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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

reservations

OpenTable: 91 Percent of Consumers Want Off-Premises Meals After the Pandemic

Ninety-one percent of consumers surveyed by OpenTable and the James Beard Foundation said they would like restaurants to offer takeout and delivery options even after the pandemic subsides. 

The figure is from new survey data OpenTable and James Beard recently released that features responses from over 21,000 diners and almost 300 restaurant industry professionals in the U.S. and Canada. 

Other findings in the survey indicate that restaurants are willing to meet that consumer demand. Of the restaurant respondents, 76 percent said they want to continue offering off-premises meal formats like delivery and takeaway after the pandemic. 

Another 86 percent of consumers said they were “willing or somewhat willing” to order more takeout in order to support off-premises initiatives at restaurants. OpenTable noted in its blog post that, “Tangible support is meaningful, restaurateurs say: Restaurants can’t keep these programs alive without it, because they’re expensive and time-consuming to implement and maintain.”

While 91 percent is a big number, it’s not terribly jaw-dropping news in the sense that we’ve seen this shift happening for more than a year. Long before COVID-19, the National Restaurant Association predicted that the bulk of restaurant sales would come from off-premises formats by 2030. The pandemic just accelerated that timeline.

The survey data comes at the same time OpenTable has released new features to aid in the restaurant reopening process currently happening throughout the U.S. The new releases include a bundle of consumer-facing tools as well as a new hub for restaurant owners/operators, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

The consumer-facing “Back to the Table” hub includes what OpenTable is calling a “Reopening Heat Map.” Said map is a state-by-state rundown of restaurants’ reopening statuses and any restrictions. The Back to the Table hub also offers customers includes a tool that will let customers find local restaurants according to meal format (dine-in, delivery, takeout, etc.). 

For restaurants, the new At Your Service feature will launch on Thursday, April 7, and include controls for restaurants to manage capacity, access guest feedback, and tips on reopening businesses.

Sevenrooms Integrates Its Digital Waitlist With Google Reserve

Restaurant management platform Sevenrooms announced today it has integrated its waitlist feature with Google’s reservation tool, Reserve With Google. Sevenrooms has also integrated its waitlist Google Search, Maps, and Assistant, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The Reserve With Google integration means guests can add themselves to a restaurant’s waitlist digitally, while they are still at home, and receive real-time estimates and updates on their wait time. 

Guests are notified via text message when they are close to the top of the waitlist and can then check in virtually when they arrive at the restaurants. Remember the pre-digital process where the restaurant called your name over a loudspeaker then crossed it off a piece of paper when you arrived at the host station? The Sevenrooms-Google integration is basically a digital version of that.

It also comes at a time when most dining rooms are still operating at reduced capacity and restaurants that might not have previously used reservations now require them. This is in part to manage that reduced capacity, but it’s also a way to keep waiting areas less crowded and customers more socially distanced.

For Google, the Sevenrooms partnership is just the latest step in the search giant’s march into the restaurant industry. In August, Google announced a partnership with Panera that lets guests order and pickup meals directly via Search, Maps, and Assistant. Last year, it partnered with delivery integrator Olo to offer more pickup and delivery through Google features and added several new innovations around restaurant menus.

Sevenrooms, meanwhile, has expanded its own arsenal of features in recent months to include contactless ordering and payments and a direct delivery tool that lets restaurants (partly) bypass third-party services like Grubhub and DoorDash. The company raised $50 million in Series B funding in June of this year.

Tock Raises $9.5M to Scale out its Reservations Platform

Reservation and table management platform, Tock, today announced that it has raised $9.5 million, led by Valor Equity Partners and Origin Ventures. This is the third round of funding for Tock and brings the total amount raised by the company to $19 million.

Tock is a cloud-based reservations software system and, according to the company, it’s the only platform that allows restaurants to set up three types of reservations: free, deposit and fully pre-paid. The Tock system also integrates with a restaurant’s POS software to gather and surface relevant guest data, so a restaurant can learn how often someone dines there, when their birthdays are, food preferences, etc.

Tock is currently used by more than 1,000 restaurants across 23 countries. I spoke with Tock CEO Nick Kokonas, who said that the company is growing 15 percent month-over-month, and that the money will be used to scale up marketing, sales and support.

“We started with the high-end,” Kokonas said of his clientele and go-to market strategy, “and are working toward the middle.”

Given the boom in restaurant delivery, I asked Kokonas if Tock will broaden its scope to incorporate off-premise business. “We are not looking to get into delivery,” he said.

Which is probably a good idea since there is plenty of competition in the reservation space alone, and there has already been some consolidation. Kokonas was actually in the news earlier this month when he tipped off Eater about rival reservation platform Resy acquiring competitor Reserve. The New York Times later confirmed the acquisition and noted that Resy serves 10,000 restaurants worldwide. OpenTable, which was bought by Priceline in 2016, operates in more than 50,000 restaurants.

For its part, Kokonas said that Tock is adding 4 – 5 new restaurants a day and that the company is prepping a new feature that allows smaller restaurants and pop-up events to self-onboard onto the Tock platform.

