Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant

NPD: Restaurant Chain Transactions Down From Last Year, Digital Orders Up

New data from NPD Group is a real good news/bad news situation for restaurants. The bad news: for the week ending May 24, total major restaurant chain transactions declined 18 percent compared to the same time period last year. The good news? That’s up 25 percentage points from the biggest decline in transactions during this pandemic (-43 percent for the week ending April 12).

Of course, a big reason for that growth is that more cities and states began re-opening towards the end of May, so more people could once again actually go into a restaurant.

An NPD press release breaks the numbers down further, writing:

  • Major full service chain restaurant transactions declined by -42% versus same time year ago, a +7 point improvement from the prior week’s decline of -49% from year ago.
  • Transactions at quick service restaurant chains were down -17% in week ending May 24 compared to same week year ago, improving from the -20% decline in the prior week.

Another couple of interesting tid-bits from NPD’s recent data is that drive-thru, mostly at QSRs, made up almost half of all restaurant occasions, and that digital orders grew by 106 percent in April compared with last year. NPD says that digital orders now account for 20 percent of all restaurant occasions.

If you’ve been following my colleague Jenn Marston’s writing, this growth in digital orders and off-premises dining shouldn’t come as a surprise. In her excellent weekly restaurant tech newsletter this past Friday, she covered recent Black Box data that showed takeout orders are going back up. As Jenn wrote:

Presumably, people got excited about going back to restaurants instead of ordering takeout, then realized what a pain in the a$$ dine-in service is going to be for a long time to come. Guidelines vary from state to state in the U.S., but almost all of them include reduced capacity, reduced party sizes, no buffets, and in some cases a mask requirement. Add to that the trepidation most of us wear with our masks these days anytime we set foot in public, and it’s not exactly a recipe for a packed house.

As more cities and states ease shelter in place order, and summer gets into full swing, we’ll move from guessing about how consumers will react to restaurants’ re-opening and into hard numbers around what they are actually doing. Data like this from NPD helps chart those movements.

Dishcraft Raises $20M, Adds Reuseable Takeout Container Cleaning as a Service

Dishcraft Robotics, which uses robots and AI to automate dish cleaning for high-volume eating establishments, announced today that it has raised a $20 million “Series A1” round of funding. The round was led by new investor Grit Ventures with participation from existing investors First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, Fuel Capital, and Lemnos. Dishcraft has raised $46 million in total funding to date.

When we last checked in with Dishcraft in January of this year, the company had just publicly come out with Dishcraft Daily, which is basically dishes as a service for foodservice locations like cafeterias. As we wrote back in January:

Each day, Dishcraft arrives at the end of lunch service, picks up all the dirty dishes that have been stacked into special carts, and drops off clean ones. Dirty dishes are taken back to the Dishcraft facility and loaded into the cleaning robot.

The Dishcraft robot uses computer vision, sensors, UV light and AI to detect the cleanliness of each dish as it goes through the machine. This technology, Dishcraft says, makes for cleaner plates because the machine can detect (and clean) any particles remaining that the human eye can’t.

However, the global pandemic hit shortly after the launch of Dishcraft Daily, forcing foodservice operations like corporate and college cafeterias to shut down. But rather than twiddle its thumbs to wait this whole thing out, Dischcraft adapted.

As part of today’s announcement, Dishcraft said it will use the new money to expand its daily dish delivery to now include reusable to-go containers and utensils. The reusable container program had been on the company’s roadmap, but was accelerated because takeout became the main, if only way, for foodservice companies to get meals out. But as anyone who’s ordered meal delivery during this global lockdown knows, restaurant food is packed in single-use plastic containers. That might help people eat right now, but those containers are definitely bad for the environment in the long term.

According to the press release, the reusable containers will allow cafeterias, caterers and restaurants “to offer diners individually portioned takeaway meals in reusable containers that meet health guidelines for sanitization and hygiene.” The program will start with corporate cafeterias and cafes, with to-go container return bins set up around the office. Those full bins will then be collected by Dishcraft to be sanitized every day. It’s easy to see how this could expand to colleges with bins placed around campus.

