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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant tech

Bbot Raises $15M Series A for its Restaurant Ordering and Payment Software

Restaurant ordering and payment processing platform Bbot announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by CRV and follows a $4 million extension to its Seed round the company raised in January of this year. Bbot’s total amount of funding is now $22.3 million.

Broadly speaking, Bbot helps restaurants, bars, hotels, ghost kitchens and other hospitality establishments add in-venue and online ordering. The company offers a range of hardware tools such as tablets, scanners and printer controls, as well as a suite of software to enable contactless and online ordering and manage catering.

Bbot’s system uses QR codes, which restaurants can place on tables and customers can scan with their own phones to pull up the menu, order, and pay for items. While the QR code-based ordering isn’t new, it has gained much more attention over the last year because of its inherently contactless nature. In her recent 2021 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem market map, Brita Rosenheim predicted that these type of tools will become more important to restaurants, writing:

Stateside, we’ve increasingly been adopting mobile-first ordering and marketing strategies, but the mobile-only approach (often seen in Asia) wasn’t widely embraced before the pandemic. Now, whether via QR codes, apps or mobile web, there has been a huge shift towards mobile-optimized menus, ordering and payments which eliminate or reduce most employee/customer contact. This can help to improve the guest experience via increased speed and fewer errors. For fine dining, this also saves time/costs in printing and sourcing supplies for paper menus.

Bbot is just the latest bit of restaurant tech funding we’ve seen over the past month. 86 Repairs raised $7.3 million for its restaurant machine maintenance and repair service. Choco raised a whopping $100 million to digitize the relationship between restaurants and food suppliers. And Zenput raised $27 million to help multi-unit restaurants widely release and enforce operating procedures and health and safety protocols.

In its press announcement, Bbot said it has added more than 700 customers and reached 85 employees across 14 states over the last year. With its new funding, Bbot said it will create new POS and loyalty program integrations, and will focus on features for food halls and virtual brands. The company also plans to launch a self-service Bbot app store, so developers can integrate their apps with Bbot’s existing platform.

Delivery Service Swiggy Raises $1.25B

Indian delivery service Swiggy has closed a $1.25 billion round of Series J funding led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 and Prosus Ventures, according to TechCrunch. Qatar Investment Authority, Falcon Edge Capital, Amansa Capital, Goldman Sachs, Think Investments and Carmignac participated in the fundraising, as well as existing investors Accel Partners and Wellington Management.

The “heavily oversubscribed” round includes the $800 million the company raised earlier this year. To date, Swiggy has raised $2.9 billion in funding and has a post-money valuation of $5.5 billion.

Like its rival Zomato (who filed to go public in April 2021), Swiggy is best known across India for its restaurant food delivery service. However, Swiggy’s Chief Executive Sriharsha Majety said that this new funding will also help accelerate its non-food categories in addition to traditional restaurant delivery. “I believe the next 10-15 years offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for companies like Swiggy as the Indian middle class expands and our target segment for convenience grows to 500 million users,” he told TC.

In 2020, Swiggy expanded its service to include delivery of grocery, household items, and laundry, among other categories. 

Zomato, too, has branched out beyond restaurant delivery with its Zomato Marketplace that connects restaurant owners with suppliers of non-food items. The company raised $1.3 billion in its IPO recently. 

The move to offer more than just restaurant meals is similar to developments in other parts of the world. A chief example is DoorDash, the U.S.-based company that added grocery services in 2020 and has also since expanded its “dark convenience store” service. Uber has also started offering non-restaurant food delivery.

In addition to the major companies, an entirely new pack of speedy delivery services has emerged and promises basic food and household items in a fraction of the time it takes a restaurant meal to get cooked and delivered.

Speedy delivery has yet to reach India in any major capacity. When it does, it will add yet-more competition to the already uber-competitive Indian delivery market.

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. 

Choco Raises $100M to Digitize Restaurant Food Procurement

Restaurant tech company Choco announced today it has raised $100 million in in Series B funding led by growth equity firm Left Lane Capital. Insight Partners along with existing investors Coatue Management and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Choco has raised $171.5 million to date.

