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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant tech

Meet The Reimagining Restaurants Podcast, and Check Out The First Episode With Wow Bao’s Geoff Alexander

Here at The Spoon, we’ve covered hundreds of restaurant operators over the past half-decade, in part because we love restaurants and restaurant tech, but mostly because restaurant operators are some of the most creative and hard-working entrepreneurs in the food business.

The truth is they have to be. There’s no business changing faster than the world of food service, with the advent of ghost kitchens, digital ordering, automation, and AI, all against a backdrop of high food costs, changing consumer tastes, employee turnover, and more.

All of which is why we’ve decided to start a new podcast focused on entrepreneurs who are finding new ways to run a restaurant in today’s modern world. We wanted to hear their journey into restaurants, hear how they are rethinking how to do business in today’s world, and where they see the restaurant business going in the future.

For our first episode, we knew no one better to discuss approaching the restaurant business in new and innovative ways than Geoff Alexander. The CEO of Wow Bao got his start in hospitality with a college job as a bartender, where he discovered his talent for connecting with people, and he hasn’t looked back.

He joined Lettuce Entertain You shortly after graduation and rose through the ranks over the next three decades, gaining operational expertise and eventually overseeing his own division. In 2009, he took the reins at Wow Bao, where he embraced technology as a way to turn the business around and innovate on new business models. He introduced self-ordering kiosks, mobile ordering, and partnered with third-party delivery platforms early on, which laid the foundation for Wow Bao’s unique model that spans over 500 locations with a mix of virtual kitchens and centralized food production.

Alexander shares insights on Wow Bao’s approach and how a lack of capital fostered a culture of creativity and efficiency. This approach led to successful innovations like centralized production and distribution, which he says has kept cost low while ensuring quality. Alexander also discusses scaling with hot-food vending machines and dipping the company’s toe into the metaverse.

It was a fun episode, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts!

VDC Rolls Out Linked Eats, a ‘Value Layer’ Software That Optimizes Virtual Restaurant Operations

It’s no secret that the virtual restaurant space has struggled over the past few years. Longtime operators like Reef, Kitchen United, and NextBite have laid off employees, shut down locations, and, in some cases, sold to another company well below their current valuations.

Those who survived have been rolling up competitors through acquisition and building out their technology stacks. At the top of that list is Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC), the company behind virtual restaurant brands like BeastBurger and Pardon My Cheesesteak.

For much of the past year, VDC has stealthily rolled out its new platform, Linked Eats, to restaurants operating within its network. The software, which is the combined result of tech built by VDC for its restaurant partners and technology acquired through the acquisition of Sauce (which built dynamic pricing tech) and Crave Delivery (ghost kitchen software), is described as an ‘AI-powered’ software tool to optimize virtual restaurant operations. The company says Linked Eats helps operators with revenue management (automating uptime, dispute management, error reconciliation), marketing & promotion management, and dynamic pricing.

According to VDC President and Co-founder Robbie Earl, Linked Eats sits on top of existing POS and delivery management software as a “value layer” designed specifically for virtual restaurant brands.

“We work with a number of the middlewares, we work with the DSPs (delivery service providers), and we’re starting to work with the POS companies and tying it all together,” said Earl. “We want to drive you towards automated actions and have an action-oriented product versus a dashboard-oriented product.”

Linked Eats has rolled out its software with 30 partners to four thousand locations over the past six months, including names such as California Pizza Kitchen, Chuck E. Cheese, and Brio Italian Kitchen. In addition to Earl, who is also the co-founder of VDC, Linked Eats is led by company CEO Devin Wade, who came over when VDC acquired the remnants of Wade’s previous company, Crave.

“In just around six months since going live, Linked Eats is already at a run rate of adding over $10 million per year in gross profitability to restaurants,” said Wade in a press release issued to The Spoon.

The expansion into developing a standalone software business alongside its virtual restaurant brand comes after what’s been an extremely active last year for VDC on its virtual brand side. The company once had 20 virtual brands and trimmed that number down to under a dozen.

“We took the number of brands we had – twenty – down to eight, and we’re at ten now.”

