptions and uncertainties are pushing customers to regularly search for what nearby food options are actually open, and whether they offer delivery, curbside, or takeout options. 

We have also reached a point where Google/Google Maps have become the defacto top of the funnel for a majority of restaurant consumers. Thus it is increasingly critical for restaurant operators to proactively manage their full digital footprint, and provide up-to-date information that customers can trust — especially across all third party platforms. 

For example, even though Google profiles include a link to a restaurant’s own website, that little link is eclipsed by the amount of ad-driven real estate that the third-party aggregators/marketplaces get within each profile. 

Growth Categories to Watch in 2022

  • Voice / Bot Technology
  • Robotics / Automation
  • Shared / Ghost Kitchens
  • Food Safety / Quality (a new category for the 2021 map)
  • Ordering and Payments will continue to evolve
  • Marketing Analytics / CRM, and Order / Delivery (both B2B and consumer-facing marketplaces) will continue to consolidate.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and reactions, and look forward to continuing to follow this sector together in the coming years.

Hear Brita and other restaurant tech leaders at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Virtual Summit on August 17th. A limited number of complimentary tickets are available, so register today!

Squarespace Acquires Hospitality Management Platform Tock for $400M

E-commerce platform Squarespace announced today it has acquired Tock, an online platform for managing reservations, tables, takeout, and more, for $400 million. The deal is a mix of cash and stock, according to a press release from Squarespace.

Chicago, Illinois-based Tock’s extensive feature list includes reservation, waitlist, and table management, event management, and, more recently, pickup and delivery order management and contactless ordering and payments features. Tock’s sell to restaurants and other foodservice businesses is that establishments can view and manage all these moving parts from a single dashboard. The system integrates with third-party POS platforms, not to mention a boat-load of other technologies, from social media platforms to third-party delivery services.

That Squarespace would want to acquire the company is not that surprising. Squarespace, which privately filed to go public in January of this year, has built a business on providing DIY(ish) website and e-commerce building tools for businesses. Right now, thanks to the pandemic, there are a lot of restaurants in need of digital properties (websites, apps, etc.) that can accommodate the industry-wide shift towards to go orders and more digital forms of ordering and payments. These are all features Tock has in its arsenal, and which Squarespace will now be able to offer to potential customers in the hospitality business. 

In a statement today, Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena called e-commerce “a large and growing market opportunity” in the restaurant business. “We believe that together we will continue building on their success, bringing Tock’s capabilities to our all-in-one product suite in service of our customers in the hospitality industry and beyond,” he said.

To date, Tock has raised $27.5 million in funding.

Campus Foodservice Giant Chartwells Brings Ghost Kitchens to Colleges and Universities

Chartwells Higher Education, a foodservice management company, announced today it has launched its ghost kitchen program for college and university campuses. Chartwells has already piloted the program at a handful of schools, including Seattle University, SUNY Buffalo State College, the University of Utah, the University of Texas at Dallas, and San Jose State University.

Working with these schools, Chartwells developed several new meal concepts appropriate for delivery. For example, the company worked with Seattle University to open a ghost kitchen that tested 12 rotating entrees and desserts, which students could order via the existing Chartwells mobile app. Since most of Seattle University’s physical campus was closed during Fall semester 2020, the ghost kitchen pilot also served as a test for how colleges and universities can provide students with food even when dining halls are shuttered. Meals were available for both delivery and contactless pickup.

Chartwells said more than 24,000 orders were placed via its mobile app within the first month of the Seattle University test. Terry Conaty, Resident District Manager at Seattle University, said in a press release that the partnership was a “win-win” because it provided students with “lots of new menu options without having to add additional personnel resources or compromise our social distancing guidelines.”

Chartwells serves more than 300 campuses. The company says this ghost kitchen program will add to rather than replace existing dining options. The idea is to take advantage of any underutilized kitchen space on campuses that can be turned into ghost kitchens.

Historically, few would have called college and university campuses hotbeds for food tech innovation. That has slowly started to change over the last few years with the rise of apps like MealMe and Good Uncle (the latter of which was acquired by foodservice giant Aramark), the presence of delivery bots on campus, and Gen Z’s inherent familiarity with a more tech-driven eating experience. 