The company’s mobile app effectively digitizes the relationship between restaurants and their suppliers, allowing the two groups to chat with one another through the app. Restaurants can place orders directly through the Choco app as well as view and edit all order sheets. Choco also released a new feature at the beginning of 2021 specifically designed for multi-unit restaurants to give them a more comprehensive overview of not just what they’re ordering but where it comes from and who is in charge of that relationship. At the time, Choco’s Global Industry Advisor, Chelsea van Hooven, said multi-unit restaurants make up about 40 percent of Choco’s current user base.

The company’s original pitch was around fighting food waste in the restaurant industry. While that remains a part of Choco’s overall benefits for restaurants, wasted time and money are also now part of the overall package of benefits the company is pitching. Replacing siloed paper-and-pen processes with digital ones, where all data is viewable from a single place, has the potential to cut hidden costs in the back of house and in doing so improve restaurant margins. 

Digital was largely seen as a “nice-to-have” feature before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Now, many claim that digitizing operations is a “must have,” and that those who don’t will wind up getting left behind.

While that may be true for large chains (think McDonald’s or Chipotle), it remains to be seen how much this full digitization of the back of house can actually help smaller independent restaurants. In other words, we have yet to see whether the cost to implement and run technology is worth the returns it brings to these smaller restaurants.

Choco says demand for its platform is up and partly driven by the pandemic pushing more restaurants to go digital. The company currently has over 10,000 active restaurants and suppliers on its platform. It will use the new funding to expand within its six current markets: the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, and Belgium. The company will also expand into several new markets, and has plans to double its head count by end of the year.

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.

Grocery, Meet the Ghost Kitchen

One year ago, Euromonitor International predicted the ghost kitchen market could be worth $1 trillion by 2030. 

The prediction, made by Euromonitor’s Global Lead for Food & Beverage Michael Schaefer, reverberated around a restaurant industry that was still deep in the midst of dining room shutdowns and restrictions related to a global pandemic. Little wonder that from that point on, many saw ghost kitchens as a kind of savior for the restaurant industry.

But Schaefer and Euromonitor were looking way beyond restaurants when they made their mega-prediction. At the time, (and later on at SKS 2020), Schaefer suggested the ghost kitchen market could reach $1 trillion because it will grow to encompass all manner of foodservice businesses: grocery outlets, dark convenience stores, and ready-made meals, in addition to restaurants. In other words, restaurants alone won’t push the market to the $1 trillion mark. Instead, it will get there because the lines between ghost kitchens, groceries, and the like will become less defined over time.

That already happening, actually, and was illustrated again recently with GoPuff’s announcement that it’s hiring staff for ghost kitchens. 

GoPuff isn’t a restaurant in any shape or form. It’s a new kind of grocery delivery service that operates in dense residential areas and promises to deliver food items to customers’ doorsteps 24/7 in roughly 30 minutes or less on average. The company’s $1.5 billion fundraise from earlier this year should indicate the popularity that the speedy-grocery-delivery segment currently enjoys. 

But GoPuff’s hiring advertisement calls for chefs as well, which suggests the company wants to add some restaurant concepts to its offerings. GoPuff isn’t alone in this. DoorDash, which began life as a restaurant delivery service, opened its own ghost kitchen in 2019 and now also operates “ghost convenience stores,” which are just as they sound. A Canadian company that’s just called Ghost Kitchens carries limited offerings from QSRs along with a mix of easy-to-fulfill grocery and convenience items like ice cream pints and frozen veggie burgers. ClusterTruck has its own virtual restaurant menu but also operates out of Kroger locations. And there are companies like C3, which operate delivery-only restaurants out of a range of physical locations, including hotels, residential properties, and other non-restaurant venues.

All of these versions of the ghost kitchen prioritize speed above pretty much everything else. They also roll up neatly into a statement Schaefer made this time last year about the trajectory of ghost kitchens.

“As more and more of the foodservice environment becomes optimized for delivery, a generation of consumers growing up with smartphones becomes accustomed and habituated to being able to order literally anything from their smartphone. That is going to drive ever-more innovation,” he said.

In 2021, that innovation appears to be the speedy delivery service. As companies further blur the lines between the ghost kitchen, the grocery, and the convenience store, they’ll launch new formats that are less about having a food experience and more about getting a food item in one’s hands as fast as humanly and technologically possible.   

