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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant software

86 Repairs Nabs $7.3M in Funding for Restaurant Maintenance Tech

Restaurant tech company 86 Repairs has raised an additional $5.3 million, bringing its total funding for its seed round to $7.3 million, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Investors in this latest raise include TDF Ventures, Gordon Food Service, MATH Venture Partners, Revolution, and Cleveland Avenue. To date, 86 Repairs has raised $8.8 million.

Chicago-based 86 Repairs says the new funds will help the company build out more products for its maintenance and repairs management platform for restaurants.

The 86 Repairs system manages repair and maintenance processes for restaurants by digitizing information about all a restaurant’s equipment, and then handling the bulk of the work when there is an issue. For example, if a walk-in cooler breaks down, the restaurant calls or texts 86 Repairs, who handles things like troubleshooting, warranty checks, and setting up an appointment with a preferred technician. The company says it takes care of all communication, scheduling, and dispatching with a restaurant’s preferred equipment vendors.

The 86 Repairs platform also includes a “data insights” portion that displays things like incident history and overall spend on maintenance repair. The idea is to give restaurants one central location at which to view all data about all maintenance, even for large, multi-unit chains. To that end, a number of different chains already use the platform, including McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, Sonic, and Famous Dave’s.

As predicted, both interest and investment in restaurant back-of-house technologies has increased since the start of the year. Though U.S. restaurants are for the most part reopened at full capacity, the need for cost-cutting and cost-saving measures is more important than ever.

ResQ, which just raised $7.5 million, is the other notable restaurant tech right now focused on repairs and maintenance.

Software that can digitize the maintenance management process makes sense for larger chains like McDonald’s. For smaller, independent restaurants — the benefits may be a bigger question mark. Spending money on another software subscription may or may not be justifiable, depending on how much a restaurant is able to save in overall maintenance and repair costs.

Popmenu Raises $65M for its Restaurant Digital Marketing and Ordering Platform

Popmenu, a digital marketing and ordering platform for restaurants, announced today that it has raised a $65 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from new investor Salesforce Ventures and existing investors Bedrock Capital, Base10 and Felicis Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Popmenu to $87.1 million.

Popmenu’s online suite of tools allow restaurants to build their own branded websites, with dynamic, interactive menus. Restaurants can also coordinate delivery or pickup, enable customer reviews and generate follow-up digital marketing promotions. Popmenu also offers a contactless ordering software package (something made more important by the pandemic) that allows guests to scan a QR code with their smartphone to view and order off of restaurant menus.

During the pandemic last year, when dining rooms were shut down, the restaurant industry turned to delivery and takeout to stay alive. The easiest way to do that was to join up with a third-party delivery service like Uber Eats or DoorDash. But that easy path to delivery came at the cost of handing over both the customer relationship (i.e., ordering and sales data) and the ability to control branding. Some restaurant tech companies even went as far as calling the pandemic “a wakeup call” for restaurants around where, how, and by whom their data gets accessed.

As an alternative to delivery marketplaces, Popmenu bills itself as a tool restaurants can use to control the customer’s journey from the time that person lands on the person’s website to the time they click the order button and their credit card is charged.

This rebuilding of direct relationships between restaurants and consumers is something many software services tout nowadays, with everyone from Toast, Square, Olo, and other offering some form of direct ordering capability. Squarespace’s recent acquisition of hospitality management platform Tock will likely add more competition to this space, too.

At the same time, however, delivery services themselves are bringing their own “commission-free” ordering platforms to market. Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats have all announced some version of this concept in a bid to keep restaurants (and their data) firmly entrenched in their own ecosystems. 

For its part, Popmenu says it will use the new funding to accelerate the development of its Popmenu Max, which bulks up its all-in-one solution with some AI-powered features.

My Other Phone Is a Restaurant

The surprise hit story on The Spoon this week has been our recent post on Mexico City-based remotekitchen, a startup that’s building a mobile-first restaurant-tech platform that, theoretically at least, only needs a smart phone to operate. 

