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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant tech

BlueDot Releases Two Features to Make Takeout Orders More Efficient

Location tech company BlueDot today announced two new features the company says will improve speed of service as well as personalization for restaurant customers, according to an email sent to The Spoon. Dubbed Hello Screens and Wave, the two features are geared towards pick up and curbside service — formats that have become a mainstay of doing business over the last year.

San Francisco-based Bluedot’s location and geofencing technology already powers a number of digital initiatives from QSRs, including McDonald’s, Dunkin’, and KFC. The company raised $9.1 million in July 2020. Around that time, it also released its Tempo feature, which is essentially a predictive arrival technology that helps restaurants better understand when to start fulfilling an order, so that food doesn’t sit waiting for a customer to arrive.

The new features build on this idea of making the pickup process more efficient. Wave is a simple arrival notification feature that lets customers alert the restaurant when they have arrived to pick up their order. Upon walking inside or pulling into a curbside parking space, the customer simply hits the “I’m here” button, which sends a notification straight to the kitchen, so a staffer can bring the order out. Wave can be added to any channel of the restaurant’s through which customers order, including mobile apps, SMS, and email.

Simultaneous to that process, Hello Screens alerts the restaurant when a customer is en route to the restaurant, giving an estimated time of arrival. The in-browser feature gives both visual and audio cues and can run off a tablet, computer, phone, or other device. 

Speeding up all three of those formats has become more important over the last year, since they’ve been the only options through which restaurants can serve customers. Dining rooms are beginning to increase their capacity volumes now, but the general consensus is that customers will continue to want to-go food as well, preferably made as quickly and efficiently as possible. BlueDot itself released a survey recently that found long wait times are a “dealbreaker” for many consumers nowadays.

Automating not just the actual pickup process but also elements of order fulfillment operations could feasibly shave seconds off each order coming into the kitchen. While that sounds small at the individual level, when added up, that time saved and make the restaurant operation move a whole lot faster.

HungerRush Launches Its AI-based Text-to-Order Tech for Restaurant Chains

Restaurant management software company HungerRush announced today that it launched its artificial intelligence-driven text-to-order product.

Dubbed HungerRush TextAI, the new feature uses natural language processing to interpret and place orders that come in via SMS. The new product is the result of HungerRush’s acquisition of OrdrAI last December. In its press announcement today, HungerRush said that TextAI works better than traditional phone or other employee-assisted formats by virtually eliminating order errors.

Text AI also integrates with HungerRush’s overall suite of products that include POS, delivery management, online ordering, mobile app, reporting and management, payment processing, and loyalty program.

HungerRush’s TextAI product launch comes at an interesting moment for AI integration for restaurants. Artificial Intelligence-driven software grabbed headlines last year as Kea, Clinc and even Google all had products that used natural language processing to hold “conversations” with restaurant customers. The promise, of course is that AI can take over incoming customer orders, allowing humans to perform more food creation and order expediting.

But in a signal that AI might not work as well as had been predicted, news broke this week that McDonald’s may sell Dynamic Yield, the AI startup it acquired in 2019. Granted, Dynamic Yield’s implementation of AI is more about creating dynamic menus that improved upselling (e.g., it’s cold outside, the menu highlighted warm beverages), so it’s a bit apples to oranges when compared with text-to-order. But if McDonald’s reportedly couldn’t even get a 1 percent bump from its implementation of AI, that could impact how other restaurant chains perceive the overall value of AI.

That’s not to say restaurants will abandon AI altogether. All of these technologies are new, and, not for nothing, are being tested under the unusual conditions of a pandemic, which has us ordering more takeout and delivery. Restaurants, which are seeing diminished value in third-party delivery services, need to save money where they can. If AI-driven text-to-order can drive sales and help restaurants get more value out of their labor, then that will go a long way towards adoption.

Survey: 91% of US Restaurants Will Invest in Kitchen Automation in 2021

The majority of U.S. restaurants have made or plan to make investments in kitchen automation technology in the future, according to new survey data from payments company Square. 

The company just released its “Future of Retail” and “Future of Restaurants” reports to offer an overview of what businesses are investing in from a technology standpoint and how processes and operations are changing.

Notable among the many pieces of data: Ninety-one percent of restaurants surveyed will implement some kind of automation technology into their kitchens if they haven’t done so already. 

It should be noted that Square has some skin in this game, since the company has some technology in the restaurant back of house. Therefore, automation in this context is more about software that runs in restaurants than it is about articulating robot arms making food.