Dishcraft hasn’t fully worked out how it would integrate its to-go container program into restaurant operations, but Linda Pouliot, Founder and CEO of Dishcraft told me by phone this week that some options could be working with cities to set up designated collection areas, or even possibly Dishcraft creating its own curbside pickup service.

Restaurants and other foodservice companies are only just now coming out of quarantine and only in certain parts of the country. There are still lots of questions about exactly how they will re-open and what that will look like. One thing we do know from a recent Washington State University study is that consumers are nervous about going right back into restaurants and as my colleague Jenn Marston wrote:

Consumers surveyed for the report said that sanitation efforts like masks for servers, hand sanitizer stations, and other visible efforts, like seeing staff clean tables and chairs, will be the most important safety precautions.

Dishcraft’s sanitization service could then be attractive to restaurants looking to entice people back into their businesses. “We have such a closed system,” Pouliot said, “Our goal is that no human hand touches the dishes before it gets to the diner or plated.”

Dishcraft is available in the Bay Area, and currently counts Affirm and foodservice company Guckenheimer among its customers. Dishcraft said that it will expand the size of its dishwashing hub in San Carlos, CA.

Popapp Data Gives Snapshot of COVID-19’s Impact on Latin American Restaurants

Because we are based in the US, we have plenty of data about how the COVID-19 outbreak is decimating the restaurant business here. And while we have a general sense about how restaurants are faring in other parts of the world (bad), we haven’t seen a lot of numbers.

But thanks to Jorge Corona Gutierrez, we have a small glimpse into the impact of the global pandemic across Latin America countries like Argentina, Chile, Perú and Mexico.

Gutierrez is the Founder and CEO of Popapp, a restaurant software startup that helps manage delivery for small to medium-sized restaurants. He pulled together data from Popapp’s 300 customers to provide a snapshot of how COVID-19 has impacted the restaurant business across Latin America. From that report, Gutierrez says:

  • As of March 1 of this year, Popapp had 336 active point of sale (POS) per day. By April 6, that number had dropped to 59 active POS per day, representing an 82 percent churn.
  • During the first week of March, the average cumulative sales per day of Popapp’s customers was roughly $117,000 (USD) per day. During the first week of April, that number dropped to $25,000, an 84 percent loss in revenue.

Obviously this is a small snapshot of the overall state of the restaurant industry in Latin America, but it does give us some numbers to get a sense of the problems there.

Even amidst this gloom, however, Gutierrez points out some optimism. That 59 active POS number above is actually an improvement over the nadir for the company over the past month, when there were just 43 active POS systems per day. And Gutierrez says that his company has been steadily adding more customers suggesting that more restaurants are pivoting to delivery.

The data from Gutierrez’s report does illustrate that this is a truly global pandemic that is hitting the restaurant industry particularly hard around the world.

Pepper Groceries Pivots to Help B2B Food Suppliers Sell Direct to Consumer

There are two consistent stories that we are seeing unfold during this time of global pandemic and massive restaurant closings. First is that the traditional ways of the restaurant business are gone for now and any company that wants to survive in that space needs to pivot into something new. The second is that all the food that would have been used by those now shuttered restaurants needs somewhere to go.

Pepper sits right in the middle of that venn diagram. A few months ago it was a startup that helped restaurants streamline their food buying from multiple suppliers. With restaurants closing, Pepper’s original business plan was kind of shot. But because Pepper was working with food suppliers, it knew even though so many restaurants slowing down or ceasing operations, those suppliers still had food to sell. So Pepper did what any smart startup does in challenging times: it pivoted.

It quickly transformed its platform from business-to-business to direct-to-consumers. Pepper’s first market is the greater New York City area, and people in the five boroughs there can visit PepperGroceries.com to purchase seafood, produce, meat, cheese and even kitchen and janitorial supplies from the companies that used to supply restaurants.

Each of these suppliers has their own delivery trucks, and orders are turned around in a couple of days. Pepper currently works with four suppliers and is in talks to bring on more. For now, all the money a shopper spends on Pepper goes directly to the suppliers.