Nor is Chartwells the only company bringing ghost kitchens to campus. Last month, hospitality platform C3 joined forces with Graduate Hotels to put more ghost kitchens in college towns. 

The ghost kitchen format is an obvious fit for the college and university market. Students eat meals at all hours of the day and night, a schedule the traditional dining room’s hours don’t typically accommodate. And on the note of dining rooms, there’s no telling whether the traditional cafeteria-style setup will exist once classes shift back to the physical campus. Social distancing will have to be considered when it comes to those spaces, and some students may not feel safe eating in a dining room. Colleges and universities will have to provide alternative options, including pickup and delivery.

Schools, too, are brimming with underutilized kitchen space. For smaller campuses, a few would suffice when it comes to serving the entire student body. For larger schools, one can imagine a network of ghost kitchens placed strategically around the campus, each serving different sets of dormitories and apartment blocks. Meals ordered from campus ghost kitchens could even count as part of a student’s meal plan, which would be considerably cheaper than someone having to order from DoorDash every night.

When schools go back in session very much depends on each individual institution. Many are doing hybrid online-offline sessions right now. The many new food options for students seem geared towards both accommodating these fluctuating schedules and a bid by schools to keep pace with the changing times for foodservice. 

Report: Consumers Spent $486B on Takeout in 2020

Consumers spent $769 billion ordering food from restaurants last year, according to a new report from Paytronix and PYMTS. Takeout orders accounted for $486 billion, or 63 percent. of those sales. 

The report, based on a survey of U.S. consumers, is the latest in Paytronix’ ongoing “Delivering on Restaurant Rewards” series. Paytronix, of course, has skin in the game, it being a restaurant-tech company that specializes in digital ordering and payments solutions. That said, the report’s findings that underscore the popularity of takeout and digital ordering line up with other statistics we have seen over the last few months around the future of these ordering and eating formats.

Online ordering drove the majority of takeout orders in 2020, according to the Paytronix report. A total of 89 percent of consumers said they had placed their takeout order via a digital channel, such as an app, a website, or a third-party aggregator (e.g., DoorDash). The majority of those meals ordered digitally were from restaurants that, prior to the pandemic, had only ever offered dine-in service. “Our research shows that $264 billion, or 61 percent, of the $435 billion consumers spent on online food orders in 2020 was spent at restaurants that had only offered sit-down dining services prior to the outbreak,” notes the report. 

Consumers also spent “50 percent more on average” when they placed takeout orders through digital channels.

Putting a takeout strategy in place was one of the first pieces of advice for restaurants to be widely circulated at the start of lockdowns last year. Takeout offered a way for restaurants to reach customers without serving them in the dining room, and could be done without coughing up the hefty commission fees third-party delivery services charge restaurants on delivery orders. For customers, too, takeout provided an often cheaper option, since they didn’t have to pay the service fees associated with delivery orders. 

None of those factors are any less important now that we’re a year into this pandemic and restaurants have resumed (some) dine-in service. In fact, the future of the dining room is kind of a giant question mark right now, and restaurants are encouraged to continue building out a robust to-go business. Takeout is still arguably the most important part of those strategies. 

E-Fish Delivers Fresh Fish to Your Door 48 Hours After It’s Been Caught

When the pandemic hit, I shifted just about all of my grocery shopping online, including my proteins like chicken and fish. I still buy my fish online, getting frozen fillets delivered to my door each month.

But E-Fish, a startup that launched around the time the pandemic hit last year, says it can do one better. The company delivers fresh — not frozen — fish to your door 48 hours after it is out of water.

E-Fish started out as a fish marketplace for restaurants such as Jean-Georges, Esca, The Fulton, and Bellemore. But when the pandemic hit, many restaurants across the country shut down, cutting off E-Fish’s target market. Not only that, restaurant closures were also devastating the fish industry, who lost all those restaurant customers. So E-Fish pivoted, and like so many other restaurant food suppliers, launched its own direct-to-consumer sales channel.

Jeffrey Tedmori, Co-Founder and CEO of E-Fish, told me by phone this week that this D2C marketplace pivot was also helpful for fish harvesters because they can focus on catching fish while E-Fish takes care of all the digital marketing and sales.

E-Fish never touches the product. Instead, it has relationships with different fish harvesters on both coasts of the U.S. When you visit E-Fish and place your order, that order along with a shipping label is forwarded directly to the harvester.