I highlight this story not because I think every restaurant needs to pare down their tech stack to a smartphone, but because now more than ever, restaurant tech companies need to ensure their products are offering real value to restaurants. In other words, they need to solve problems restaurants are having right now while also helping to prepare for the ones waiting for us in the future.

Remotekitchen’s platform solves some obvious problems for its core audience. Its founders explained to me that 96 percent of independent restaurants in Latin America are not online, that restaurant tech solutions are underdeveloped in the region, and that a vast majority of restaurant owners have to take orders via their own smartphones. The mobile-first approach also better equips operators to run virtual restaurants, which may be necessary depending on how high the coronavirus wave spikes.

The U.S. is not like Latin America when it comes to restaurant tech. We have choice and then some. Prior the pandemic, restaurant tech solutions included not just point of sale systems and self-serve kiosks, but also reservations management, wearable computing, virtual reality on boarding . . . the list goes on and on and on.

I don’t think restaurant tech companies should necessarily stop work on any of the above solutions, so long as they’re somehow helping restaurants solve the industry’s most urgent problems. Such as:

Improving restaurant pickup orders. For restaurants new to the off-premises world, juggling takeout and/or curbside pickup orders has proven challenging — to put it politely. Restaurants need more streamlined ways to both receive and deliver pickup orders to customers. (Geofencing, perhaps?)

Making restaurants more socially distant. I don’t refer to space between tables here. That is not a problem tech needs to solve. Menus, on the other hand, are. The number of simple digital menu solutions out there right now is encouraging, and many of them rely on simple signage or QR codes. And unlike chalkboards or disposable paper menus, digital menus could eventually become interactive tools for guests to learn more about the food they’re eating.

Enabling better communications with customers. This one is huge. Back when the pandemic first hit. I remember one restaurant telling me their customers didn’t even know they were open for takeout. Part of this is due to the rise of third-party delivery, which owns a lot of customer relationships. Delivery integrators are one way around this, as they allow restaurants to offer off-premises while still keeping their customer data.

These are just a few of the hot-button issues in the restaurant biz right now. I’m sure you have others, so drop us a line (tips@thespoon.tech) to let us know where you think restaurant tech will be the most valuable right now.

Restaurant Closures Underscore the Need for Off-Premises

The week, Yelp released new data about COVID-19’s continued impact on businesses, the restaurant industry included. The takeaway? A bunch of restaurants that have temporarily closed may never reopen.

Quite a lot of them, actually. 

As of June 15, roughly 140,000 businesses were listed on Yelp as closed. While retail got hit the hardest, restaurants came in at a close second, with 23,981 businesses closed. And here’s the kicker: more than half — 53 percent — of those restaurants currently closed won’t reopen, according to Yelp. 

“Restaurants run on thin margins and can sometimes take months or even years to break even, resulting in this higher rate of permanent closures,” Yelp explained in its update. 

This is aggravated by the rising number of COVID-19 cases across many states, which is causing governments to either delay reopening or order closures again. Some restaurants that had already reopened have to close once more because of employees becoming infected. 

Right now it’s incredibly hard to predict the total number of restaurants that will close permanently. Yelp’s numbers are actually smaller than a report by Independent Restaurant Coalition that said 85 percent of indie restaurants could close by the end of the year. Still, tens of thousands of restaurants is a lot of restaurants.

The lesson? First, that we’re going to be riding this will they-won’t they wave in terms of restaurant closures for a long time. Second, those that can, must continue finding ways to serve their customers with off-premises orders, even if their dining rooms have partially reopened. 

I’m All-In on Smart Vending Machines for Restaurants

On the note of restaurant tech that’s useful, The Spoon’s Editor recently did a report on the promise of automated vending machines in the foodservice world. I give it a shout out here because these next-generation machines, which serve up actual meals created by real chefs, could be the answer to getting good food in a socially distanced manner in many settings.

Consider the old mall food court, where you could mill between different restaurants and build your own smorgasbord of mediocre mall food. Digitizing as much of these very public spaces as possible will be necessary for sanitization and social distancing in the future. Since next-gen automated vending machines are basically their own little restaurant in a box, it’s possible we’ll one day head to food courts not manned by people but equipped with multiple machines from different brands offering increased choice without so much human interaction.