Why the rush to digitize the back of house? “In order to take advantage of opportunities like multiple revenue streams and creative dining experiences, the back of house needs to be buttoned up,” notes the report. Restaurants certainly grappled with things like multiple order streams (e.g., delivery, takeout, etc.) prior to COVID-19. But few would deny the pandemic accelerated the widespread adoption of these off-premises formats, and up to now restaurant tech has only had time to react to the changes, not get ahead of them.

Hence more investment in back-of-house tech. Bruce Bell, Head of Square for Restaurants, said in the report he sees more of a “hub-and-spoke” model these days, where the kitchen sits at the center of a growing number of sales channels. “One channel might be the dining room, one channel might be first-party delivery, one channel might be meal kits, and so on,” adds Bell. “Having the kitchen run as efficiently as possible extends that efficiency into all of those channels,” he said. 

The hub-and-spoke model is already popular with some ghost kitchen setups. For larger restaurant chains, many of which are decreasing the sizes of their dining rooms or eliminating them altogether, this model could become the norm, too.

As far as those formats go, Square’s report found that restaurants plan to offer the following in 2021: curbside pickup (66 percent); drive-thru service (52 percent); drive-in service (48 percent); and drive-through dining (46 percent).

Loyalty programs, digital menus, in-house delivery, and digital ordering and payments are all technologies we can expect to drive these formats as well as the dining room experience in the future.

If you are interested in kitchen automation and robotics, make sure to attend the second food robotics summit on May 18th!

Yelp Upgrades Its Waitlist Feature to Manage Takeout Orders

Yelp today announced a bundle of new features that will, according to a company press release, “help restaurants’ front-of-house operations.” Among those new features is one aimed at improving operations around takeout orders by extending the capabilities of Yelp’s existing Waitlist tool. 

Waitlist has been in Yelp’s restaurant tech arsenal for a few years. Up to now, the feature has been most useful to dine-in customers looking to “get in line” virtually and avoid having to cram in the restaurant lobby or bar to wait for a table. 

But when the COVID-19 pandemic halted dining room service last year, some businesses began using Waitlist to manage takeout and even drive-thru orders. Without going into great detail, Yelp noted in today’s press release that the issue was that the original Waitlist “wasn’t built to meet this growing need.” 

The need to more easily fulfill takeout orders is not certainly going away. Recent data from a Paytronix and PYMTS survey found that takeout orders accounted for $486 billion, or 63 percent, of restaurant sales in 2020.

In response to takeout’s leading spot among off-premises formats, Yelp will now allow restaurants to manage all to-go orders via Waitlist. 

From today’s press release:

“[Restaurants] can easily enter and keep track of all takeout orders in the app – whether the orders were received via phone or website — and can input relevant information, such as type of car to accommodate for curbside pickup. Repeat diner information is stored for easy autofill of pertinent details, such as phone number and dietary preferences. From there, the host can text consumers when their order is ready, allowing them to maintain social distancing when picking up.”

The system offers some automation of the pickup process. For example, instead of having to manually input a text to the customer when the order is ready, a restaurant staffer simply triggers an automatic notification.  

Today’s press release did not mention any further automation of Waitlist, though it seems a necessary next step in a restaurant industry getting quickly saturated with solutions with which to digitally manage takeout orders. Right now, further automating the takeout process is a big opportunity for restaurant tech companies.

Yelp announced a few other new features today, including one called Guest Profiles, which lets restaurants store information about their guests (e.g., dietary preferences) in the system. The company also announced a point-of-sale integration, improved analytics, and some incremental upgrades to the consumer-facing Yelp experience. You can read the full list of new features via a company blog post.

Waitlist for takeout, meanwhile, is available at no extra charge for restaurants with nine or fewer locations. For those with 10 or more units, pricing varies.

Restaurant Tech Company Olo Files to Go Public

Restaurant SaaS platform Olo filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC late Friday and hopes to raise $100 million in an initial public offering. A representative for Olo confirmed this news to The Spoon today.

Olo is best known for its software platform that consolidates digital orders coming from different channels (web, kiosk, mobile, etc.) into a single ticket stream for the restaurant. Founded in 2005 in NYC, It was one of the original companies to help restaurants eradicate the so-called “tablet hell” scenario for restaurants. Prior to companies like Olo, staffers would have to manually input information from, say, the tablet processing Grubhub orders into the restaurant’s main POS system. 