That doesn’t mean your order ships right away, however. As Tedmori explained, when an order is placed, “A lot of the time the product isn’t even caught.” So the harvester goes out, catches the fish, preps it and ships it out to the customer. The result, said Temori, is an “Unparalleled level of quality.”

You’ll pay for that freshness. Two pounds of Black Cod will set you back $70 plus shipping and taxes (E-Fish ships across the U.S., except for Hawaii and Alaska). While that is probably more than your corner store, it is not that far out of line with other online fish markets like CrowdCow.

E-Fish has received Angel funding and is now part of the Techstars Anywhere accelerator cohort. The company currently has relationships with fishers in Massachusetts, Maine, Florida and California, and is looking to scale up from there.

Outsource the Turkey, Help a Restaurant

The whole “Thanksgiving-to-go” concept used to be the territory of just a handful of restaurant chains — the Bob Evans and Cracker Barrels of the world, for example. That, of course, was pre-pandemic, and now that the CDC has told Americans not to travel on Thanksgiving and the whole “home for the holidays” phrase has new meaning (like, you’re literally stuck at home), restaurants of all types and sizes are offering up their own take on the Turkey dinner.

At one point in the not-so-distant past, I might have thought Thanksgiving in a box was a bit bleak. But let’s be real: it’s been a stressful, scary year. People are alone and lonely, many are struggling financially, and the ever-present threat of the pandemic hangs over everything. Rather than spend hours in the kitchen cooking too much food for too few people, check out some of these restaurants, which are ready to do the hard work for you.

The Classic Thanksgiving Meal. You’ll find the old standards in this category: Cracker Barrel’s famous Heat&Serve Thanksgiving, Denny’s Turkey & Dressing Dinner Pack, and Boston Market’s takeout Thanksgiving (which, for the record, I’ve actually had and it was delicious). Thrillist has a big ol’ list of other restaurants here. There’s nothing fancy or unique about most of these options, but if you’re dead set on a turkey dinner but don’t want to deal with cooking it, these options are your best bet.

The Plant-Based Thanksgiving. Demand for plant-based foods has skyrocketed this year. It follows, then, that many restaurants around the country are offering 100 percent vegan takes on the Turkey Day dinner. VegNews has rounded up some notable ones here that include California’s Cafe Gratitude, the Veggie Grill chain, and many other restaurants, both local and national. 

Higher-End Thanksgiving to Go. If the industry-wide shift to off-premises has taught us one thing this year, it’s that even high-end food can be put in a box and delivered to your door. In keeping with that, a number of higher-end restaurants are offering Thanksgiving feasts to go. Some notable ones include Chart House, Fleming’s, and McCormick & Schmick’s.

Not-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. Or you could just be totally over it all and have no inclination whatsoever to celebrate this year. Can’t say I blame you. For the usual QSRs and fast-casual joins, from IHOP to Sonic and every McDonald’s in between, Thursday will be business as usual.

Go Local. One quick glance on Twitter shows the sheer number of small, independent restaurants offering some kind of service on Thanksgiving. Encouragingly, there’s also an unbelievable high volume of tweets from folks that are ordering from these establishments in order to show their support.

An added bonus of ordering in for Thanksgiving instead of doing it yourself: most of these restaurants need the revenue. With no end in sight to either the pandemic or the struggles eating establishments face as they struggle to keep the lights on, the more support they can get on Thanksgiving, the better.

Upcoming Event: Food Waste Strategies for the Supply Chain

Restaurants are one stop along the food supply chain where a whole lot of food gets wasted. For restaurants, there are financial consequences to so much waste; for the entire world, there are environmental and human ones.

On Monday, November 30, The Spoon will be holding a virtual fireside chat with Apeel founder and CEO James Rogers to discuss how this waste happens and what we can do to stop it. That goes for restaurants as well as grocery stores, farms, distribution centers, and your own fridge.

Join James and myself on the Hopin platform at 2 p.m. PST that day to be a part of the discussion. You can register here.

And oh yeah, it’s free!

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Chick-fil-A officially made ordering via its website available after tests in the Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. this past summer. Those that can’t or don’t feel inclined to download the chain’s app can now order digitally through the brand’s website.