“All the proceeds are going to pockets of the suppliers,” Bowie Cheung, Co-Founder and CEO of Pepper told me by phone this week. “The general thing is to see how much relief we can provide to these [suppliers]. Drum up as much demand as we can.”

Cheung said that while the service is only available in the New York/New Jersey area right now, the platform can easily scale up and go nationwide. Pepper is venture-backed with an undisclosed seed round investment from Greylock Partners and Box Group.

Like so many things being upended by the coronavirus right now, one has to wonder whether this will be a temporary pivot for Pepper or a new normal both for the startup and the food suppliers it works with. As Cheung summed it up, “How and where does the industry go in a couple of months? I have no idea.”

Restaurants and Partners Innovating to Survive During the Coronavirus

The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent social distancing are affecting many folks, but one of the groups that’s been the hardest-hit is the hospitality industry, especially restaurants. So we at The Spoon are putting together a list of companies in or adjacent to the food and restaurant space who are offering ways to help foodservice establishments struggling during the coronavirus.

Please feel free to leave any additional companies in the comments section or email us at tips@thespoon.tech. We’ll be updating the list. Stay safe and healthy out there!

SOFTWARE HELPING RESTAURANTS

Photo: Foodetective

Switzerland: Foodetective

Plenty of restaurants are trying to focus more on takeaway and delivery, but third-party delivery services can charge high fees that cut into restaurants’ already razor-thin margins. Foodetective is trying to let restaurants keep more profits in their pockets by offering free takeaway and delivery platform for restaurants — in Switzerland. Swiss restaurants can go onto Foodetective’s website and set up a profile to sell their food online without having to pay commissions to delivery services.

Maybe (more) third-party delivery services here in the U.S. will take note.

Photo: Bbot

Nationwide: Bbot

Steve Simoni, founder of smart ordering software provider Bbot, told The Spoon that they would be providing discounted setups of their software to help restaurants better support delivery and pickup. Simoni said that they won’t charge the monthly fee for their software until June 1.

“We’re trying to make it cost effective and easy for them,” he wrote to us. However, participating restaurants will need to figure out their own delivery service to partner with to actually get the food to diners’ doorsteps.

Photo: Lavu

Nationwide: Lavu

Restaurant PoS system provider Lavu Inc. just released its Corona Virus Relief plan. According to a Linkedin post by Lavu’s CEO Saleem S. Khatri, the company is no longer charging software payments to restaurants that are shut down in response to the outbreak.

Lavu is also waiving fees for Menudrive, its online ordering platform, so restaurants focusing more on delivery don’t have to pay as much to third-party services.

Finally, Khatri wrote that Lavu has partnered with an undisclosed capital partner to help restaurants in dire straits gain access to short-term capital.

RESTAURANTS REINVENTING THEMSELVES

Seattle: Addo

Chef Eric Rivera is known for his wacky, creative theme nights at his Seattle restaurant addo. But in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, he has started diversifying addo’s offerings to cater to diners who might be cautious to dine out in a group setting.

Seattlites can order to-go meals from addo @ home, which includes three pre-prepped meals plus wine, for pick-up or delivery. Rivera has also created addo pantry, a source of dry goods, hot sauces, and more made in-house which people can pre-order for pickup or delivery (delivery comes with a flat fee). Pick-ups and deliveries for addo pantry start on 3/22.

If you’re looking for a way to pay it forward in these uncertain times, Rivera just launched addo for the people. Through the program you can purchase $9 bowls of take-and-heat food either for yourself or as donations to local charities. The bowls are currently available for pickup at addo and Rivera and his team are in the midst of partnering with charities to coordinate food drop off.

Photo: Canlis restaurant in Seattle

Seattle: Canlis

James Beard Award-winning fine dining restaurant Canlis is completely reinventing itself in the wake of the coronavirus. The restaurant will shut down its dining room starting on Monday, March 16 and will pivot the following day to offer three new dining options: takeout-only breakfast option The Bagel Shed, pickup lunch offering Drive On Thru, and a meal delivery service called Family Meal.

