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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant operations

Zenput Raises $27M to Manage Operations for Multi-Unit Restaurants

Restaurant operations tech company Zenput has raised $27 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Golub Capital with participation by existing investors, including Jackson Square Ventures, MHS Capital, and Goldcrest Capital. It brings Zenput’s total funding to date to over $47 million, according to a company press release. 

San Francisco-based Zenput calls its tech an “operations execution platform.” With it, multi-unit restaurant operators, grocery stores, and convenience stores can release new operating procedures and health and safety protocols and enforce them across all units. Businesses can update all of their locations at the same time whenever a new policy or procedure gets rolled out. Zenput can also track how well each unit is complying with standards and procedures. The system can also be used to distribute new promotional campaigns across all units. 

Leading brands in the restaurant and convenience store industries, including Chipotle, Five Guys, P.F. Chang’s, and 7-Eleven, are current customers of Zenput.

Zenput says it has “approximately” 100 percent revenue growth over the last year and saw daily activities on the platform increase by 150 percent per store. The platform’s apparent popularity makes sense, given that restaurants have had to continually change and update policies in order to accommodate COVID-19-related restrictions and regulations. “The challenges of the past year really underscored for our customers the criticality of being able to manage the complexities and overall execution of work in one central place, especially when an operator might have dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations,” Vladik Rikhter, Zenput’s CEO and cofounder, said in a statement.  

He added that the new funds will largely go towards building new products that can address additional areas of operations. 

Zenput currently serves over 500 customers across 50,000 locations in 40 different countries. The funding will also go towards expanding this customer base. 

Survey: Despite Low Adoption Today, Automation Is a Key Part of Future Restaurant Operations

Automation could significantly help restaurants deliver high-quality experiences to customers more consistently and easily, according to a new Zenput and Technomic survey of 295 restaurant industry personnel.

That might seem like an obvious statement in this day and age, where digital ordering is on the rise and you can’t turn a corner without running into a self-service kiosk. But as Zenput and Technomic’s “2020 Restaurant Ops Report” suggests, the restaurant industry as a whole remains slow when it comes to adopting technologies that can automate more manual day-to-day tasks for restaurant employees. 

Just 27 percent of restaurant operators said their company is embracing automation “to a great extent.” The number is higher among corporate stores (33 percent) than franchisees (18 percent). Meanwhile, smaller operators (think less than 50 units) are more likely to embrace technology that automates employee tasks than larger ones. The latter point makes sense, given the time, money, and sheer organizational factors needed to introduce new technologies across thousands of restaurant units.

But slow adoption will almost certainly speed up in the near future, however. As the report notes: 

“The reality is that to remain competitive and consistently deliver positive customer experiences, corporate brands and franchisees need to find ways to get more out of every store and field employee they have. This means embracing new strategies, processes, and automation — technologies that will enable staff to focus on higher value activity and do it more efficiently.”

The report doesn’t call out many actual technologies, but it’s a safe bet to say the bulk of restaurant automation in the near future won’t be in the form of burger-flipping robots or widespread delivery via drone, which while promising are expensive and time-consuming to implement on a wide scale. Instead, automation will be software that streamlines day-to-day tasks like inventory management and bookkeeping, which in turn frees up employee time to focus on customer service. As the National Restaurant Association noted in its recent “Restaurant 2030” report, “Everything from inventory management to scheduling to payroll, taxes and bill reconciliation will be more automated in the restaurant of the future.”

Already companies like Fourth and HotSchedules, who merged in July of 2019, as well as Toast, LimeTray, xtra Chef, and many others, offer software platforms that automate “busy work” in the back of house — tasks such as order tracking, inventory management, and bookkeeping. 

And while adoption of automation technologies may be low right now, approval is high among those who are already using them. The Technomic-Zenput survey notes that “83 percent of operators who embraced automation say their experience has been a positive one.” Operators cite more effective store operating procedures, clear visibility across store units, and the ability to quickly identify operational issues as some of the big benefits of software automation. 

One of the predicted trends for restaurants in 2020 is that operators will focus on streamlining their tech stack and employing software more strategically in the coming months. In other words, rather than inundate employees with a pile of new digital tools to learn, restaurants will pick and choose which technologies are most effective at solving the big issues. Tech that can pinpoint and solve more operational issues is likely to be high on the list of many over the next year.