The company has added its Dispatch service, which helps restaurants process delivery orders from their own websites and mobile apps. Another service, Rails, helps restaurants manage their relationships with third-party delivery providers, including negotiating a restaurant’s preferred providers and pricing strategy.

“Consumers today expect more on-demand convenience and personalization from restaurants, particularly through digital channels, but many restaurants lack the in-house infrastructure and expertise to satisfy this increasing demand in a cost-effective manner,” states the S-1 filing. “Our platform and application programming interfaces, or APIs, seamlessly integrate with a wide range of solutions, unifying disparate technologies across the restaurant ecosystem.” 

The Olo platform is specifically suited to restaurant brands with multiple locations. Among the companies customers are Five Guys, Wing Stop, Shake Shack, Denny’s, The Cheesecake Factory, Jamba Juice, Dairy Queen, and many others well-known names in the restaurant biz.

The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, has only heightened the urgency for restaurants to organize their off-premises orders (takeout, delivery, drive-thru, etc.) to increase the speed and efficiency at which those can be fulfilled. Olo said in its S-1 filing that in response, the company “reprioritized” its strategic roadmap “to address the most important solutions for [its] customers.” Notably, that has included takeout and curbside options.

Currently, Olo works with about 64,000 individual restaurant units across 400 brands. In its filing, Olo said it processed $14.6 billion in gross merchandise value in 2020.

This is the second major piece of news around restaurant tech IPOs today. Earlier this morning, the Wall Street Journal noted that restaurant-management platform Toast could go public in 2021 with a $20 billion valuation. 

For Olo, no price or timeline has been set as of right now.     

WSJ: Restaurant Tech Company Toast Planning an IPO

Restaurant tech company Toast is planning an initial public offering, sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. These people suggested an IPO could value the company at around $20 billion, and that Toast approached Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to underwrite a possible listing later in 2021.

Toast may also consider other options, such as a sale or a combination with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), WSJ sources said.

The speculation comes almost exactly one year after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the restaurant industry to close down dining rooms and significantly alter its focus towards meal formats like delivery, takeout, and curbside pickup. 

Toast initially took a major hit from the effects of the pandemic. In April 2020, the company cut 50 percent of its staff through layoffs and furloughs. It cited the “massive disruption” otherwise known as COVID-19 that “hit the industry overnight” as the driver behind these cuts.

Over the rest of 2020, however, Toast’s situation improved dramatically, thanks to its ability to quickly shift direction. Unable to serve the dining room, the company started adding more off-premises-focused features to its restaurant tech stack, including software to facilitate delivery orders and a set of so-called “contactless” tools that enable digital ordering, payments, and menu browsing. 

As of November 2020, Toast was valued at $8 billion, up $4.9 billion from February of 2020. An IPO would be one of the largest thus far for a restaurant tech company, following DoorDash’s December 2020 IPO, which valued the third-party delivery service at almost $40 billion.

McDonald’s Agrees to Third-Party Audit of Disputed Technology Fees

Ernst & Young will conduct an independent audit of the new technology fees McDonald’s assigned to franchisees at the end of 2020, according to a report from Business Insider.

The review, requested by a group of McDonald’s operators called the National Franchisee Leadership Alliance, will look into the $423-per-month technology fee McDonald’s announced in December of last year. Franchisees contest they owe this fee and have paused non-essential communications with corporate in response.

The monthly technology fee, which corporate would begin charging franchisees next month, is part of a $70 million debt McDonald’s claims its operators owe for a “lag” from an old payment structure. McDonald’s controls most of the technology in its stores and charges franchisees a fee for use of that tech. Tech has been an ongoing point of friction between McDonald’s and its franchisees for years now, with operators with operators increasingly frustrated over how much they must pay. 

This is further aggravated by the sheer amount of tech getting implemented at McDonald’s restaurants nowadays, from Dynamic Yield’s artificial intelligence system in the drive-thru to the increasingly popular McDonald’s mobile app. And McDonald’s is just getting started when it comes to digital ordering, drive-thru tech, and other digitization efforts of its business.  

According to Restaurant Business, franchisees argue they do not owe back pay for tech such as the mobile app. McDonald’s corporate, on the other hand, says it has “absolute confidence” that these fees are owed to the company. 

Franchisees will start talking with McDonald’s field officers over the issue, but non-essential communication with corporate remains paused. Restaurnat Business noted that the end of these talks between corporate and franchisees could well mean that the dispute eventually goes to court. 