Papa John’s is the latest restaurant brand to employ an AI-powered voice assistant to answer the phone. The chain will use AI company Kea’s platform, which can learn a restaurant’s menu as well as take orders, answer questions, and even upsell items. 

Washington, D.C. is allocating $35 million in COVID-19 recovery grants to restaurants as part of the city’s $100 million “Bridge Fund” for the hospitality industry. D.C. restaurants are still open, though Mayor Muriel Bowser suggested new restrictions could go into effect soon in response to the pandemic. 

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. 

Lunchbox Raises $20M to Expand Its Online Ordering System for Restaurants

Lunchbox, an online ordering system for restaurants, announced today it has closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Coatue. The round also included participation from existing investors 645 Ventures and Primary Ventures, and executives from Venmo, HelloFresh, and Planet Hollywood, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Including this round, Lunchbox has raised $22.1 million to date.

Lunchbox’s software integrates digital ordering, loyalty programs, delivery dispatch, marketing, analytics, and many other features into a single interface, effectively eliminating the need for restaurants to juggle multiple restaurant tech platforms on the front end. Businesses pay a flat monthly fee to use the platform.

The end goal as Lunchbox sees it is to give restaurants more ownership over their digital properties and operations as the restaurant biz moves deeper into the off-premises realm. That includes the all-important customer data, which up until recently was largely held captive by third-party delivery services. In the wake of the pandemic, more restaurants are taking steps to gain more control of this data along with other aspects of the customer relationship.

With the new funds, Lunchbox plans to scale up nationally to meet that demand, as well as add new capabilities to its platform and build out its team.

And while the company may only be 18 months old, it has reached a number of noteworthy deals and milestones over the last year. In September, it struck a deal with Ordermark to integrate the latter’s online ordering platform into the Lunchbox system. Last month, Lunchbox teamed up with Beam Social to let customers donate to nonprofits via their restaurant orders, and the company has also ventured into autonomous delivery via a partnership with Sodexo and Kiwibot.

All that activity and attention isn’t too surprising. The pandemic and its subsequent leveling of the restaurant biz as we know it has forced businesses to go online by adopting digital ordering and payments technologies, mobile apps, more robust rewards programs, and a whole bunch of other tech tools most restaurants can’t afford to build in-house. Lunchbox’s platform is one option restaurants have when it comes to a third-party system that can help them make sense of the seemingly endless tech options out there.

The common denominator for all these developments is off-premises ordering, which is where many restaurants are headed, if not already there. Since we’re still in the midst of the fallout created by the pandemic, it’s too early to say exactly how much of the restaurant industry will be permanently about delivery and takeout. For now, though, much of it is, which gives restaurant tech companies like Lunchbox a competitive edge.

Ordermark Raises $120M to Build More Virtual Restaurants

Restaurant tech company Ordermark announced today it has raised a $120 million Series C round led by the Softbank Vision Fund with participation from existing investor Act One Ventures. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Ordermark will use the new funds to “help more restaurants transition to online ordering during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.”

Ordermark has been helping restaurants incorporate off-premises orders into their operations since long before the pandemic. The company’s hardware-software combo consolidates all order tickets (delivery, takeout, in-house, etc.) into a single channel to make the management of these tickets easier for restaurant staff.

The company has also been something of a trailblazer in the world of virtual restaurants through its Nextbite platform, which is Ordermark’s portfolio of delivery-only brands. Most recently, Nextbite launched rapper Wiz Khalifa’s Hotbox restaurant concept, much to the delight of munchies fans everywhere.

Ordermark/Nextbite relies on underutilized kitchen space in restaurants to fulfill orders for these virtual brands, which gives the restaurants themselves a chance to build up some incremental revenue. While today’s press release did not specifically name new brands or restaurant partners, the company is clearly looking to build out this virtual restaurant portfolio. Jeff Housenbold, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in the release that Softbank will “support [Ordermark’s] mission to help independent restaurants optimize online ordering and generate incremental revenue from under-utilized kitchens.”

Alex Canter, Ordermark’s cofounder and CEO, added that restaurants “must get creative by embracing technology and new sources of revenue generation to reach customers outside of their four walls.”

Ordermark said that since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nextbite has launched 15 brands and has added over 1,000 delivery-only restaurants nationwide.