More Headlines

Following Tensions, McDonald’s Cuts Tech Fees for Franchisees by 62 Percent – The company has changed its stance on the $423-per-month fee for franchisees after a third-party review of of billing. 

DaVinci Kitchen Equity Crowdfunds €500,000 for Robotic Pasta Kiosk – The company’s campaign ran from March to the end of June this year on Seedmatch, with 488 investors participating.

C3 Raises $80M to Expand Its Virtual Food Hall Concept – The $80 million fundraise will go towards further expansion in the form of signing leases with real estate developers at various mixed-use, retail, and hospitality spaces.

Following Tensions, McDonald’s Cuts Tech Fees for Franchisees by 62 Percent

McDonald’s will cut technology fees for its U.S. franchisees by 62 percent following a third-party review of of billing, according to a report from Bloomberg. 

The original $68 million was announced in December of 2020, when corporate said it would charge franchisees a $423-per-month fee to cover a lag in outstanding technology fees. Outrage ensued from franchisees, who have pushed back against some of McDonald’s tech-related decisions in the past.

Those clashes have included everything from store design overhauls to disputes over delivery. At the same time, McDonald’s has been aggressively pursuing new technology implementations in an effort to digitize its fast-food business. It acquired AI company Dynamic Yield and voice-tech company Apprente in 2019. And though the chain has downgraded its Dynamic Yield implementations of late, it appears to be increasing its efforts around voice tech. McDonald’s latest move has been to implement voice-order technology at 10 stores in Chicago in an effort to automate more of the drive-thru experience for customers. At the time of that announcement, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski suggested we’ll see voice-ordering at all McDonald’s in the next five years.

Additionally, McDonald’s is one of the many QSRs to release new store designs following 2020’s upheaval. Future locations could prioritize formats like drive-thru and curbside pickup, and emphasize mobile ordering and more tech in the drive-thru lane(s).

Franchisees have argued against some new technologies in the past. It remains to be seen how onboard they will be with further digitization of the business in light of this new agreement with corporate. 

Franchisees own about 95 percent of all McDonald’s locations in the U.S.  

2021 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem: Serving Up a Digital Lifeline

In collaboration with TechTable and Culterra Capital, we are pleased to share an updated 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map, sponsored by Back of House, a community of restaurateurs to find and share top-reviewed tech solutions. Download the map here. 

It is an understatement to say that the restaurant industry went through a massive shift since we published our 2019 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map. The pandemic’s economic toll on the industry has been grave, though notably, the toll was not evenly distributed. A higher level of digital maturity was a clear success indicator for most restaurants that survived the crisis (as detailed by McKinsey here). 

Thus, in a year that was challenging for all, we did find one bright spot from the pandemic: many of our past predictions around tech adoption were significantly accelerated, shrinking from years to months. 

In fact, in the past 18 months, technology solutions across the restaurant and hospitality industry evolved at such a fast pace that keeping up with changes proved challenging, even for those of us who work in the space. This rapid rate of adoption in the industry caused even the technophobes in hospitality to rapidly embrace tech solutions. 

The most notable growth areas were in the areas of Ordering/Delivery and On-Premise Ordering/Payments Tech, including kiosks, mobile ordering and payments, and cashierless checkout. In addition to the acrobatic feats from restaurant operators, we also saw tech companies reinventing themselves to stay in business during the pandemic.

With that in mind, we are pleased to share our 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem, which serves as a current heat map of the broader ecosystem (and is clearly not exhaustive). 

Click to Enlarge

In order to help operators, entrepreneurs and investors continue to understand and digest this quickly evolving landscape, we also highlight some of the essential shifts and sector themes below, plus a few predictions for the year to come.

Help Wanted

Finding and securing hospitality staff has never been so challenging. As thousands of hospitality workers were left unemployed by the pandemic, or stymied by the risks of the frontlines, many have moved on to find work in other fields, leaving a huge gap in talent. 

