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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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McDonald’s Testing AI-Powered Drive-Thrus in Chicago

McDonald’s has started testing out drive-thrus that use artificial intelligence systems, rather than humans, to take orders. CNBC reported yesterday that the new automated drive-thrus are in use at 10 Chicago McDonald’s locations.

The new system is based on the voice platform built by Apprente, which McDonald’s acquired in 2019. According to McDonald’s, restaurants using the system are seeing an 85 percent order accuracy rate, with only about one-fifth of orders requiring human intervention.

AI-powered drive-thrus can reduce customer wait times and allow restaurants to shift its in-store workforce. A computer that understands natural language is always on and available to take orders. It could also be tied in with other automated systems that know a customer’s purchasing history to automatically make recommendations. With improved understanding accuracy, a restaurant would no longer need a dedicated person to take (or confirm) a drive-thru order, allowing more people to do more customer service or expedite orders.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski told Alliance Bernstein’s Strategic Decisions conference that a big issue ahead for the AI-powered drive-thru is scaling. CNBC reports Kempczinski as saying “Now there’s a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S., with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather — and on and on and on.”

The Apprente acquisition appears to be working out better than Dynamic Yield, which McDonald’s also acquired in 2019. Dynamic Yield generated automated menu recommendations based on factors like weather, and was supposed to be integrated into self-service kiosks and drive-thrus as well. However, this tech didn’t yield the results McDonald’s was looking for and in March of this year The Wall Street Journal reported McDonald’s was looking to sell part of Dynamic Yield.

While McDonald’s Apprente acquisition may have pre-dated the pandemic, last year certainly accelerated the need for enhanced drive-thru technology as dining rooms were forced to shut down. In a February 2021 survey, BlueDot reported that 91 percent of respondents said they had visited drive-thrus the previous month and that long wait times were a “dealbreaker.” Most major QSRs have been doubling down on their drive-thru capabilities to meet this demand, adding capacity and building restaurants around takeout rather than dine-in.

In addition to adding AI assistants, McDonald’s has previously said that it will add other features to its drive-thru such as express lanes for digital orders and conveyor belts to carry food out to customers.

Kempczinski also told the conference that McDonald’s is also exploring ways to automate parts of the kitchen such as the grill or fryer. However he said any such move in the back of the house is still a more than five years out as the technology is too expensive right now.

CheckMate Raises $3M to Streamline Restaurant Ordering

Tiger Global has invested $3 million in CheckMate, a service that helps restaurants unify orders received across multiple platforms, according to TechCrunch. This is a Series A round for CheckMate and is the first outside funding the startup has received.

Off-premise ordering has become a growing part of a restaurant’s business (at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit, restauranteur Richard Blais said delivery was thirty percent of his restaurant’s business). Services like Uber Eats, PostMates and DoorDash can open up a restaurant to new customers, but it can also bring chaos to a restaurant as none of those services talk to each other. That means restaurants need to set up separate tablets for each platform, resulting in a bank of incoming order screens that staff needs to manage and manually enter into their PoS system.

CheckMate works to alleviate that morass by aggregating all those disparate orders from different services and plugging them into a restaurant’s existing management system. This unification reduces complexity and simplifies the order management process.

The rise in restaurant delivery services has spawned a mini-boom of startups looking to clean up the complications those delivery services create. In addition to CheckMate, there’s also Ordermark and Ingest.ai.

For its part, Tiger Global has been investing in pieces that connect all of the dots when it comes to the evolution of restaurants. In July, Tiger Global invested in restaurant POS software maker Toast, and in September, the company led the $300 million investment in Postmates.

Allset raises $5M to take waiting off the menu

You would be forgiven for rolling your eyes when you first hear of Allset. The reservations app, which today announced it had raised $5M in Series A funding (hat tip: TechCrunch), wants to make the dining experience more “efficient” by letting you reserve a table, order and pay all before you even take your seat.

At first, this seems like yet another case of Silicon Valley trying to disrupt something that was actually just fine, thank you very much. After all, a restaurant is more than just food. It’s the ambiance, the slowing down for a minute to enjoy a meal.

But that’s not always the case, especially when you are busy and need to maximize your lunch hour. Being seated and served in rapid, automatic succession is actually a great time saver. Or if you are having a lunch meeting, the ability to pre-order and pre-pay makes can take some of the social awkwardness out of the process and allow you to be more productive.

And Allset believes it isn’t just good for diners, the company says it can be a boon to restaurants, helping them become more efficient and deliver a VIP experience. In this regard the startup is just one of a slew of services looking to optimize restaurant processes and the business of eating out.

Speaking of business, Allset also provides a service that allows companies to offer faster restaurant lunch experiences for employees. Having worked a startup that had catered lunches every day, the ability to actually leave the office in a timely manner (and experience actual sunlight) would have been a great perk.

And just as Facebook has expanded its foray into food delivery, and AirBnB lets guests book reservations via Resy, perhaps it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine a more business-focused social platform such as Linkedin expanding into the business of business lunches through some kind of partnership with Allset.

Allset is available in San Francisco and the Bay Area, New York City, Chicago, Boston, Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Jose. Greycroft led the funding round announced today. Founded in 2015, Allset has raised more than $8.35 million in total funding so far.