While McDonald’s seems to have more disputes with its franchisees than most major QSR chains out there, the ongoing battle highlights some of the complications of digitizing a QSR brand. The pandemic’s impact on the restaurant industry has shifted the bulk of business for QSRs to off-premises meal formats, which increasingly rely on digital ordering. Whether other QSRs that rely on a franchise-based model encounter some of these issues as they digitize their businesses remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the Ernst & Young review is expected to take a few weeks at the very least. 

Hey, Restaurants. (Geo)Fence Me In

A few weeks ago, I looked at some of the top elements QSRs will need in order to stay ahead in the current craze for off-premises meal formats. “More curbside pickup spots” was top of the list, but of late I’m starting to think restaurants will need more than just a parking spot to make their curbside business competitive in 2021. They’ll need to fully automate those last few minutes of the process.

That thought was prompted by new survey data I got this week from restaurant tech company Bluedot. Among other things, the survey found that customers expect to be automatically checked in after placing a curbside order via a mobile app and arriving at the restaurant in the aforementioned parking spot.

Few restaurants, including most major chains, actually do this right now. Most require some form of manual(ish) check in, usually via opening the app and hitting a button, scanning a QR code at the parking spot, or, in some cases, sending a text message.

At the moment, the only major restaurant chains to fully automate the curbside process are Panera, which integrated a geofencing feature into its app last year, and El Pollo Loco. In these cases, geofencing technology can identify a user upon their arrival (the user will have agreed to give identifiers like their vehicle make and model or license plate number) and automatically alert the restaurant. The customer does nothing, save roll down the window and take the bag of food.

Geofencing is typically harder to implement and costlier than using, say, a QR code-based checkin process. Plus, most of the big changes have been busy of late building out sophisticated reward programs or four-lane drive-thrus. Fully automated curbside pickup is something of an afterthought at the moment.

But speed of service is currently a major problem and a major opportunity for restaurants. Case in point: Bluedot’s survey found that across order channels, including curbside, drive-thru, and regular ol’ pickup, that 77 percent of respondents said they would leave if the wait time was too long. The amount of time a customer is willing to wait has dropped to just six minutes, down from 10 minutes in August. 

Given that, it’s only a matter of time before more restaurants start to automate that last step of the curbside pickup process. It may only shave seconds off the process, but in today’s restaurant biz, those seconds add up quickly. 

But to clarify: “restaurants” in this context unfortunately means the big chains, those with the money and resources to spend on incremental tech developments. That leaves out a huge number of businesses just trying to survive the remainder of the pandemic.

That gives restaurant tech companies a major opportunity to help. With the future of the dining room still in question, many tech companies have turned to building out back-of-house and/or off-premises-focused tools and features. Those that cater to smaller chains and independent restaurants should consider the automation of curbside pickup as part of their future plans.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Restaurant tech writer and friend of The Spoon Kristen Hawley’s latest newsletter addresses one of the biggest questions in the restaurant biz right now: do third-party delivery services really help local restaurants? The answer, as it turns out, is not so black and white.

Elsewhere, the folks at Restaurant Dive break down the types of assistance these third-party delivery services are providing restaurants. The piece provides a clear, well-organized picture of who’s doing what and how much it is actually helping small businesses.

Finally, there really is a Taco Bell with four drive-thru lanes. Or there will be soon, according to plans from Minnesota-based Taco Bell franchisee Border Foods. Plans surfaced this week for a new store prototype that would feature one traditional drive-thru lane, three for pickup orders, and no dining room. 

Flipdish Raises €40M to Help Restaurants Process Digital Orders In House

Flipdish announced that it has raised €40 million (~$48.5 million USD) from Tiger Global Management to expand its software platform that lets restaurants create their own branded digital properties instead of having to rely on third-party platforms for online orders.

The company said today in a blog post that it will use the new funds to build out its team, expand operationally, and improve services to its existing customers. Currently, the service operates in the UK, Germany, France, Ireland, Spain, and the U.S. 

Flipdish’s promise to restaurants is that its software will help them easily set up and manage digital properties in order to bring digital ordering in-house, rather than leaving it to third-party marketplaces like Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Restaurants using software can build a website and mobile app that features their own branding but is powered by Flipdish’s technology on the back end. The system also includes built-in marketing and analytics tools. 