Another big challenge VDC faced over the past years was the ongoing lawsuit with MrBeast over BeastBurger, perhaps the most well-known celebrity-branded virtual kitchen effort of all time. According to Earl, the dispute between VDC and MrBeast is still in the courts, but he says we should hear something on the status of that soon.

“We are still operating the brand. It is still on offer and available, but there will be, I think, some other news coming on it soon,” said Earl.

Looking forward, Earl thinks the growth for Linked Eats will be fueled by demand for operators to expand their digital business, whether it’s a digital order for a virtual brand running out of their kitchen or for their own native business.

“The exciting thing is it doesn’t discriminate between a virtual brand and your regular brand. So, with all of the learnings that we have, this massive data set of hundreds of millions of dollars of digital orders that we generate, we now have all those learnings that we can give to you and your brick-and-mortar restaurant.”

You can watch and hear my full conversation with Robbie Earl below.

The Spoon Catches Up With Robbie Earl to Talk Virtual Restaurants & Linked Eats Roll Out

Restaurants Offering Subscriptions Up 54% Over Past Year According to Square

According to a new report from payment processing company Square, the number of restaurants offering some form of active subscription plan to its customers has grown by 54% over the past year. These subscriptions – anything from a wine club to a taco lover’s pass – have become increasingly popular (among some, at least) in recent years as restaurants look for ways to create more stable revenue through automated payments and increase customer loyalty.

According to Square, over three-quarters of restaurant subscriptions remained active after one month, and 57% remained active after six months.

Of course, it should be noted that Square doesn’t represent the entire point-of-sale market for restaurants so the data might be somewhat skewed. While other POS players like Clover also offer support for subscriptions, Square has been probably the most active in building out subscription functionality over the past year. That said, given the success Square has had and the continued challenges restaurant operators face in the form of rising costs and constrained labor markets, my guess is most major POS providers will begin to offer this feature sooner rather than later.

The Square report also showed data that pained a picture of a slowly recovering, perhaps permanently changed, restaurant industry post-pandemic. Square data shows that while many urban work centers have seen their share of food and beverage transactions increase slowly since the early days of the pandemic, overall activity has largely flatlined. According to Square, downtown dining is at about three-quarters of what it used to be, a number that is primarily a reflection of a reshaped workforce that has seen many office workers continue to work from home for the bulk of the workweek.

However, Square data shows that one city has proven to be a significant outlier to the trend of decreased downtown dining traffic. According to Square, Detroit has seen its downtown dining jump an eye-popping 75% increase in traffic compared to 2019, something that’s likely attributable to strong hiring by US automakers, particularly as they look to build out their EV strategies over the past couple of years.

2023 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem: Nourishing the Bottom Line

In collaboration between TechTable and Vita Vera Ventures, we are pleased to share an updated 2023 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map.

We all saw that the pandemic brought a wave of experimentation in the restaurant tech space, but we also know that tech-driven change is not always linear. 

In early 2022, we made bold predictions about the restaurant tech environment in 2023, as we anticipated numerous acquihires ahead (acquisitions primarily driven by tech talent vs strategic tech value). This was due to the tight tech labor market (at the time) and the increasingly challenging funding and interest rate conditions. 

However, with the recent wave of macro tech layoffs, the tech labor market is no longer tight, and we believe more restaurant tech companies may be forced to shut down rather than finding a soft landing through acquisition. We’ve already seen a strong reset on requirements for capital efficiency and valuations of startups in the sector. This macro shift may create potential for rollup opportunities, but many early-stage assets across the sector are overfunded single-point solutions and still subscale.

This is ironic as the need for tech-driven solutions has never been stronger, but companies without the right growth metrics will likely struggle to survive. The inflationary environment is also forcing harder decisions for operators, which may further dampen their willingness to engage with new solutions.

With that in mind, we are pleased to share our 2023 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem, which serves as a current heat map of the broader ecosystem within the US (and is clearly not exhaustive). 

Click here to enlarge/download image of map. Click here for downloadable PDF.

The Journey from Point Solutions to Comprehensive Tech Stacks

While single-point solutions for things like online ordering, loyalty programs, and delivery were popular during the pandemic, we have reached a moment now with perhaps too many point solutions in the market. 