All new offerings will be based on the Canlis restaurant site in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, and the delivery range for Family Meal will be roughly 7 miles away from the restaurant. “Fine dining is not what Seattle needs right now,” reads Canlis’ new website. “Instead, this is one idea for safely creating jobs for our employees while serving as much of our city as we can. We’ve got this, Seattle.”

CREATOR GOES TAKE OUT

San Francisco’s hamburger restaurant, which already has robots that make its food, has gone to take out and delivery only. The restaurant has also taken on what seems like sci-fi level measures, as the company told us via email:

Our engineers have worked around the clock to create a transfer chamber that protects the inside of the restaurant from outside air yet still allows us to transport completed meals, in their hermetically sealed bags, out to customers. The chamber uses a positive pressure system combined with a self-sanitizing conveyor.

—

Do you know of other restaurants/online platforms/services that are helping foodservice establishments survive during the coronavirus outbreak? Comment below or send us a tip at tips@thespoontech!

2ndKitchen Completes $4.35M Seed Round so Places Like Bars Can Serve Food from Nearby Restaurants

2nd Kitchen, the startup that enables establishments with no kitchens like pubs or bars to serve food from nearby restaurants, announced today that it has completed a $4.35 million seed round of funding. The round was led by Hyde Park Venture Partners with participation from MATH Venture Partners, Great North Labs, Bragiel Brothers, and M25.

The seed round actually kicked off in February of this year when 2nd Kitchen raised $1.35 million of the round. Here’s how we described the company back then:

It’s expensive for a bar or brewery to add its own kitchen facilities, so 2ndKitchen creates what could almost be considered a virtual food court. It connects a bar (or other business without a kitchen) with restaurants that are within walking or biking distance to curate a menu of items. Customers can order from this mini-menu via kiosks in the kitchenless establishment or a mobile phone app with the food delivered straight to their table.

Since then, 2ndKitchen has added other kitchenless locales like hotels, hospitals and co-working spaces to the place it serves. It’s free for a location to set up, and 2ndKitchen takes care of the menu, payments, and customer support. According to its website, 2ndKitchen charges participating restaurants a commission for orders it generates and restaurants can either make deliveries themselves or work with 2ndKitchen’s “delivery partner network.”

For anyone who’s ever had to cut short a good time at their favorite pub because it didn’t serve food, it’s easy to understand why this is a good idea. For location proprietors like bars, it keeps butts in seats for longer (ideally ordering more drinks) and adds food without needing to add all the expense of adding a kitchen. For restaurants, it’s easy to see some initial pushback in adding yet one more sales channel to its order tablet roster. But if the orders are placed from establishments close by, then it seems like 2ndKitchen could be a boon for restaurants looking to expand their customer base.

In its press release, 2ndKitchen said that it is rapidly expanding across the U.S. and will use the new funds to go after new business categories beyond bars, breweries, and hotels.

FRO’s All-Electric Dessert Truck Takes Food Mobility to Another Level

If there was such a thing as a Spoon Bingo card, FRO would be a winner, ticking off a number of trends we follow including sustainability, plant-based foods, and the rapidly emerging world of restaurant mobility.

Los Angeles-based startup FRO runs an electric, solar-powered food truck that serves up vegan “ice cream.” FRO Founder and CEO Deloss Pickett was formerly with Tesla, where he worked on that company’s Powerwall battery storage product. Pickett took that electrical know-how to build out the first FRO electric truck, which houses a bank of batteries to power the company’s frozen dessert offering. The truck even has solar panels to provide extra juice for the machines to keep the batteries humming.

Because all the power is supplied by these batteries, the FRO truck doesn’t need an external gas generator or to plug into an outlet when it stops to serve customers. It’s all self-contained and can last ten hours on a full charge (with a couple extra hours provided by the solar panels on a sunny day). This zero emissions aspect is a nice bit of sustainability, but it also increases the FRO truck’s mobility.

Food trucks have been around for a long time, but their very nature is undergoing a pretty rapid evolution in the back half of 2019. In September, Zume launched its first mobile kitchen, which allows restaurants to extend their delivery footprint by placing full ghost kitchens-on-wheels directly in neighborhoods, closer to customers. Then earlier this month, Ono Food launched its robot-smoothie-maker in a van, also in Los Angeles, which can travel to different parts of the city in the same day to follow the crowds (and their money).

