Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

pickup orders

BlueDot Releases Two Features to Make Takeout Orders More Efficient

Location tech company BlueDot today announced two new features the company says will improve speed of service as well as personalization for restaurant customers, according to an email sent to The Spoon. Dubbed Hello Screens and Wave, the two features are geared towards pick up and curbside service — formats that have become a mainstay of doing business over the last year.

San Francisco-based Bluedot’s location and geofencing technology already powers a number of digital initiatives from QSRs, including McDonald’s, Dunkin’, and KFC. The company raised $9.1 million in July 2020. Around that time, it also released its Tempo feature, which is essentially a predictive arrival technology that helps restaurants better understand when to start fulfilling an order, so that food doesn’t sit waiting for a customer to arrive.

The new features build on this idea of making the pickup process more efficient. Wave is a simple arrival notification feature that lets customers alert the restaurant when they have arrived to pick up their order. Upon walking inside or pulling into a curbside parking space, the customer simply hits the “I’m here” button, which sends a notification straight to the kitchen, so a staffer can bring the order out. Wave can be added to any channel of the restaurant’s through which customers order, including mobile apps, SMS, and email.

Simultaneous to that process, Hello Screens alerts the restaurant when a customer is en route to the restaurant, giving an estimated time of arrival. The in-browser feature gives both visual and audio cues and can run off a tablet, computer, phone, or other device. 

Speeding up all three of those formats has become more important over the last year, since they’ve been the only options through which restaurants can serve customers. Dining rooms are beginning to increase their capacity volumes now, but the general consensus is that customers will continue to want to-go food as well, preferably made as quickly and efficiently as possible. BlueDot itself released a survey recently that found long wait times are a “dealbreaker” for many consumers nowadays.

Automating not just the actual pickup process but also elements of order fulfillment operations could feasibly shave seconds off each order coming into the kitchen. While that sounds small at the individual level, when added up, that time saved and make the restaurant operation move a whole lot faster.

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.

DoorDash Will Use Location Data to Make Pickup Orders Speedier and More Socially Distanced

DoorDash announced a new feature today that’s meant to speed up the process for pickup orders and make it more appropriate for these socially distanced times. One catch: the new feature needs your location data in order to do that.

Customers can opt in and share their location data with the DoorDash app, so that as they approach the restaurant, that restaurant can receive an alert and have their order ready to go. The idea is to cut down on the amount of people crowding into a restaurant lobby as they wait for their takeout orders to be ready. In theory, at least, a restaurant could have a designated area of the lobby for pickup orders and place the food there when the app notifies them of a customer’s arrival. 

Of course in order for that to work, people have to be okay with DoorDash having access to their location data while the app is running. I doubt this will be an issue for most customers, given the times. Recent survey data sent to The Spoon by Dragontail found that 73 percent of consumers getting takeout/delivery said they would be “more inclined to order for carry out over delivery if given the option for a contactless experience.” 

The new feature is also a way for DoorDash to originate more takeout orders through its own platform. Third-party delivery has taken much heat (understatement) lately over the amount they charge restaurants in commission fees for delivery orders. More than ever, customers are encouraged to order takeout directly from the restaurant itself so that the revenue from each transaction goes directly to businesses, which need all the help they can get right now. The idea of ordering takeout direct from local restaurants has even been translated into a weekly event on social media.

DoorDash is clearly trying to grab back some of the orders from takeout, and it wouldn’t be alone. At the end of last week, Postmates launched a curbside pickup feature. Grubhub has had a feature for pickup orders in place for some time, too.

Nor is sharing one’s location to make food pickup more efficient just the territory of third-party delivery services. My colleague Chris Albrecht highlighted its benefits in the grocery sector this week when he wrote about his experience with Walmart’s geofencing technology that enables contactless curbside pickup. Geofencing, and location data in general, will “take on more importance as restaurants and grocers look to efficiently maximize their revenues while reducing human-to-human contact.” 

Back in the restaurant world, DoorDash still leads in terms of market share for third-party delivery companies, according to the latest numbers from Edison Trends. That number one spot could be upset, though, if the rumored Grubhub-Uber Eats deal goes through. Edison Trends noted that the combined Grubhub-Uber Eats entity would gobble up 45 percent of the market share — the exact same percentage DoorDash currently holds. The latter’s push to win more takeout orders is no doubt also a move to retain some of that market share in the face of the impending deal.