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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant technology

Holo Industries Provides Futuristic Holographic Menu Solutions

Pre-pandemic, most people didn’t think twice about checking out at a supermarket or ordering in a restaurant. Now, after entering our PIN numbers or holding a menu, the new normal involves vigorous hand scrubbing and sanitizing. Given that, dozens of companies are now rushing to create more contactless experiences in public spaces. One such is Holo Industries, a brand of Convergence Promotions that provides holographic and contactless-touch solutions that can be used in place of elevator buttons, restaurant menus, check-out kiosks, and more.

I spoke with Glenn ImObersteg, the president of Convergence Promotions, on the phone this week about recent developments within Holo Industries. The development of the brand’s contactless-touch hologram units began in March 2020, just as COVID-19 hit in the U.S. COVID-19 spiked the demand for technology like this, and the company was able to have these units ready for use by May 1, 2020.

The hologram interface is made possible through the pairing of Neonode Touch Sensor Modules, the ASKA 3D Holographic plate from Asukanet, and other components from Holo Industries. The holographic menus are touch responsive, and when your finger touches a button mid-air, it triggers an audible response from the unit.

Holographic Kiosk/Restaurant Demo - HI-DEMO-KR

Contactless solutions alone won’t be able to save struggling restaurants from going under, but they may be able to reassure customers — who demand transparency around safety nowadays — and get more foot traffic into the dining room. So far Sevenrooms, Paytronix , Payjunction also offer variations of contactless order and pay systems.

Contactless ordering and payment may be a key component to easing customers back into dine-in restaurant service. A touch-less holographic kiosk removes the risk of coming into contact with germs, bacteria, and pathogens, and does not require cleaning.  Holo’s units can be used as a menu, a method of paying for a meal, or even used to broadcast the menu from inside the restaurant to the outside. 

The contactless and holographic units from Holo Industries currently cost about $2,500. Currently, the products from Holo Industries are being used by elevator companies, and the company is also piloting a kiosk program with two undisclosed restaurant companies. Holo Industries has yet to receive outside funding but is currently looking for investors to enable its expansion. The Sacramento-based brand will become its own company separate from Convergence Promotions in October 2020.

Restaurant Tech Roundtable: Reinventing The Back of House With Digital Technology

In this panel session, you’ll hear insights how how everyone from small operators to the country’s biggest QSR chains are using technology to improve operations, make their kitchens safer and to help roll out new menus in real-time.

Here are Jenn Marston’s take-aways from session:

More automation. Back of house automation isn’t just about robots making burgers. It has much more to do with digitizing operational processes to make them more efficient. That could mean a robotic arm doing manual tasks. But it could also mean using tech to replace paper-and-pen accounting books or taking a better, more granular analysis of food inventory to cut down costs.

More operational efficiency. Related to automation, the back of house will become more about making operational processes faster and more efficient. One of the panelists went as far as to say efficiency is the biggest thing for restaurants to get right. That’s especially true with fewer people eating in dining rooms and instead ordering takeout or delivery meals that are constantly evaluated for convenience and speed in addition to quality.

More transparency. The pandemic has arguably brought a greater desire for transparency when it comes to our restaurant food, and tech-savvy companies will respond with a variety of solutions. That could include installing software in a restaurant that can tell a customer exactly where their order is at any given moment (e.g., “on the grill,” “out for delivery”) or a tool that better informs them of a restaurant system’s security measures.

Spoon Plus Subscribers can watch the full session below. If you’d like to subscribe to Spoon Plus, you can learn more here.