Tech stacks that require too many logins are now in fact creating a cognitive burden for employees, rather than the intended promise of efficiency and ease of use. As a result, operators are beginning to seek integrated systems and smaller tech stacks that can do more. (See commentary in the previous section about rollup opportunities!) 

Restaurant tech advisor David Drinan succinctly identifies the near-term priority for most operators: “The restaurant industry is thirsty for technology innovation that will deliver high margin, incremental revenue.”

On the operational side, managers are still struggling with certain areas such as scheduling and inventory management. These tasks can be time-consuming, especially for independent restaurant owners who have limited resources. As a result, we have seen a growth category of solutions that can automate these functions and provide real-time data to help operators make informed decisions.

Help *Still* Wanted   

The labor shortage in the restaurant industry has been a major challenge for operators in recent years, and labor optimization is still at the top of every operator’s mind. The pandemic caused many workers to permanently leave the hospitality industry, leaving restaurants short-staffed. 

According to the National Restaurant Association, almost two-thirds of US restaurant operators say they do not have enough employees to support existing demand. Instead of replacing this lost workforce, many operators are turning to tech to automate more functions and reduce the need for human labor. 

From digital menus and ordering kiosks to automated kitchen equipment, there are many ways that technology can help restaurants operate more efficiently with fewer employees. By automating basic tasks such as taking orders and processing payments, operators can free up their staff to focus on more complex tasks that require human expertise, such as customer service and food preparation.

Another trend the restaurant industry is grappling with is the changing expectations of younger workers when it comes to the employer/employee relationship. With more emphasis on work-life balance, career development, and job satisfaction, younger workers are looking for more than just a paycheck. 

To meet these expectations, operators are looking for workforce management solutions that can help to improve engagement, development, and rewards for their employees. This includes tools for tracking and managing schedules, as well as innovative solutions for tip outs and other compensation mechanisms. By investing in these solutions, operators can not only attract and retain top talent but also improve the overall efficiency and productivity of their workforce.

Finally, it is worth noting that basic scheduling and labor management tools can have a significant impact on profitability by reducing labor costs and improving operational efficiency. By automating scheduling and timekeeping, for example, restaurants can reduce the likelihood of overstaffing or understaffing, which can be costly in terms of wasted labor or lost sales opportunities. 

In the end, the ability to leverage technology to optimize labor is critical for restaurants to remain competitive in a challenging operating environment. While kiosks and text ordering have shown promise in the QSR space, there are many other opportunities for technology to make a positive impact on the industry as a whole.

Ghost Kitchens: It’s Even More Complicated

In our 2021 restaurant tech retrospective, we had a lot to say about this growing subsector, including the challenges for success (a.k.a. profitability) within the confines of a ghost kitchen business model.  

Now, as the concept of virtual and ghost kitchens continues to evolve even further, it’s important for operators to understand the complexities involved and navigate these challenges to build successful ghost kitchen operations.

One major obstacle has been the potential for tension between virtual brands and existing businesses, where adding virtual brands can lead to direct competition with their own existing businesses. Finding the right tech and operational partner to balance between these two is key.

Additionally, ensuring food safety and maintaining quality standards across multiple brands can be a challenge. Many of the generic virtual brands have lacked distinct value or clear taste standards, leading to underwhelming food quality issues and removal from the major third-party delivery platforms.

Last Mile Magic

Making the economics work for restaurant delivery is a growing priority for the industry. This includes better interoperability between POS/Kitchen systems and delivery providers, better routing and batching systems, localized kitchens, and of course even the mode of transportation for delivery.

We are tracking over 20 companies in the North American unattended last mile category, but it is still early days with most (all?) of the solutions operating in limited geographies and customer trials. So we have left this slice off the infographic for 2023, but don’t forget to keep your eyes on the sky, as we’ve seen recent growth of backyard drone delivery companies which are proving to be faster and better for the environment (if they can outweigh the noise and regulatory concerns).

GenAI on the Menu

Tech entrepreneurs have long dreamed of personalized food recommendations, but few have succeeded in creating true personalization beyond dietary concerns, allergens, or ingredient likes/dislikes. 