As a result, the urgency to leverage robotics, automation, computer vision, and voice technologies will continue to increase as the hospitality industry aims to do more with less staff. And while discussions around robots within hospitality have always been cautious — because we don’t want to put people out of work — we believe we will continue to see more opportunities in the near-term for human-assisting robots (versus human replacement by robots). 

For example, as restaurant operators seek to offset workforce challenges, there are numerous opportunities for specific task automation of repetitive, dangerous or mundane tasks like dishwashing, precision preparation/cooking, food waste management, bar/food inventory, and quality control.

Another area ripe for automation via AI-driven voice tech includes drive-thrus and digital ordering. When people think of a traditional drive-thru, they likely picture a garbled voice and screaming the order into a speaker, hoping their order is correct. But we are seeing many of the larger chains replacing human voices with automated voice assistants to speed up service, order accuracy, and upsell rates. We’ve seen estimates that drive-thru automation can reduce customer wait time by 10 to 25 percent, which is compelling given that the former CEO of McDonalds previously declared that for every six seconds saved at a drive-thru is equal to an increase of 1 percent in sales.

Ghost Kitchens: It’s Complicated

While many restaurant operators were broadly familiar with the concept of ghost kitchens and virtual brands before the pandemic, these formats are now prevalent in most discussions on the burgeoning post-pandemic restaurant industry. 

Whether part of an existing kitchen or a separate commissary kitchen, the ghost kitchen’s purpose is to fulfill online orders for delivery or pick up. Ghost kitchens have the potential to solve real challenges for their restaurant customers, and there are tremendous variations on the economics, setup, and ideal use cases.

So then what’s so complicated about ghost kitchens? 

The rapid growth in consumer demand for restaurant delivery and the high usage of third-party ordering/delivery apps pushed restaurant operators to explore different avenues to expand their access points and footprint beyond their existing restaurants. 

However success (a.k.a. profitability) within the confines of a ghost kitchen business model is primarily driven by volume of daily orders, average order value, and percentage of direct channel sales versus third-party sales. This is why ghost kitchens are primarily well-suited for larger brands, as most local restaurants simply do not meet the average requirements to warrant a ghost kitchen endeavor. (If you are curious to crunch the numbers, check out this excellent ghost kitchen calculator created by Kitchen Fund.)

Further, the lines are beginning to blur between delivery and ghost kitchen platforms. We are entering a world where these platforms are increasingly supporting their own virtual brands and/or next-gen food courts, oftentimes by using the ordering/menu data captured from current restaurants using their platform. Thus local operators will be battling for market share against larger chains which are using ghost kitchens to extend their reach and volume, as well as additional competition from ghost kitchen platforms themselves.

Enter the The Mobile-Only Experience

Stateside, we’ve increasingly been adopting mobile-first ordering and marketing strategies, but the mobile-only approach (often seen in Asia) wasn’t widely embraced before the pandemic. Now, whether via QR codes, apps or mobile web, there has been a huge shift towards mobile-optimized menus, ordering and payments which eliminate or reduce most employee/customer contact. This can help to improve the guest experience via increased speed and fewer errors. For fine dining, this also saves time/costs in printing and sourcing supplies for paper menus. 

Successful operators will prioritize their tech strategy to capture as much digital data as possible in order to personalize offers, segment customers and influence behavior, and a mobile-first/mobile-only approach creates a compelling opportunity to increase both first-party and third-party data capture.

As it can be dizzying for operators to decide how to best leverage their digital data, we predict high growth for the tech partners which are helping operators utilize customer data to better uphold their brand, funnel customers into more profitable channels, and make better decisions about merchandising, pricing, and promotions.

Aggregators Will Continue to Disrupt the Customer Journey

While many of the technologies we discuss here are more operational, we also want to address the customer search and discovery experience. While this was an important topic in pre-COVID times, it is all the more so now, when disruptions and uncertainties are pushing customers to regularly search for what nearby food options are actually open, and whether they offer delivery, curbside, or takeout options. 

We have also reached a point where Google/Google Maps have become the defacto top of the funnel for a majority of restaurant consumers. Thus it is increasingly critical for restaurant operators to proactively manage their full digital footprint, and provide up-to-date information that customers can trust — especially across all third party platforms. 