Think of FRO as the smaller, more lightweight next step in that evolution. Sitting somewhere between a food truck and a vending machine, Pickett told me by phone this week that the vehicle is actually classified as a cart, so it can go on city sidewalks. But it’s demure stature and self-contained power supply makes it easy to set up shop quickly on college campuses, at farmers markets or in outdoor festivals.

Once set up, FRO sells a patent-pending vegan frozen soft serve. Pickett wouldn’t tell me the exact process, but it starts with Evolution brand pressed juice to which they add some vegan stabilizers to produce flavors like strawberry lemonade and citrus chocolate. We don’t know if FRO is as good as Perfect Day’s flora-based ice cream, but FRO is building on the idea that you don’t need dairy to make a cold dessert that people will want.

One trend the FRO truck is not following is full automation. A human is still on board to pour out 7 – 8 oz. desserts for $6.00 a piece. Pickett said that they had looked at creating more of a self-serve situation, but that wound up slowing the whole process down. While having a human on board does speed things up, it does deprive FRO of deeper, software-driven data insights that it could use to become more efficient in its inventory management, and location placement.

FRO is bootstrapped right now and Pickett said he’s focused on generating revenue and learning from real world conditions before he begins the process of raising money and scaling up. Though FROs are owner operated right now, it seems like once its technology has been built up and iterated, there’s no reason FRO couldn’t license out its platform to other brands in other parts of the country. That would certainly check one more box on The Spoon Bingo card.

Ovation Raises Nearly $1M in Seed Funding for its Restaurant Rating Platform

Ovation, a software platform that gathers customer feedback for restaurants and retailers, announced today it has raised $965,000 in seed funding led by Monta Vista Capital and includes 500 Startups.

Ovation recently graduated from the 500 Startups accelerator in San Francisco as part of Batch 24, and uses a combination of QR codes, texting, kiosks, or other integrations to gather customer feedback and measure their experiences through survey tools. There is no app to install, account to create or code needed from paper receipts. Customers who were happy with their experience are invited to share why and encouraged to come back, while dissatisfied customers can immediately engage in an SMS chat with management to determine why.

Based in Provo, Utah, Ovation charges a monthly subscription for its service, and says it has more than 300 customers.

Restaurants face all kinds of new and different pressures from today’s diners. First, more diners are choosing to get their restaurant meal delivered to their home, with QSR magazine reporting that delivery sales are projected to grow at more than three times the rate of on-premises revenue through 2023. So restaurants need to make sure that any diners that come in have a good experience. Ensuring a good customer experience is even more important in a world where a bad review can go viral online, severely damaging a restaurant’s reputation.

Ovation is among a crop of startups looking to help restaurants protect their reputations through instant customer engagement. Presto, which raised $30 million earlier this year, uses a combination of on-table tablets and wearables to provide customers with direct communication with their servers. Other restaurant software systems like Toast also provide in-house feedback tools for restaurants.

Google Maps Adds Popular Dish Feature to Surface Favorite Meals at Restaurants

Google Maps has always helped navigate you to a nearby restaurant, but with a new feature launched today, Maps will help you navigate that restaurant’s menu by surfacing its most popular dishes.

The popular dishes feature uses machine learning to parse through photos and reviews of dishes posted by Google Maps users and identify a restaurant’s most popular meals. The new feature is available now on Android with an iOS version to follow later. From a Google blog post announcing the service:

Simply pull up a restaurant on Google Maps to find its popular dishes in the overview tab. Feeling extra peckish? Dive into the menu tab to scroll through all the most-talked about meals, and tap on a popular dish to explore reviews and photos. In a country where you can’t read the language? Maps will also translate the reviews for you too.

Google has certainly been interested in feeding you lately. Last week, the company announced a feature that allows Google Maps, Search and Assistant users to order food for delivery directly through those apps. Earlier this month, the company revealed a new Google Lens feature that let users point their phone cameras at a menu to bring up pictures of popular meals. And there’s also, Google Duplex the human-sounding AI assistant that can make restaurant reservations for you.