However, we have now reached a unique moment where new technologies like ChatGPT will be able to create meaningful and personalized interactions with guests. This has always been the premise of a variety of AI-driven restaurant tech startups, but the ability to leverage the underlying data to engage and interact with guests in a truly personal and conversational manner is game-changing. 

By using data from previous orders and interactions alone, ChatGPT can help to create a more tailored experience for guests, from recommending menu items to offering personalized promotions. ChatGPT can become a critical part of a restaurant’s marketing team by creating content, with the ability to easily translate to different languages as well. This could give operators a crucial competitive advantage as consumers demand more personalized experiences. We have only begun to see the capabilities of ChatGPT with free templates being offered to restaurant operators already.

Moreover, conversational AI like ChatGPT can also be a valuable tool for restaurant operators seeking to understand their own operating metrics. By integrating ChatGPT into their tech stack, operators can ask natural language questions and receive real-time responses, empowering them to make informed decisions about their operations.

Emerging Restaurant Tech Concepts to Watch

  • Chat/AI across marketing and operations
  • Tech-enabled employee support and training (for example, personalized perks, tip-out options, or language choices) 
  • AI for scheduling to free up managers
  • Dynamic pricing
  • Reusable containers + tech-driven circular economy for foodservice 

Looking ahead –  As always, we welcome your thoughts and reactions, and look forward to continuing to follow this sector together in the coming years. Reach out to us: Brita@vitavc.com and hello@techtablesummit.com. 

Podcast: Hospitality in the Era of Web3 with Ben Leventhal

Ben Leventhal has nothing if not good timing. 

In 2004 the New York entrepreneur launched Eater at the dawn of the blogging era, when food media was still mostly legacy publications and message boards. 

After selling Eater to Vox, he launched Resy in 2014 just as restaurants were beginning to bristle at the data practices of legacy online reservation systems such as OpenTable. He’d eventually go on to sell his second company to American Express. 

And now Leventhal is looking to create his third founder success story with the launch of Blackbird, which he describes as “a new loyalty, membership, and payments technology company.” With Blackbird, Leventhal hopes to create consumer-friendly software that harnesses the features enabled by new platforms such as Web3 while pushing the technology into the background.

“Consumer software is consumer software,” Leventhal told me

In this episode, we discuss Ben’s journey from those early days, how the evolution of food media, the changes to reservation and other restaurant tech platforms, and how he envisions Web3 and other new technologies could change the game for small and independent restaurants. 

You can find out more about Ben’s new company at Blackbird.xyz. 

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

AI-Powered Colonel Sanders and Santa Voices May Be Coming to a Drive-Thru Near You

Are drive-thrus the next celebrity voice licensing opportunity?

If Presto Automation has its way, the answer could be yes. The restaurant automation company announced this week that it has launched a new custom voice solution that features different characters ranging from celebrity voices to restaurant mascots to localized voices with specific local dialects.

According to the company, the new Presto Voice feature allows guests to place orders in a conversational style and says its natural language recognition technology will allow it to operate even in high noise environments. In addition to celebrities and brand mascots such as Colonel Sanders, the technology will also enable offer seasonal voices (like Santa) and regional personalities such as local sports athletes.

In the release, Presto claims in a recent survey that 68% of consumers aged 18-44 years said that they are significantly more likely to use a drive-thru featuring celebrity voices. I’m personally skeptical about how persistent any boost in business computer-generated character voices would be, but I’m willing to be persuaded.

Celebrity voices or not, there’s no doubt that this type of technology will continue to gain traction as restaurant operators struggle to hire qualified employees. If Presto and other drive-thru automation technology prove to be reliable, my guess is the drive-thru employee at large national chains will become an endangered species within 5 years.

Restaurant Tech News Pod: Web3 Restaurants, Sweetgreen Robots, Subway Smart Fridge

Last week I caught up with Expedite’s Kristen Hawley to talk about some of the recent happenings in the world of restaurant tech.

Some of the stories we talked about on this episode include:

And more! You can listen to the podcast below or find it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bite Ninja’s New Funding Shows Operational Efficiency Is What’s in for Restaurant Tech in 2022

Despite the constant flood of doomsday headlines as the dark clouds of recession gather overhead and consumer behavior regresses to the mean post-pandemic, not all news is bad news these days when it comes to restaurant tech. In fact, some startups seem to be doing just fine, particularly those whose mission it is to help restaurants save money.