It does not, however, appear to completely eliminate reliance on third-party delivery providers. Instead, restaurants can process orders through their own (Flipdish-powered) apps and website, and Flipdish then partners with “a number of food delivery service providers” to power the last mile. Many of those are smaller, regional on-demand delivery services, though DoorDash’s Drive service makes an appearance. 

This hybrid approach isn’t unusual in the restaurant tech space. Few companies actually provide their own driver fleet along with their software stack to restaurants, ShiftPixy being the notable exception. Others, including Lunchbox, Orderslip, and Toast, integrate with some of the major third-party platforms in order to fulfill that last mile. That particular setup is unlikely to change soon, since few have the money to actually maintain a national (or international) driver fleet.

Flipdish, at least from its messaging, seems to understand that. The company noted in today’s blog post that its system isn’t just about addressing “the huge commissions taken by those marketplaces – although that is certainly part of it. It’s also about enabling those businesses to build a closer relationship with their customers.”

To date, the company has raised a total of €47.5 million, or roughly $58 million USD.

Survey: Curbside, Drive-Thru Usage High But Long Wait Times Are a ‘Dealbreaker’

Restaurant-goers continue to head to the drive-thru in droves, according to new survey data from mobile location tech company Bluedot. In the last month, 91 percent of respondents said they visited the drive-thru. An additional 67 percent are getting curbside pickup “as often or more frequently” now compared to 45 percent from last April.

The data is from the third installment of Bluedot’s four-part “State of What Feeds Us” report examining consumer preferences around the restaurant experience, both during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. As Bluedot is a restaurant-industry-focused tech company (KFC, McDonald’s, and Dunkin’ are among its clients), a lot of the information in these reports is around mobile app usage. However, the data also examines some broader trends that have been happening in the restaurant biz over the last several months, including those around drive-thru and curbside pickup.

Though drive-thru usage dipped slightly in January 2021, the number of visits “remain strikingly high,” according to the report: “Consumer drive-thru visits dipped slightly from the last report with a decrease to 68% of those visiting as often or more frequently in January from 74% in August.” That 68 percent, however, is still a 26 percent increase from April 2020 in terms of customers regularly going to the drive-thru.

Those numbers are reflected in recent strategies from restaurants — especially QSRs — to focus more on providing solid drive-thru experiences for customers. Chains like McDonald’s and Burger King, which have always relied on drive-thru for a percentage of sales, are redesigning their entire store formats to accommodate more drive-thru orders. Other chains, notably Chipotle and Shake Shack, are adding the format as an important element to their digital strategies for the first time.

Curbside pickup is a newer entrant to the restaurant industry, but from Bluedot’s numbers a no less important one when it comes to customer expectations. A total of 67 percent of consumers are now picking up via curbside compared to just 45 percent in April 2020. 

Consumers expect to the restaurant’s app to check them in automatically upon arrival at the restaurant and for the staff to bring out their food. Few chains with curbside pickup actually do this right now. Panera is the one major exception, as the company integrated geofencing technology into its curbside process last year that automatically notifies staff when a customer has arrived.

Automatic checkins enabled by tech would also speed up the entire curbside pickup experience, something consumers feel needs to happen in order to improve the experience. Ditto for drive thru. Bluedot’s survey found that “long wait times and lines are a deal breaker,” with 77 percent of respondents saying they would leave or consider leaving if they see a long line. Additionally, consumers expect to wait no more than six minutes, down from 10 minutes in August.

Providing faster service is an element restaurants of all shapes and sizes will have to continue to prioritize for the foreseeable future. As Bluedot and countless others point out, consumer preference for off-premises formats isn’t going away once the pandemic does. The sheer number of QSRs redesigning their physical spaces to be more to-go-friendly is testament to that. Whether those moves as well as more tech can actually cut wait times down remains to be seen.

Landed Raises $1.4M, Launches App to Make Hiring Simpler for Restaurant Managers

San Francisco, California-based restaurant tech company Landed announced the official launch of its mobile app that connects hourly restaurant and retail workers with potential employers. The company has also raised a $1.4 million seed round led by Javelin Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Palm Drive Capital, with angel investors also participating in the round.

Landed says it uses a combination video interviews and an “intelligent matching algorithm” to match restaurant job candidates with the most relevant employers. Job seekers download the app, and fill out a profile, including a short video recording, which essentially acts as a digital resume. Candidates are evaluated by Landed’s system based on over 50 data points, among them communication skills, body language, and work longevity. Depending on what an employer wants, Landed can prioritize certain data points over others.

