Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

takeout orders

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.

Report: Consumers Spent $486B on Takeout in 2020

Consumers spent $769 billion ordering food from restaurants last year, according to a new report from Paytronix and PYMTS. Takeout orders accounted for $486 billion, or 63 percent. of those sales. 

The report, based on a survey of U.S. consumers, is the latest in Paytronix’ ongoing “Delivering on Restaurant Rewards” series. Paytronix, of course, has skin in the game, it being a restaurant-tech company that specializes in digital ordering and payments solutions. That said, the report’s findings that underscore the popularity of takeout and digital ordering line up with other statistics we have seen over the last few months around the future of these ordering and eating formats.

Online ordering drove the majority of takeout orders in 2020, according to the Paytronix report. A total of 89 percent of consumers said they had placed their takeout order via a digital channel, such as an app, a website, or a third-party aggregator (e.g., DoorDash). The majority of those meals ordered digitally were from restaurants that, prior to the pandemic, had only ever offered dine-in service. “Our research shows that $264 billion, or 61 percent, of the $435 billion consumers spent on online food orders in 2020 was spent at restaurants that had only offered sit-down dining services prior to the outbreak,” notes the report. 

Consumers also spent “50 percent more on average” when they placed takeout orders through digital channels.

Putting a takeout strategy in place was one of the first pieces of advice for restaurants to be widely circulated at the start of lockdowns last year. Takeout offered a way for restaurants to reach customers without serving them in the dining room, and could be done without coughing up the hefty commission fees third-party delivery services charge restaurants on delivery orders. For customers, too, takeout provided an often cheaper option, since they didn’t have to pay the service fees associated with delivery orders. 

None of those factors are any less important now that we’re a year into this pandemic and restaurants have resumed (some) dine-in service. In fact, the future of the dining room is kind of a giant question mark right now, and restaurants are encouraged to continue building out a robust to-go business. Takeout is still arguably the most important part of those strategies. 

Report: 66% of Consumers Are Not Ready for Restaurant Dining Rooms

Around 66 percent of consumers said they would not be willing to eat in a restaurant’s dining room immediately, according to new research from Washington State University’s Carson College of Business and covered by RestaurantDive. Another 47 percent said they planned to wait another three months before venturing out to eat. 

Of those surveyed for the report, 21 percent said they would eat in restaurant dining rooms “soon after” they reopen. “Over time, others will join this group of consumers — assuming that there is not a second wave of COVID-19 infections,” Dr. Dogan Gursoy, a professor of Hospitality Business Management at Washington State University, told the Bellingham Herald recently. About 50 percent of respondent said they would wait at least one to three months before eating out. 

The report also found that casual restaurants will be the first type of eating establishment customers will patronize. Think Outback Steakhouse or Applebee’s, or any of the hundreds of thousands of independent sit-down restaurants in the U.S. Well, at least those that have managed to keep the lights on during state-mandated dining room shutdowns. 

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. 

As states reopen, rules, regulations, and practices vary from one to the next in terms of keeping customers safe. All states that have allowed dining rooms to reopen have set rules in place around reduced capacity for customers, with some at 50 percent and some as low as 25. Reservations are being encouraged, even for quick-service chains you’d have never in the past imagined having to book a table for, and many businesses are limiting the size of large parties to between 6 and 10 people. Meanwhile, the National Restaurant Association has thorough guidelines about updated cleaning and sanitizing procedures for restaurants as they start to invite customers back. 

Even so, consumers are wary when it comes to mingling with the outside world again, which means no matter how visible and effective a restaurant’s sanitization strategy is, it needs to also continue its off-premises strategy. Dr. Gursoy recommended having such a strategy in place for the next three to six months, since limited capacity in the dining room will make it next to impossible to turn a profit.

Granted, there’s no guarantee off-premises orders will make a restaurant money either, especially not when it comes to delivery. Add a possible second wave of coronavirus infections to the mix, and it looks like we’re still a long ways off from the restaurant industry having a true recovery. 

Foodie Card Raises $1.5M for Its Subscription Service Supporting Both Restaurants and Food Banks

Dining subscription company Foodie Card announced today it has closed a $1.5 million seed round for its service that gives customers discounts on restaurant food while also donating to those in need. The round was led by Ruttenberg Gordon Investments with participation from Gary Vaynerchuk, Ryan Harwood of Gallery Media Group, Jamie Schweid of Schweid & Sons, Eric Sobotka of Durational Capital Management and Nat Brogadir of Delivery.com. 

Foodie Card began as a dine-in-only service in 2018. Members paid $29.99 for a year-long subscription and received an actual card in the mail, which they could then show a server or flash at the register during checkout and receive 10 percent off their meal. 

With dine-in service on hold for most states, though, Foodie Card has pivoted like much of the rest of the restaurant industry and now focuses on takeout orders. Customers can show their card at the register when picking up their food and get the same 10 percent off the bill they would with a sit-down experience. The majority of restaurants currently on the company’s roster, most of which are based in the New York, now accept the card for takeout orders.

Importantly, 5 percent of every subscription purchased goes towards providing meals from food banks to those in need. Foodie Card says it has donated more than 20,000 meals to date.

Foodie Card said in the press release it will use the new funds to hire staff, grow additional food banks, expand its network of restaurant parters, and build out its technology. That last point is especially worth noting because while Foodie Card is still a pretty no-frills service at the moment, it has a lot of potential in terms of what it could evolve into. Right now, customers use an actual card to get their discount; building a mobile app for users seems to be the logical next step for the company, given the shift towards contactless payments the restaurant industry is about to make. Foodie Card hasn’t yet said if it has any plans for integrating with delivery orders, though that would make sense at some point, too.

The company will also need to figure out how to accommodate orders that customers pay for digitally before they ever set foot in the restaurant. There’s likely about to be an uptick in companies offering mobile order-ahead solutions for independent restaurants; an integration with some of those platforms would make sense.

Foodie Card says it currently has over 10,000 members and nearly 1,000 participating restaurants. Most of those restaurants are small, independent businesses who need more takeout orders as the pandemic goes on and dining rooms remain closed.