Winter Is Coming for Outdoor Dining, So Get Going With Off-Premises

In further proof that you can’t solve the current restaurant industry crisis by flipping a switch, Upserve released new data this week that shows many restaurants are still struggling with off-premises formats.

Upserve’s survey polled 421 players across different types of restaurants, including full-service/dine-in, fast casual, QSRs, and fine dining, among others. The big takeaway? More than half (64 percent) of restaurants feel “optimistic” about the future, but nearly half (47 percent) struggle with shifting their business models to online ordering and the formats that come with it.

We’ve seen this play out in real time for better and for worse throughout the last several months. Restaurants historically focused on dine-in service have had to pivot to delivery and curbside pickup, not to mention find affordable tech solutions that could enable online ordering. Businesses have struggled to master off-premises operations. They’ve gotten really creative with ad hoc tech stacks and worked much harder to communicate with their customers. And most all of them have seen a rise in off-premises orders. Upserve’s report said that as of July, its restaurant customers “have seen a 782.7% increase in Online Order sales volume growth.”

But Upserve also points out that autumn is practically upon us, and once colder weather comes, the option for outdoor seating will go away, not just for its own customers but for everyone. “It’s key that restaurants find an online ordering solution that works for their customers by the fall,” the report said.

The call to action for all restaurants right now is to get their off-premises strategies fine-tuned, streamlined, and operationally efficient, regardless of the trajectory of the pandemic or the future of indoor dining. Even if indoor dining returns in some form close to what we used to know, its chances of unseating off-premises at this point are slim to none.

Here’s Why Delivery Price Hikes By QSRs Could Spike Demand for Drive Thru

Admittedly, I brushed over news from earlier this week that some QSRs are raising their delivery prices more than 15 percent. But the more I’ve thought about it over the last few days, the more I wonder at two things: the chains’ motivations behind the price hikes and whether they’ll prompt more customers to order drive-thru and pickup to save a few bucks. 

Business Insider first wrote about the price hikes, noting that Chick-fil-A’s prices are 30 percent higher for delivery, while Starbucks and McDonald’s prices are about 20 percent higher. My own unscientific analysis compared the costs of McDonald’s double quarter pounder with cheese meal and found it to be $9.19 on Uber Eats versus $7.99 via McDonald’s own app. (Both prices are before taxes, delivery fees, and tip.)

That example is arguably not going to break the bank. But consider that since more people are staying home and ordering for the whole household, delivery orders are likely much bigger than a single meal, which could significantly raise the cost of dinner. 

Of course, part of the reason for these price hikes is that large chains, just like small restaurants, have to pay the third-party delivery piper when it comes to commission fees, which can go as high as 30 percent. Passing some of that burden on to the customer makes sense from a business perspective.

Question is, will customers want to shoulder that delivery burden when they could hop in the car, drive a couple miles, and collect their food via curbside pickup for cheaper? In many cases, probably not. For one thing, a lot of food from QSRs just doesn’t travel well and you typically wind up with soggy fries, watery soda, and lukewarm burgers. For another, we’re in economically uncertain times, y’all. 

Given all that, more customers will be motivated to order their fast food via pickup and drive thru, which may be part of these chains’ longer-term strategies in terms of price hikes. Restaurants make more money off pickup orders (no commission fees), and when orders are funneled through the business’s own digital properties, the customer data remains in-house. Over the last year we’ve seen an uptick in brands encouraging customers to order via in-house apps, while others are even launching their own full-stack delivery services. 

Price hike’s won’t take third-party delivery down, but if customers respond by choosing pickup, curbside, and drive-thru, the loss of business will be another swing of the hammer currently trying to crumble third-party delivery’s chances of profitability. 

Elsewhere in Restaurant Tech . . .

  • Iconic hot dog chain Nathan’s Famous has partnered with REEF to use the latter’s ghost kitchen network to fulfill more off-premises orders. The partnership is now in Manhattan, and Nathan’s has cities like LA, Portland, and Minneapolis on the horizon. 
  • Yum Brands’ digital sales hit an all time high of $3.5 billion in Q2 of 2020. The parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut notably said on the call that opening dining rooms was important but not “critical” to the company’s success. 
  • Sonic unveiled a new drive-thru design that’s further proof the drive-thru experience is also being reinvented. Contactless order and payment capabilities, expanded patio areas, and “lawn games” (?!) are all part of the new design.
  • Oakland this week became the latest city to approve a cap on commission fees third-party delivery services charge restaurants. The 15-percent cap is effective immediately and last until 90 days after the COVID-19 health emergency is over. Whenever that is. 