Given the way this pandemic is heading, smart vending machines could be a really smart idea.

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Yumpingo Raises $10M to Build Up Its Restaurant Intelligence Platform

Restaurant intelligence platform Yumpingo has raised a $10 million Series A round, according to a company press release. The round was led by Smedvig Capital with participation from Equinix CEO Keith Taylor, Bullet Point Network CEO Mike Ryan, and David Cantu, cofounder of HotSchedules. 

Yumpingo’s software is primarily built around the after-meal surveys restaurant guests are given that let them rate their experience at the restaurant and their food, with questions specific down to the the individual dish. Restaurants can offer the surveys via the Yumpingo Now package, for which they are given a Yumpingo tablet to hand to guests dining in. They can also choose Yumpingo Everywhere, which lets businesses use the software on their own devices and in a range of different restaurant settings, full-service, quick-service, stadiums, bars, and delivery among them.

Digital surveys are nothing new in the restaurant biz, but Yumpingo somewhat differentiates itself by adding a data analytics element to its products. The Insights Platform, which is also part of the cloud-based offering, looks at live restaurant data over time to identify things like popular dishes and server performance in any given day, week, or month. There is also a communication tool that lets restaurants track reviews on the major sites (e.g., Opentable) and communicate with customers. The entire product can integrate with a restaurant’s existing POS system.

And from the looks of it Yumpingo seems to be inching towards becoming a full tech stack for restaurants rather than just a restaurant feedback platform. The company says that part of the new funding will be used to launch a new pay-at-the-table platform in addition to scaling its existing offerings.  

The move to branch into other areas of the tech stack is wise on Yumpingo’s part, given the consolidation that’s already happening in areas of the restaurant industry and fast headed for others. Other companies, notably reservations platforms like Yelp and Resy, have also built out their software packages to include menu management, loyalty programs, and, even some back-of-house tools. 

For Yumpingo, becoming more than just a survey tool means hopefully staying competitive and staying relevant in a restaurant industry based less and less on what’s happening in the dining room and more on off-premises orders. Continuing to develop the Everywhere offering as well as adding a pay feature could help the company potentially reach a wider base of restaurant clients, whether they’re catering to guests in the dining room or those on the couch.

Newsletter: The New All-in-One Restaurant Tech Is Here, Digital Drive-Thru Goes Down Under

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I was in a local coffee shop recently and overheard a rep from a well-known POS company trying to sell his product to the shop’s manager. But for every feature he offered up (“It’ll manage payroll!” “It makes tipping easier!”), the cafe manager had more or less the same rebuttal: more tech would make more work for her staff.

I suspect this conversation is happening all over the world. Tech’s march on the restaurant industry is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily making life easier for restaurants. In a growing number of cases, too many digital tools actually make it harder to get work done, particularly as demands for delivery and mobile orders ramp up and those functions have to be integrated into an already chaotic workflow.

But this week, we got a different glimpse into the future of the digital restaurant — namely, one where disparate tech solutions are replaced by a single digital platform that can manage every corner of the restaurant, from the kitchen system in the back to the kiosk out front to the off-premises order on its way out for delivery.

At least, that’s what Brightloom hopes to launch to restaurants this fall. The newly rebranded company, formerly known as Eatsa, announced yesterday that it’s revamped its existing end-to-end restaurant tech platform, into which it’s also integrating Starbucks’ famed mobile technology.

This is a big deal because, while many products claim to be “all-in-one” restaurant management software packs that make it easier for restaurant owners and operators to manage the entire business, no one’s yet managed to seamlessly integrate the mobile aspect of business into their system.

And nobody does mobile like Starbucks. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s hard to deny the mega-chain’s dominance when it comes to offering fast, highly personalized order and pickup functions for customers. Brightloom’s soon-to-be-unveiled system will integrate the Starbucks mobile order, pay, and customer loyalty tech into its own system. We don’t yet know exactly what that will look like, but it will undoubtedly raise everyone’s standards around what restaurant-tech systems should be able to do and put pressure on others to make their offerings just as useful and less of a burden for restaurants to implement.