Take Bite Ninja, who this week announced an $11.3 million funding round. The company allows fast food restaurants to outsource their drive-thru through Bite Ninja’s cloud-labor platform. Bite Ninja employees can remotely staff a drive-thru from their home anywhere in the country and can also work multiple drive-thrus during the course of their shift.

The ability to spread a single worker across multiple restaurants and treat drive-thru labor as an “elastic” resource that can be spun or down dynamically during the course of a day is a radical rethink of a core part of a fast food restaurant, coming at a time when most fast food restaurants are struggling to hire employees. According to the announcement, Bite Ninja is currently running trials at five of the top twenty quick-service chains in the US.

Other companies that help restaurants and retail become more efficient and bring cost-savings to operations continue to thrive and get new funding despite what many see as a large-scale downturn in food tech funding. For example, Galley Solutions, a company that helps restaurants more accurately predict and optimize their food inventory, raised $14.2 million this spring. Hyphen, a startup that is building plug & play automated makeline solutions, raised a $24 million Series A in February and saw additional follow-on investment by Chipotle in June. That same month, food waste reduction startup Goodr raised a $8 million funding round in early summer. Last month, Afresh, a company that enables food retailers to optimize their fresh food inventory and reduce waste, raised a $115 million series B.

If 2021’s restaurant tech funding was all about ghost kitchens and digital transformation, the big buzzwords for 2022 are operational efficiency and cost savings. Startups that can help streamline operations using automation, cloud computing, AI, and other transformational technologies will continue to do okay, particularly those that help restaurant operators deal with acute labor shortages and rising costs of doing business during rising inflation and persistent supply chain disruptions.

Podcast: A Challenging Time for Restaurant Tech

In this episode of The Spoon, we are joined by long-time restaurant and restaurant tech journalist Nancy Luna of Insider to compare notes about what’s been a challenging few months for restaurant tech startups.

Some stories we discuss on the show include:

Click play below or find The Spoon podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: The Hard Business of Building an At-Scale Restaurant Tech Company

Anyone who’s read Jordan Thaeler’s publication Reforming Retail knows he likes to tell it like it is when it comes to restaurant tech.

No matter whether it’s the business model of payment processors or the difficulties of building an at-scale restaurant tech startup, you can find his no-holds-barred analysis on a wide variety of topics on a website he describes as, “a cathartic output to all the nonsense” he sees in the industry.

We thought it would be fun to have Jordan visit the podcast to talk about some of this nonsense and more. On this week’s show we discuss:

  • The challenges of the restaurant tech market and why there aren’t more publicly traded companies to support a restaurant industry with a total market size of over half a trillion dollars
  • Why point of sale is still the focus and starting point for digital transition in restaurants
  • The ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant market
  • Jack Dorsey’s fixation with crypto and the potential impact of Web3/crypto on restaurants
  • And a whole lot more!

Click play below to listen. As always, if you want more Spoon podcasts you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tablz Wants to Metaverse-ize Restaurant Reservations and I am on Board With It

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went out for our anniversary dinner.

I’d made reservations for two with OpenTable at a nice little steak place and mentioned it was our anniversary in the ‘special occasion’ field. When we arrived, the staff was friendly and gave us special treatment.

Overall it was a great experience, except for one little thing: the table. We’d have preferred a window seat, not one in the middle of the room near the entrance. Nitpicky, I know, and something the staff had no idea about since I didn’t tell them and I wasn’t able to pick a specific table when I made reservations

But what if I could have? What if I could have picked my table location like I would when buying a ticket on an airplane or for a concert? Better yet, what if I could have walked around a virtual version of the restaurant and seen the table and the view before making the reservation?

That’s the future a startup called Tablz is hoping to make possible. The San Francisco-based company has created a table reservation platform that allows prospective diners to virtually tour a restaurant and pick their table. As you can see in the video below, the experience is not unlike moving through a video game like The Sims or touring a home with a 3D walkthrough on Zillow.