It’s not hard to connect the dots to see where all this is going. Knowing what restaurants are nearby, what type of cuisine they serve and what their most popular dishes are creates the foundation for an even more powerful AI assistant. Why should Duplex stop at making restaurant reservations when it could also order your food for home delivery? While this is useful on your phone, having this kind of functionality on a Google Smart Hub smart screen would be equally powerful for families ordering dinner. Google can recommend the restaurant, suggest dishes and then automatically have it delivered to your door.

Getting your purchase history and surrounding data (when you ordered, etc.) would provide Google even more data to power its algorithms, and the company is pretty upfront about wanting that data. From the Popular Dishes blog post today:

At the end of the day, this feature is made possible because of contributions from people around the world who want to help others using Google Maps. So if you want to pay it forward to the next dinner, simply take a photo of your meal (before you’ve scarfed it down!) and add a dish name so others can know what’s good on the menu.

Of course, in a world where we freely hand over so much information about ourselves, at some point you have to ask: who, exactly, is being served?

Instawork Raises $18M to Connect Hospitality Shifts with Workers

One of the reasons restaurant owners give for moving towards robots is that they have a hard time finding human workers. We’re still a ways off from a full robot restaurant revolution, so in the meantime restaurants, hotels and other hospitality businesses can find qualified workers to pick up shifts through platforms like Instawork, which announced today that it has raised $18 million in new funding.

The round was led by Spark Capital, GV, and Burst Capital, with participation from existing investors Benchmark, Y Combinator, Tuesday Capital, and SV Angel (hat tip to VentureBeat). This brings Instaworks total amount of funding to $28 million.

Through Instawork, qualified workers like servers and chefs can post their services and look for shifts, sometimes at the last minute. Instawork vets all candidates, checking references and ensuring they are qualified to do the work. Companies post shift openings, and after a worker selects and completes a shift, they can be rated, and even requested for future shifts. Instawork charges companies a per-shift booking fee, and takes care of the insurance, billing and payments.

Right now, Instawork is available in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego. However, as part of the funding announcement today, the company said that it is expanding to Phoenix, Scottsdale and Mesa, Arizona.

If you consider that there are more than a million restaurants and 15.3 million restaurant workers in the U.S., it’s no wonder that there’s a mini-industry sprouting up to connect the two. In addition to Instawork, there are startups like Jobletics, which does much the same thing, and Shyft, which lets employees more easily swap shifts amongst themselves.

Who knows? Maybe services like Instawork and others will work so well restaurants will have an easier time finding workers, though that probably won’t stop the robots.

Bear Robotics Launches Second-Gen Restaurant Robot, Adds Swappable Tray System

Bear Robotics has officially launched the second-generation version of its Penny restaurant robot. The autonomous robot, which shuttles food and dishes between the front and back of house, now features a versatile tray system for carrying more and different types of items.

With its new design, Penny has lost its bowling pin shape and single carrying surface. Instead, Penny 2.0 is more cylindrical in shape, and can sport up to three tiers of carrying surface. Not only can Penny carry more, a new swappable tray system means it can be configured to carry any combination of food, drinks or bus tub.

On the inside, Bear updated the smarts of Penny, giving the robot enhanced obstacle-avoidance technology, and while the company didn’t go into specifics, a tablet can now be attached to Penny for expanded customer interaction capabilities.

Penny 2.0 is being shown at the National Restaurant Association trade show this weekend and is available now. While Bear doesn’t disclose actual pricing, Penny is offered on a monthly subscription, which includes the robot, setup and mapping of a restaurant and technical support.

Penny is among a wave of robots coming to restaurants in the near future: Flippy makes burgers and fries up chicken tenders, Dishcraft is still stealthily working on automating tasks in the kitchen, and there are entire establishments like Creator and Spyce built around robotic cooking systems.

Any discussion of automation always involves the loss of human jobs. John Ha, CEO of Bear Robotics, actually owned a restaurant and built Penny after noticing how hard servers work, often for little pay. By automating the expediting of food and bussing, Bear aims to free up humans to provide higher levels of customer service (ideally earning those humans higher tips).