Food Tech Roundup: CBD, Butterballs and Resy!

With Halloween in the rearview mirror and eggnog now on store shelves, we have officially entered the holiday season.

Dunh-dunh-DUNH!

Fear not, for we at The Spoon are here to help you with your connected cooking this season, whether that’s through cooking tips or… some supplemental help. Speaking of which…

The 411 (420?) on CBD
Derived from cannabis, CBD is all the rage and is being infused into everything from chocolates to beer to water and potentially even Coca-Cola products. Supposedly the wonder substance CBD can supposedly reduce inflammation and help with anxiety.

But does it, though? I mean, really? Or is it just another example of snake oil in a new package?

Vox has put together a pretty great primer on the state of CBD that you should read. Here’s a tasty nugg from that story to pique your interest “CBD is about as poorly regulated and understood as a product this popular can possibly be. It’s not accurate to say that CBD, as a whole, is bullshit. From a medical perspective, it’s promising; recreationally, it’s interesting. But that doesn’t mean the stuff you’re buying works.”

Alexa Adds Butterball Skill
Whether it’s your first or fiftieth time cooking turkey — there’s no shame in getting a little help when you need it. In a move fit for our digital age, in addition to its famous hotline, Butterball now has an Alexa skill to give you guidance with your bird.

As The Takeout writes, using Alexa connects you with an automated assistant to answer basic cooking questions by using just your voice. So your hands can be otherwise elbow-deep in a turkey, or filled with giblets and you can still get the answers you need.

RUMOR: Resy to Aquire Reserve
Eater reports that online reservation platform Resy is set to acquire rival table booker, Reserve for an undisclosed sum of money. The source of the rumor is Chicago restauranteur, Nick Kokonas (owner of Alinea) who also just happens to have his own reservation system called Tock. Kokonas also claims to have looked at a Reserve acquisition earlier this year, but passed on it. Both Resy and Reserve declined to comment.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports that Resy did indeed acquire Reserve. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Even With a Goliath, Competitors Abound in the Online Reservation Space

If the restaurant savants at Zagat are correct, more than half of diners make their reservations over the internet. Folks in San Francisco and Washington D.C. jump significantly above that number, while only 21% of Portland hipsters would stoop as low as to be so technologically mundane. Snobs aside, going online has become the de facto way of securing a favorable table time.

Even in a crowded marketplace, online dining reservations remains a popular frontier for budding food-tech entrepreneurs. The top layer of the market is dominated by Open Table, offering huge breadth –but little depth — in terms of customer options.  The key differentiator for Open Table, which services 21 million diners across 40,000 eateries, is the vast number of restaurants it serves. For each reservation made via its website or app, the company receives a fee as well as revenue from a propriety reservation/CRM-like terminal it offers to its clients.

The top of the res-tech space is rich with mammoth players. Open Table was purchased for $2.6 billion in 2014 by Priceline Group. Open Table has leveled the playing field by acquiring such competitors as Quickcue and Rezbook. Following in the big fish eats little fish scenario, Yelp purchased Seatme, Michelin Travel bought U.K.-based Bookatable and Tripadvisor put European online res company La Fourchette into its fold for $140 million. Some acquisitions added new features to the mothership such as improving wait times for tables while others added more client bases.

Sensing opportunities to provide more in-depth services, newer entrants such as Scottish-based Eveve, Table 8, Resy, Nowait and Nextable are digging deeper into layers of value that go beyond clicking for table times. Newer firms are working to create communities between eating establishment and their patrons. Going far beyond loyalty clubs, the goal of these hopefuls is to maximize mobile technology and data to create dining experiences where the maître d knows his or her customer’s favorite table and server.

Among those with a new vision for the online res space, Table 8 suggests it can provide seating priority at restaurants that don’t take reservations; Nowait attempts to empower customers by upgrading the waiting in line experience; and Seven Rooms goes deep into CRM, allowing eateries to gather sophisticated data about their diners.

Included in this new crop of restaurant tech companies is Reserve. Offering what it calls “premier table management software” for restaurants which allows its clients the ability to more efficiently with a CRM component to understanding the behaviors of its diners. This includes “identifying VIPs and tracking visit history, learning about diners with social media profiles and food/beverage/service tags, searching for guests via any detail in their notes, and sharing diner data across locations in a group.” The company says it differs from Open Table in that they select a curated list of establishments it and charges establishments a monthly fee, as opposed to a per reservation fee.

With all the established players and newcomers to the res-tech space, a crucial opportunity seems to be falling by the wayside. As most online reservation spaces provide some sort of feedback loop, those comments—especially the harmful negative ones that make their way to social media—are not easily managed through current reservation systems. To handle a review crisis, restaurants rely on all-purpose social media management firms such as Bazaarvoice or specialty consultants like Reputation Ranger.

It seems fairly obvious that one way of competing with the online reservation Goliaths is to provide the tools to forestall social media disasters. Res-tech wannabes, take note.