Run a Restaurant From Your Phone, Thanks to This Latin American Tech Startup

Click through any restaurant industry publication in these pandemic-stricken days and you’ll likely assume that to run an off-premises restaurant, you need to load up on as much tech as you can. But as we’re fond of saying here at The Spoon, when it comes to restaurant tech, quality matters way more than bells and whistles. For all the contactless dining kits, delivery integrators, and AI-enabled tools out there, it’s the simpler solutions often create more value for the restaurant.

A Mexico City-based startup called remotekitchen appears to be betting on that idea with its new restaurant tech platform that essentially lets restaurant operators run a business directly from their mobile phones. That includes everything from promoting their restaurant to taking orders and processing payments. And for independent restaurants in Latin America — many of whom are not even online — that’s all they need.

“We are mobile and this [solution] is working for a smartphone-first operation,” David Peña, remotekitchen’s founder and CEO told me over the phone last week. With fellow cofounder and company COO Diego Vielma, he walked me through the technology and how it can get restaurants up and running with their off-premises strategies.

The company started as a delivery-only kitchen in 2019 and quickly pivoted to software in response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. As has been well-documented, worldwide shutdowns have decimated restaurants as we know them, and there’s been much ado over the prohibitive cost of doing delivery via third parties like Grubhub and Uber Eats. So it’s perhaps not surprising that when remotekitchen started tinkering with its own software, others took note.

As restaurant tech goes, the remotekitchen platform is an extremely simple setup. A Basic plan gets you a website (those already online can simply add an “order” button), an app for receiving orders, coupon/promotion management. Those who opt for the Plus plan also get their own branded iOS and Android apps and the ability to process payments online. Either takes about a day to set up, and restaurants can also sell meals via a Facebook integration.

There’s a good reason for the simplicity here. Peña says that unlike the U.S., Latin America’s restaurant tech is “far from being developed.” Tech solutions are hard to come by, and even when they’re available, they’re overly complex.

“This is an industry that is working with almost no resources, almost no labor, so the whole industry is running on the smartphone of the owner,” he explained, adding that he’s seen many restaurants simply taking orders through WhatsApp. 

On top of that, roughly 96 percent of independent restaurants in Latin America are not online at all. There are no menus to peruse via the web, and third-party services like Uber Eats are out of the question, given the high commission fees associated with those companies.

The crew at remotekitchen bundled all of these factors together and have built a solution to address them that works on any device and is most appropriately suited to mobile devices. “We believe we can unlock a new market by giving access to a technology,” said Peña.

It’s very early days for the company, which is still in testing phase. They are currently working with just 10 restaurants, though Vielma said that over 50 are on a waiting list and will be able to use the software once remotekitchen “really understands how we are adding value to this small group of restaurants.”

One thing that may help that progress along is the company’s recent participation in food business accelerator Food-X. When remotekitchen joined the cohort back in March, they had no product on the market. Without any technology to back it up, they quickly launched a landing page and started signing up restaurants and figuring out how their product could add actual value to the Latin American restaurant industry.

“They actively seek out feedback and iterate as quickly as any team we’ve worked with so the product gets better and better, not because of guessing, but because they are engaged with their customers, their advisors, and their investors to understand what works and what doesn’t,” Peter Bodenheimer, Partner and Director at Food-X, added over email.

That this past Food-X cohort was entirely remote actually helped. Vielma noted that staying in Mexico City and doing a virtual cohort let the company stay focused on their core market and in communication with the restaurants surrounding them.

At the moment, remotekitchen is developing the final part of its product before they officially go to market. From there, the company plans to start raising its seed round.

The overarching goal is to empower any restaurant to get online — no small feat when the majority of your target region is currently offline and a pandemic is currently wrecking havoc on the entire industry. A huge part of the restaurant industry’s evolution will be the shift towards more and more off-premises orders, for which an online component is pretty much mandatory these days.

Peña says that remotekitchen’s long-term goal “is to enable universal access to healthy delicious and affordable food by democratizing the marketplace.” In other words, anyone can be a restaurant, thanks to mobile-first restaurant technology.