Finding a Table With Tablz Reservation Technology

In other words, the company has shown us what the restaurant reservation experience will look like in the metaverse, and I am here for it. The first description I heard of Tablz was that it allows you to pick a seat like you would on an airplane. That’s accurate, but it doesn’t really do it justice. By being able to walk around the restaurant and pick a table, see where it is on a 3D floorplan or dollhouse view, and look around from your prospective seat with a 360-degree view is a game-changer when it comes to making a reservation.

Tablz’s technology can be plugged into existing reservation sites like OpenTable and Rezy, which makes it a lot more appealing to prospective restaurant owners who have spent years building followings on those platforms. It also makes it more likely that the entrenched platforms themselves will embrace the technology rather than see it as a competitor. I also wouldn’t rule out the incumbents either creating similar technology or acquiring a company like Tablz as restaurant reservations evolve and move into the metaverse.

Tablz was initially incubated as the first product from a company called Transparent Kitchen. The Transparent Kitchen’s founders saw enough potential with the product to sunset the original company and focus full-time on Tablz. The company has raised a small seed round of funding from Branded Hospitality Ventures and a private investor group, including restaurant advisor Steven Kamali and Bbot founder Steve Simoni.

Tablz technology is being used at a handful of restaurants today like Roka in San Francisco and Dog & Tiger Public House in Toronto, but I expect we’ll see more soon as restaurants look for ways to stand out from the crowd as we come out of the pandemic.

Front Of House Takes an NFT Program to Smaller Restaurants

If you’ve ever taken home a souvenir menu or ashtray from your favorite restaurant, you will understand the role NFTs play in the hospitality industry. The same goes for attending a restaurant theme night or local pop-up of a new dining establishment. As Front of House (FOH) co-founder Phil Toronto eloquently puts it, a restaurant establishing a successful NFT strategy is “a beautiful merging of the digital and physical experience.”

Launching on May 18, Front of House (FOH) is a marketplace for NFTs of digital collectibles and experiences for independent restaurants. Co-founders Phil Toronto (VaynerFund), Colin Camac (former restaurateur), and Alex Ostroff (Saint Urbain) represent a mix of people with backgrounds in digital technology, advertising, and the hospitality industries. Initial clients include Wildair and Dame, with upcoming partners such as Rosella, Niche Niche, and Tokyo Record Bar.

The company’s business model is for the restaurant to keep 80% of the sale of digital collectibles. If an establishment uses a collectible as an invite to a unique dining experience, the restaurant will keep all the money from the food event.

Toronto stresses that FOH’s digital collectibles will be the digital analog to buying swag (such as a sweatshirt or tote bag) from your go-to dining establishment. Over time, he adds, the digital representations can grow to become interactive experiences that can be shared and/or enjoyed as a personal keepsake. “It’s a passport of sorts from your favorite restaurant,” the FOH co-founder told The Spoon in a recent interview.

The early adopters of using NFT as a marketing and sales tool are “scrappy entrepreneurs,” Toronto added, who had to get creative to stay afloat during the pandemic. “The commonality is that every restaurant owner interested in our program is entrepreneurial and looking to go outside the box,” he said.

Marketing and being on the cutting edge are only part of it. The impetus for jumping on board the growing NFT trend is about money. In addition to their regular dining business, an owner can collect revenue from digital collectibles, but the aspect with the most upside is creating memorable dining experiences. A key to all the possibilities is to make it simple for the customer to engage. A key to FOH’s success will be what the co-founder calls creating a frictionless experience, making it a little more than a typical eCommerce check-out experience.

“One of the avenues we’d like to explore is ticketed experiences where Front of House will work with a restaurant to buy it out for the night and have a special ticketed experience,” Toronto said. “That experience is sold through a digital collectible that lives on as a memory and a digital ticket stub you can take.”

Toronto said he is surprised that 65% of the customers he approaches get the idea and understand its value but might have a wait-and-see attitude. Once the pioneers prove NFTs successful and more than a “get rich quick” concept, he believes any reluctance will disappear. Also, Toronto commented that the NFT opportunity for restaurants isn’t limited to New York, Los Angeles, and other coastal towns. Given the hospitality business’s everyday issues, the concept will work just as well for Des Moines or any eatery wanting to explore a new business opportunity.