Good-bye, Crackly Speakerphone. Hello Digital Drive-Thru
Will all these digital developments render the crackly speaker at the drive-thru null and void? Probably, and sooner than we think.

While major QSRs like Dunkin’ and Starbucks have been implementing digital and mobile ordering into the drive-thru experience little by little over the last couple years, KFC took things a step further recently by announcing its first-ever drive-thru-only concept store.

The store, which is slated to open in November, will feature multiple drive-thru lanes dedicated to customers who have ordered their food via the KFC website or mobile app. The idea is to streamline the order process and cut down on how long it takes customers — or delivery drivers — to get their food. But again, it’s all about the implementation. KFC’s concept store could raise the bar on what QSRs are expected to deliver in terms of speed and quality. Or it could just be introducing another digital process that stresses workers out. We’ll know more when the pilot launches in November, in Australia.

Delivery Bots on the Rise
Or you could just let the restaurant come to you in the form of a roving bot. There’s a growing number of these devices delivering food from restaurant to customer, often on college campuses, which hold a lot of people in a relatively small geographic area.

But as my colleague Chris Albrecht pointed out this week, Kiwi announced it will test its semi-autonomous delivery bots on the streets of Sacramento, CA this fall, which suggests we’re coming to a point where these li’l roving machines will start to become a more common sight on regular city sidewalks. Who needs drive-thru when you can have your meal brought to you by a cute little box on wheels? As Chris said, “it was pretty amazing to whip out my phone, order a burrito, have a robot fetch my lunch and bring it to my location.”

For now, roving delivery bots are probably not a priority for most restaurants’ overall digital solutions. But as all-in-one offerings like the Brightloom-Starbucks tech get more commonplace and digital ordering becomes routine for customers and workers alike, there may be room for most restaurants to accommodate a bot or two in their tech stack.

Fourth and HotSchedules Merge to Form All-in-One Restaurant Management Platform

Restaurant tech platforms HotSchedules and Fourth announced today they have merged business operations to create an end-to-end restaurant management SaaS solution. According to a press release sent via email, the deal was backed by Marlin Equity Partners and Insight Partners.

Fourth has long offered a software package for restaurants that collects and analyzes various pieces of data both in and out of the kitchen to help restaurants better manage the back of house, from how much inventory to buy and staffers to keep on the floor to payroll details and invoice processing. All this is done through a web-based dashboard. Talking to The Spoon this past March, Simon Bocca, COO of Fourth, highlighted the importance of data in today’s restaurant: ““That’s where we see ourselves as being most valuable for restaurants. We bring in all the data: transaction, productivity, and put that into a really helpful package so that leadership can understand what’s happening.”

HotSchedules, meanwhile, also offers a centralized web interface that uses data to help restaurants make better decisions around workforce management — that is, training and scheduling employees, keeping in line with compliance rules around labor, and forecasting sales and labor costs.

The new combined offering merges both these companies’ strengths into a single cloud-based solution that works across devices. According to the press release, it will also integrate with most major POS systems, along with third-party apps, and accounting platforms.

As restaurants large and small continue the trek to digitization, and as data becomes a more important aspect of doing business, we’ll see more and more software offerings that aim to simplify the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on data. Long-established players like Toast and Upserve already own large portions of the U.S. market for this kind of restaurant tech. And newer companies are getting attention, too, like LimeTray, an Indian company who just started operations in the U.S.

The newly combined Fourth-HotSchedules business will be headquartered in Austin, TX and London, UK, with Fourth’s CEO, Ben Hood, as CEO over the new combined entity. The press release also notes that an executive team will be made up of members from both Fourth and HotSchedules. Both companies will continue operations around their own respective platforms.

These Startups Want To Reduce Wait Times By Making Restaurants More Efficient

It’s occasionally possible to enjoy waiting around for a table at a restaurant. Usually there’s champagne and a comfy seat involved. But for most of us, the words “wait time is about 20 minutes” conjure images of crowded restaurant lobbies with bad acoustics and sometimes peanut shells on the floor.