How Sevenrooms Is Making Voice Tech the Centerpiece of Restaurant Operations

If you are a restaurant in 2019, one of your most valuable assets is your customer data: what they order, how much they spend, whether or not they hate parsley. There are numerous tech platforms nowadays to help restaurants access this mountain of information, but historically that’s meant handling a tablet or mobile device along with all the other items restaurant staff juggle. Guest-management platform Sevenrooms wants to change that by making it possible to access vital customer information using your voice. The NYC-based company’s software platform already lets restaurants track customer data points in real time and access that information quickly to provide guests with more personalized service. Now the company is doubling-down on voice tech, which it believes will be the key tool for collecting and inputing customer data into restaurant systems of the future. The company, who has raised $21.5 million to date, received an investment for an undisclosed sum from the Amazon Alexa Fund in late 2018 and has been working on an Alexa skill ever since to help restaurants access customer data faster and more seamlessly, and without having to use their hands. “That’s a thing that would have originally required a GM to be looking down at a tablet or some form of screen,” Allison Page, Sevenrooms’ cofounder and Chief Product Officer, says over the phone of getting customer data. “And Alexa’s going to make it so much easier to get [that information] hands free in the middle of service so they don’t have to interrupt that hospitality they’re providing.” So long as a guest’s information is stored in the restaurant’s system (via, for example, a loyalty program), Alexa can access that information with a simple voice command. For example, a GM could ask Alexa who is sitting at Table 5 and be told it’s a local customer who’s spent a total of $5,000 at the restaurant over the course of time and is celebrating an anniversary that night. The GM could then send over a giftcard, dessert or some other token of appreciation for the guest that would both personalize their experience that night and, hopefully, keep them coming back. In certain settings, it might seem superfluous to add a voice layer to a system. But restaurants are inherently chaotic settings where multitasking reigns supreme and staff quite literally have their hands full most of the time with trays of food that could easily be spilled and damage a touchscreen device. Going hands-free with voice-enabled technology is potentially a far more seamless way of integrating guest management into a restaurant’s system. Page says the skill can also tell a user things like how much revenue a restaurant has booked that night and how that number compares to previous nights, if a guest has dietary restrictions, and even if they wrote any recent reviews of the restaurant. The system also works the other way around. If a server or GM learns, for example, that a guest just moved to the neighborhood, they can tell Alexa to input that data into the guest’s profile to store as information for future visits. All of this can be done without the user ever having to log into the Sevenrooms system, and that’s at the heart of Sevenrooms’ Alexa integration: bringing tech into the restaurant without letting it take over a la tablet hell. Page demonstrated this at the 2019 NRN show by donning a pair of Alexa-enabled glasses and showing the audience how she could ask the skill questions about a restaurant guest and have the information appear right on the lens. Whether its glasses, watches, or some other wearable device that’s the future of voice tech is yet to be determined. While voice tech in the restaurant has gotten a lot of press lately thanks to McDonald’s acquisition of Apprente, it’s still early days for the technology’s place in restaurants, and there are still challenges to work through. For example, Page says one of the current hurdles for Sevenrooms is getting Alexa to properly understand voice commands and questions in the middle of a noisy dining room. The company is currently working with Amazon on solving this issue. There’s also the question of whether restaurants will sign up for yet-another piece of tech, and one they can’t even put their hands on. Page doesn’t seem terribly concerned about this, however. As she sees it, the benefits of “not having to take your eyes off the dining room and not having to take your eyes off the guest” will prove valuable enough to the customer to justify making voice tech a central part of a restaurant’s guest management system.

Fourth Helps Restaurants Find and Deal With the Hidden Costs of Doing Delivery

The third-party food delivery market is projected to hit $24.5 billion by 2022. Along with those rising numbers are growing expectations for restaurants to offer off-premises food options through services like Uber Eats and DoorDash.

Those well-tread statements are easy enough to sit and write. But for restaurants, those statements are, to shamelessly quote Jack Sparrow, “just maddeningly unhelpful” if they don’t also include practical advice on how to set up a delivery program and what to look for in terms of financial, operational, and technical surprises.

As a result, says Simon Bocca, COO of restaurant-tech company Fourth, a lot of details can fall through the cracks if a restaurant business doesn’t know to keep an eye on them. Those include things like ensuring the right number of staff is on hand, having extra storage space for all the delivery/takeout packaging, and figuring out how to keep Uber Eats drivers from clogging up the waiting area of the in-house restaurant.

These are the kinds of things Fourth tackles with its restaurant operations platform. The software uses data collection and analytics to help restaurants predict weather patterns, food inventory needs, or how many staffers to put on the floor. If we translate those capabilities to third-party delivery, the system help restaurants know many takeout boxes the business will need in stock, which items are popular as delivery orders, and which days might be more popular for delivery (e.g., game day). Restaurants can know ahead of time to expect an influx of delivery orders and prep as much as possible beforehand.

The data is available through a dashboard interface restaurants can customize to their individual business needs.

All of this goes back to the importance of planning when it comes to delivery. “Planning is everything,” says Bocca. “We’re very much helping organizations make sure they’ve got enough foods from the right vendors at the right price [and] understanding the sales that are going to be coming through those channels they can fulfill.”

It’s even helped restaurants figure out when they need to use ghost kitchens. Bocca calls these kitchens, which have no dining room and are increasingly being used by restaurants to fulfill delivery orders, “a huge opportunity” for traditional restaurants. “That financial modeling and planning the full system is ideal to help organizations [with ghost kitchens]” he said.

At the end of the day, it’s all about what the data tells you. In some cases, it might strongly suggest opening a ghost kitchen. At other times, it will highlight less positive things, like one client Bocca didn’t name who saw a 21 percent jump in delivery orders and a simultaneous drop in in average ticket spend for in-house diners.

“Being aware of the data and the information that can affect your business,” he says. “That’s where we see ourselves as being most valuable for restaurants. We bring in all the data: transaction, productivity, and put that into a really helpful package so that leadership can understand what’s happening.”

Founded in 1999, Fourth serves restaurants in over 60 countries. Bocca said the company would like to replicate its success in Britain here in the U.S. and is currently doubling down on its efforts Stateside. Currently, Fourth counts TGI Fridays, Dairy Queen, and Le Pain Quotidien among its clients.