For example, even though Google profiles include a link to a restaurant’s own website, that little link is eclipsed by the amount of ad-driven real estate that the third-party aggregators/marketplaces get within each profile. 

Growth Categories to Watch in 2022

  • Voice / Bot Technology
  • Robotics / Automation
  • Shared / Ghost Kitchens
  • Food Safety / Quality (a new category for the 2021 map)
  • Ordering and Payments will continue to evolve
  • Marketing Analytics / CRM, and Order / Delivery (both B2B and consumer-facing marketplaces) will continue to consolidate.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and reactions, and look forward to continuing to follow this sector together in the coming years.

Hear Brita and other restaurant tech leaders at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Virtual Summit on August 17th. A limited number of complimentary tickets are available, so register today!

Are You Creating the Next Big Tech Tool for Restaurants?

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This time last year, the restaurant biz was grappling with pandemic-related shutdowns and restrictions and innovating on the fly to survive the fallout. Digital menus. Virtual tip jars. Ad-hoc drive-thru windows. These mannequins. 

As the year wore on, much of the restaurant-related innovation turned to tech, a shift more or less forced by the pandemic. By some accounts, technological shifts expected to unfold over the course of a decade happened in a matter of months. Online ordering is the norm for many, which means so, too, are the technologies that power that process, whether in-house creations or third-party platforms. Virtual restaurants run from ghost kitchens are everywhere now, including in existing restaurant locations. Someone’s revamped the automat (see above), the robots are coming, and investors have a sudden interest in funding tech that promises to make the back of house more efficient.

There are also a lot more questions than previously around which tech tools restaurants actually need, where investment is most likely headed (spoiler: it’s the back of house), and, most important, what’s going to bring the most value to everyone’s restaurant experience moving forward. 

We could debate all of that here. Instead, I invite you to tell The Spoon about your restaurant tech innovation this summer at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Summit, set to take place August 17 virtually. 

Whether you think you’re the next Olo, want to entirely disrupt the drive-thru, or have a robot mannequin to track food waste, The Spoon would like to hear from you. Tell us about it by applying for the Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Innovator Showcase, which will happen as part of the aforermentioned Restaurant Tech Summit. 

The Spoon team and panel of restaurant experts will choose the 10 most interesting teams building innovative and potentially game-changing new products. Those 10 companies will then get an opportunity to do a four-minute pitch about their company that will be featured as part of the main stage at the event.

A few general guidelines apply. Companies need to be at early stage, with fewer than 10 employees and less than $1 million in funding/investment. Companies should also have an actual tech product (software, hardware, etc.)

Your pitch will be seen by attendees at the Restaurant Tech Summit and your company will be covered by The Spoon.

More Headlines

San Francisco Makes Restaurant Fee Caps for Delivery Services Permanent – San Francisco, California voted to permanently cap the fees delivery services charge restaurants at 15 percent. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution.

ResQ Raises $7.5M for Back-of-House Restaurant Tech – ResQ, whose software platform manages restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding, bringing its total funding thus far to $9 million. 

Grubhub and Resorts World Las Vegas Partner on New Hotel Concept – Resorts World Las Vegas has announced a partnership with Grubhub for a new mobile order service. 

ResQ Raises $7.5M for Back-of-House Restaurant Tech

ResQ, whose software platform manages restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding, bringing its total funding thus far to $9 million. Homebrew, Golden Ventures, and Inovia Capital led the round, which also saw participation from various angel investors, including Instacart president Nilam Ganenthiran, Gokul Rajaram (Doordash, Board of Pinterest and Coinbase), and AirBnb’s Lenny Rachitsky, among others. ResQ’s restaurant customers, including Yum Brands! franchisee Soul Foods, also participated.  

The company’s technology focuses on a very specific part of the restaurant back of house: repairs and maintenance. Through the ResQ platform, restaurants can request, manage, and pay for a service, as well as manage the documents for these things. 

ResQ also connects restaurants with a network of contractors able to perform those services. The company’s ever-growing list of available services right now includes HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, janitorial, plumbing, pest control, grease trap cleaning, preventative maintenance, and just about anything else needed to keep a restaurant kitchen up and running.