A company in Virginia wants to fix that problem. Last week, Waitbusters Dining unveiled Digital Diner, an all-in-one restaurant-management platform for front of house. As its name suggests, the main focus here is using tech to shorten, if not altogether eliminate, wait times for eat-in customers.

Appropriately, then, most of the platform’s features contribute to that goal.

Pre-Dining: Restaurants can embed a widget into their website and social media pages that makes it easier for guests to book tables. While this doesn’t seem too different from, say, OpenTable, there’s definitely time, and therefore money, restaurants will save by being in control of reservation features.

Once they book a table, guests “get in line” from their phones and receive updates without having to actually be in the restaurant lobby or carry one of those buzzing pagers around. The restaurant, meanwhile, can send SMS messages with updates and any sudden changes. Especially impatient guests can even pay a small fee to “skip” the line. The latter is not a bad way for restaurants to make incremental revenue, and it will be interesting to see if more platforms adopt this feature as technology advances.

At the Restaurant: Part of what makes it so easy for a restaurant to communicate with diners via this platform is Digital Diner’s table-management features. An auto-server interface makes suggestions to the hosts about where to seat guests. These suggestions are generated from pre-determined factors. For example, maybe that party of six needs space for a wheelchair. Or perhaps the Jones family dines with you frequently and likes the four-top table by the window. It’s a small improvement, but as anyone who’s worked front of house knows, not having to guess and debate seating on a busy night saves a lot of time for everyone.

After Dinner: All the while, Digital Diner collects data on guest behavior (getting in line, canceling, walkouts, etc.), analyzes it, and makes suggested actions for restaurant owners and managers based on the analysis.

There are three pricing options right now: $129/month when you sign up for monthly; $119/month for six months; and $109/month for an annual subscription. When you think about the fact that a set of 30 pagers alone can cost a restaurant thousands of dollars, widgets might be the better option for many places, especially smaller establishments. It’s also worth thinking about how much money a restaurant is saving by streamlining wait times and lessening the chance that people will get fed up and leave before they’re seated.

Digital Diner is, of course, one of many, many products out there trying to become the ultimate solution for the digital-age restaurant. To highlight just a few:

Toast is one of the best-known ones, and they just integrated with hospitality marketplace Harri to make their all-in-one restaurant-management platform even more three-dimensional. In the case of Toast, “all in one” refers to the entire restaurant setup—everything from tableside ordering and payment hardware to measuring staff productivity to splitting a check. Their types of plans run the gamut: full service restaurants and food trucks alike.

Meanwhile Airbnb now allows consumers to make restaurant reservations through the app, building on its investment in reservation platform Resy. The company has slowly been diversifying into dining the last couple years, and so restaurant reservations make sense as Airbnb becomes more of a full-service travel and dining sharing economy marketplace.

Compeat focuses on workforce management and other back-office concerns, like accounting and inventory. The platform makes it easier to manage how much gets spent on employees, whether you’re following the correct labor laws, and minimum wage analysis. Of all the solutions out there, this one is definitely one of the most comprehensive, particularly when it comes to centralizing and streamlining the enormous amount of information restaurants have to have about laws and regulations.

Not all in one but equally fascinating is a self-ordering kiosk from Nextep that uses facial recognition to remember guests. When customers place an order, they are asked if they’d like to save it via phone number or facial recognition. Right now Asian-food restaurant Wow Bao uses the technology to speed up their already speedy order process. Cool as it sounds, though, the company is also being sued right now over use of biometric data.

Which brings up a question the restaurant industry inevitably has to face: Who owns all this customer data, and what can restaurants legally do (or not do) with it? Any tech enthusiast knows this isn’t an easy question to answer. And as more and more of these systems come to market, the data issue will probably get more complicated before we make some sense of it.

For now, however, enjoy not having to wait for 45 minutes in the lobby of your favorite sports bar to get table on a Friday night. That alone is enough to make me want to see the restaurant-tech space continue evolving.