On the hiring side, restaurant managers download the Landed app and input their hiring goals like head count, pay rate, and location(s). Much of the hiring process is then automated: the app can automatically schedule interviews, follow up with candidates, and organize potential employees.

Founder Vivian Wang got the inspiration for Landed after years of working in the retail industry, where turnover rates are typically over 100 percent. Restaurant jobs are similar. Restaurants are also under pressure to make their operations as efficient as possible now that the COVID-19 pandemic has decimated the traditional model. Managers of multi-unit chains, in particular, could benefit from a more streamlined hiring process. The tech-driven model Landed offers restaurants is similar to that of ShiftPixy, which also works with large, multi-unit chains.

Landed’s current customer base includes franchisees of Wendy’s, Chick-fil-A, and discount supermarket Grocery Outlet. The app is currently available in seven metro areas: Atlanta, Reno, Dallas-Ft Worth, Scottsdale/Phoenix, Virginia Beach, and Northern and Southern California.

Brightloom Raises $15M, Launches a ‘Customer Growth Platform’ to Help Restaurants With Their Data

Restaurant tech company Brightloom has launched what it’s calling a “Customer Growth Platform” (CGP). The software will enable smaller restaurants to get more valuable insights out of their customer data and translate those insights into marketing campaigns more relevant to customers.

On top of that launch, Brightloom has also raised $15 million from new and existing investors including Valor Siren Ventures and Tao Capital Partners. The company will use its new funds to increase R&D and scale its new product, which Brightloom CEO Adam Brotman calls “a really easy solution for the everyday restaurant brand.”

The move towards customer engagement software is a change for Brightloom, which up to now has been better known for its high-tech cubby system and software that manages front- and back-of-house restaurant operations. Brotman confirmed over the phone last week that the new CGP product is now the company’s main focus.

He explained that this level of technical sophistication when it comes to customer engagement has historically been the territory of the billion-plus-dollar chains (think McDonald’s or Starbucks). But these systems take millions of dollars to build and sometimes up to a year to implement. It’s an understatement to say those numbers are unattainable for most restaurants, from both a cost and time perspective. 

“That’s the problem we’re attacking,” he said. “It should not take months or a year or millions of dollars.” 

Brotman knows a thing or two about these systems, having been the Chief Digital Officer at Starbucks for a number of years. (Brightloom also licensed its previous product to Starbucks last year.) While Brightloom is obviously not mimicking exactly what the coffee giant puts its data to work, he brings an insider’s perspective to the operation, and to the overall conversation around restaurant customer data.

“The biggest opportunity is customer data,” he said of the restaurant industry right now. “That opportunity was on everyone’s minds before the pandemic. Now it’s exploded because everything is so digital.”

Brightloom’s CGP system integrates with a restaurant’s main data source (the point of sale, a data warehouse, etc.) Among the features on the new platform is a product recommendation and forecast tool called SmartSegments, which can predict what customers are likely to purchase next. The results of those SmartSegments can be imported into a restaurant’s existing software for managing marketing campaigns in order to offer customers more relevant offers, upsells, and deals. 

The platform also includes a dashboard with detailed results on different marketing campaigns and regular reports on how campaigns are performing and how they can be improved in the future. 

Brightloom says the CGP platform launched in 2020 as an invite-only beta and is now in use with about 25 different restaurant brands. For now, the smallest restaurant brand Brightloom works with has five units, while the largest has close to 1,000. Brotman says the product does not make sense at the moment for a single-unit restaurant, although that’s another challenge the company is working to solve.

Of course, software that helps restaurants leverage data only works if the restaurant actually owns the data. Right now, ownership of a lot of data lies in the hands of the third-party delivery platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats. This has been an increasingly problematic issue since the pandemic started, with many across the industry referring to the pandemic as a kind of “a wake-up call” to restaurants about what they are doing (or not doing) with their data.

Right now, most restaurants that aren’t billion-dollar chains are just trying to keep the lights on. However, the industry is not going to go backwards in terms of digital ordering. To the extent that they are able to, restaurants should be thinking about how they will put their data to use once the worst of the pandemic and its accompanying shutdowns/restrictions/lockdowns has passed.

“The more [restaurants] allow that data to be in the hands of the third-party marketplaces, the more they are giving up,” Brotman said. “I do believe there’s a value and a time and a place for these marketplaces. But restaurant owners should be aware and be careful that there’s a tradeoff.”