Digitizing the management of such things would, ResQ suggests, help with revenue recovery in the restaurant back of house. The company says restaurants typically spend between 3 and 5 percent of annual sales on repairs, and that the ResQ platform has saved businesses 10 to 30 percent in annual repairs and maintenance spend. 

Keeping costs in the restaurant back of house down has been a topic of growing interest for the last several months. Lockdowns and restrictions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic decimated already-thin margins for businesses. Many have said digitizing the back of house, whether through inventory management, back office-focused platforms, or maintenance management, is an important way to keep costs down. Granted, much of that talk comes from the tech companies selling these services and the investors funneling money into them. Realistically, smaller, independent restaurants won’t necessarily have the budget to pay for more software, at least not while the industry slowly recovers.

For its part, ResQ has plenty of bigger restaurant chains that are clients in the meantime. That list currently includes Wendy’s, Burger King, Panera, KFC, and Taco Bell, to name a few. 

ResQ will use its new funding to build up its team and launch its service in new markets. Currently, ResQ is available in Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Chicago. 

 

OpenTable Launches New Tools to Discourage Diners From ‘Ghosting’ on Their Reservations

OpenTable today launched its Show-Up for Restaurants initiative, which highlights the impact of no-shows and late cancellations on restaurants’ margins. The initiative will take the form of forthcoming new digital tools as well as “blog and social content educating diners on the impact of ghosting a reservation.”

In most places in the U.S., dining at restaurants is back in full swing. Yelp, for example, recorded its highest totals ever this past May for consumers using the app to dine out. Across the country, foot traffic is up by nearly 50 percent since the start of the year.

While most of that is good news for restaurants, the re-emergence of dining rooms also means the return of the no-show — when customers book a reservation then simply skip out on it without calling the restaurant to cancel. OpenTable’s own recent survey data found that 28 percent of of Americans haven’t shown up for a reservation in the last year. The company says that in certain cases, as few as six no-shows can affect profits at a small restaurant.

To help restaurants better control the situation, OpenTable will launch a tool this summer that will let restaurants label a customer as a potential no-show based on that person’s past reservation history. The restaurant can then “be proactive” about confirming the reservation with that diner via other tools the company offers, including emails, alerts, and credit card-required reservations. A “four strikes and you’re out” policy suspends diners that don’t show up for a reservation four times.

OpenTable says it will also use various forms of content to further educate diners on the negative impacts of no-shows. Presumably that also means highlighting the company’s own digital tools that make it fairly painless for the user to modify or cancel a reservation within the app.  

U.S. Restaurant Foot Traffic Is Up Nearly 50 Percent From January

Foot traffic and in-store visits to food and beverage establishments in the U.S. has increased 48 percent since the start of 2021, according to new research from marketing tech company Zenreach emailed to The Spoon. 

The uptick in restaurant foot traffic seems the natural result of more Americans getting vaccinated and cities and states loosening restrictions around when, where, and with how many customers dining rooms can reopen. (It should also put to final rest earlier speculation that the pandemic killed the concept of the eat-in restaurant.)

Certain cities have seen enormous increases. San Diego, California has seen a 198 percent increase since January 2021, followed by Los Angeles (141 percent), San Jose (141 percent), and Denver, Colorado (129 percent). California had the most increases overall, with The Golden State cities taking five of the top seven spots on Zenreach’s list of increases. At the same time, California is fully reopening its economy today, which could bump its overall number of foot traffic increases even higher in the future. 

Zenreach expects foot traffic to continue increasing for the entire country. “It would not surprise me if nationwide foot traffic reaches a more than 55% lift (since January 1st, 2021) within the next three months.” Megan Wintersteen, VP of Marketing for Zenreach, said in a statement.

Of course, the foot traffic increases come at a time when the restaurant industry is dealing with a major labor shortage that’s making it difficult for businesses to offer the level of customer service they normally would. The restaurant industry is still 1.5 million jobs below pre-pandemic levels, according to the National Restaurant Association. An increase in foot traffic could further increase difficulties in delivering the kind of service customers previously expected when dining out. Unemployment benefits are frequently blamed for the shortage, and many states are now asking for proof of a job search for those seeking unemployment. Larger chains are also responding to demands for safer jobs and higher wages for restaurant workers.