Ha and Linda Pouliot, CEO of Dishcraft recently spoke at our recent Articulate Food Robotics conference about the challenges restaurants face, and how robotics can help. You can watch their session in full right here.

Articulate 2019: Robots in Restaurants

With McDonald’s Dynamic Yield Deal, is the Era of Personalized Menus Upon Us?

Let’s face it, menus are pretty boring. Go into almost any restaurant — fast food, fast casual or that fancy place you take mom once a year — and what you get is a set of food choices that don’t differ from one customer to the next.

And ok, we’ve seen incremental improvements over the past few years through interface technologies such electronic order kiosks and voice ordering, but the reality is a menu today is pretty much the same for us as it was for our parents and grandparents: a one-sized-fits-all list of food choices.

But here’s the good news: judging by recent moves by big restaurants like McDonald’s, that may soon change. Just this week the fast food goliath announced they were buying menu personalization startup Dynamic Yield for $300 million to make their drive thru and in-store menus more technologically dynamic. Chris has the story here.

Here’s an excerpt from the company press release describing what they plan to do with the new technology:

McDonald’s will utilize this decision technology to provide an even more personalized customer experience by varying outdoor digital Drive Thru menu displays to show food based on time of day, weather, current restaurant traffic and trending menu items. The decision technology can also instantly suggest and display additional items to a customer’s order based on their current selections.

Sounds great, right? After all, who wouldn’t want contextualized menu choices based on external environmental factors? Plus, trending items will mean more optimized options than the usual.

But here’s the thing: if that’s the extent of the personalization that a $300 million deal buys you, I’ll be pretty disappointed.

There’s Personalized and Then There’s Personalized

No matter what industry you follow, at this point you probably know personalization is hot. Whether it’s entertainment, nutrition, food or what-have-you, there’s probably more than a dozen startups who want to deliver something highly tailored to you, the end user.

The problem with most of these offerings today is that in most cases, personalized doesn’t really mean personalized, but instead it just means something slightly different based on a set of localized and current environmental factors.

What if instead we were to get truly personalized results tailored specifically for us? What if instead of a menu based on whether it’s hot or cold we got a menu based on what type of food we – you, me, us – like and eat on hot days or cold days?

In short, what if we were to see truly personalized food choices based on specific food profile?

This level of personalization is something we’ve been thinking about at The Spoon for a while. We talked about this exact topic at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2017. Alpha Labs’ Mike Lee had this to say about the idea:

“I’ve always believed there needs to be this interoperable data standard that encapsulates what your food preferences are,” said Lee. “Something that can be used from this app to this app to this grocery store. Much in the same way you have single sign-on with Facebook, I can log in somewhere, and it can show me content that’s sculpted to what I have.”

Think about it: instead of getting just an updated list of food based on what’s trending that day or if it’s hot or cold outside, you would get a menu that was created specifically based on your taste profile, biomarkers, allergies and more. This menu would be an entirely new thing to the world, something made for you and your unique characteristics.

Sounds intriguing.  It also sounds like the future. But is it a future that is near or far? A lot of it depends on how companies like McDonald’s, with Dynamic Yield in the fold, move in that direction.

There are definitely barriers. In a world rampant with data breaches and consumers increasingly worried about their privacy, the idea of more places having information about you and your specific preferences, biomarkers and more can be petrifying (not to mention perilous from both a political and business standpoint).

Still, I think it’s worth pursuing and I’m not the only one. Jim Collins, the CEO of Kitchen United, said menu personalization is one of the biggest opportunities going forward in restaurant. To him, today’s menus are like search engines of the early 2000s: kinda dumb.

“If you’re gluten-free, why do you see menu where 80 percent of the items have gluten?” he asked last fall on our panel about restaurant tech. “Why don’t you see one that only shows the 20 percent that’s not? That’s what I’m looking for.”

I agree and I’m pretty sure McDonald’s (and others) does too: true menu personalization is the holy grail. So while in the near term this deal likely means trending items and McFlurry recommendations when it’s hot out, in the long term I think we’ll see menus created instantly – based on your own McDonald’s or perhaps a more universal profile – for you.