Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

to-go orders

Taco Bell Will Expand To-Go Centric Concepts for Future Stores

Taco Bell today became the latest QSR brand to unveil plans for digital-centric store formats that emphasize off-premises meal formats like takeout, curbside pickup, and delivery, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The biggest forthcoming development for Taco Bell store design is a major expansion of the brand’s Go Mobile concept, which launched last year. Go Mobile stores feature things like multiple drive-thru lanes, “bellhops” for curbside pickup orders, and minimal space for dining in. The concept, unveiled last summer, when cases of COVID-19 were high in the U.S., seems a direct response to the restaurant industry’s seismic shift towards both digital ordering and off-premises meals. “While the brand will continue building destination restaurants, it will simultaneously prioritize digital elements to maximize efficiency for on-the-go customers,” the company said in today’s press release.

Besides GoMobile, Taco Bell also cited a kiosk-only concept set to open in Manhattan, as well as new iterations of its drive-thru Cantina. In 2020, Taco Bell merged its traditional drive-thru concept with its Cantina concept at a location in Danville, California run by Taco Bell franchisee Diversified Restaurant Group. The restaurant offers the full Taco Bell menu along with a full bar for dine-in customers (when they can actually dine in), an outdoor fire pit, and a games area. More such locations are planned for the future.

Revamping store formats has been one of the major trends to come out of the last year for QSRs. From Burger King to McDonald’s to Sonic, there are many different iterations on the concept of retrofitting the QSR for the pandemic era. All share some common denominators, including more curbside pickup, less dining room space, and lots and lots of drive-thru lanes.

Taco Bell is no exception to this, as the above concepts underscore. The company did not provide any specific timeframes for these developments, saying only that it plans to have a total of 10,000 locations — including old and new — open globally in this decade.

Yelp: Permanent and Temporary Restaurant Closures Are Increasing

Roughly 61 percent of businesses listed as “closed” on Yelp have shuttered permanently, according to the platform’s latest Local Economic Impact report.

A total of 32,109 restaurants that were marked as open on the Yelp platform on March 1 are now closed, the new report details. Those numbers make the restaurant industry the most impacted by the pandemic of any business type on Yelp.

Those numbers, of course, only account for the restaurants listed on Yelp’s platform. The National Restaurant Association, which represents the entire restaurant industry, released its own findings this week that said 100,000 restaurants, or nearly one in six, are closed either permanently or for the long term. But whether you go by Yelp’s numbers or the Association’s more widespread findings, the conclusion is the same: the uptick in restaurant closures continues to rise.

As far as Yelp’s new data is concerned, restaurant closure rates vary across the country. As today’s report notes, “Bigger states and metros with higher rents and more stringent local operations for small businesses throughout the last six months have felt a greater toll.” Geographically speaking, California, Texas, Florida, and New York had the highest number of closures of states, while Los Angeles, NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Dallas topped the list for cities.

Types of restaurants with the most closures include breakfast/brunch spots, burger joints, sandwich shops, dessert places and Mexican restaurants.

Yelp’s report wasn’t all gloomy news, though. It also noted that some restaurants have been able to maintain low closure rates. Not surprisingly, those are the restaurants focusing on delivery and takeout, offering food that travels well. While a small silver lining, that point suggests the work restaurants have been doing for the last six months to shift their strategies towards more to-go-friendly formats is not in vain.

Yelp’s new report, along with the Association’s figures, both come just days after the the CDC released findings that suggest those who eat in restaurant dining rooms are twice as likely to be at risk for COVID-19.

A Railway Lunchbox Company In Japan Reinvents Its Packaging to Fight Coronavirus

Not all food tech needs to be high tech when it comes to creating novel solutions that aid against coronavirus infections. Awajiya, a Kobe, Japan-based company that delivers meals to railway stations, announced last week it had developed new packaging for its bento box meals aimed at shielding customers from potential infections.

Awajiya makes and sells ekiben, which are portable meals historically sold on trains and in railway stations. But while ekiben might function as a quick bite for eaters on the go, the boxes are quite a few steps up from “fast food.” Typically, the ingredients in an ekiben reflect the flavors and culture of the region in which they are sold. Ditto for the packaging, which often looks like a work of art, not a to-go box.

Awajiya’s new bento box reflects all of this. The lunches are sold at railway shops and in some department stores, most of them in and around around the city of Kobe. According to the company’s website, meals incorporate meats, seafoods, and other ingredients specific to Kobe and its surrounding areas.  

When folded according to the instructions, Awajiya’s lunchbox creates a three-sided shield-like structure around the box that can keep any airborne droplets from nearby people out of the food. It also guards against the eater’s own germs from spreading to others. Awajiya says the box is the same size as a regular bento box, making it easy to use on trains. 

While not the most high-tech development, Awajiya’s box is nonetheless a reminder that fighting COVID-19 in the food realm can be as simple as reimagining a piece of packaging or the layout of a physical space. After all, we’re in a time when reusable coffee cups are currently frowned on or outright prohibited, when menus have to be disposable or digital, and sit-down restaurants are getting reformatted for off-premises orders. A simple lunchbox may not stop coronavirus in its tracks, but it’s incremental developments like these that, when working together en masse, can go great distances to keep the world’s population a little safer.

Allset’s Tech Gives New Meaning to the Concept of Quick Service in the Restaurant

Not so long ago, the idea of ordering your food before you got the restaurant then sitting down in the establishment’s dining room to eat it felt unnecessary. Why go to a restaurant dining room at all if you’re in that big of a hurry? Why not hit the quick-service chain down the road if you’re that badly in need of quick service?

Flash-forward to now, and being able to order ahead is becoming a must-have for restaurants, in or out of the dining room.

This is what Allset, a company based out of San Francisco, wants to address. In addition to currently offering a bundle of contactless features restaurants can use during this current restaurant industry upheaval, the company also allows customers to order food ahead of time for any type order, whether they’re eating in the dining room or taking it to go.

More than ever, restaurants are finding they need to offer high-tech order-ahead features for both in-house and off-premises meals, and that both speed and minimized human-to-human interactions are important parts of that process. Some companies — third-party delivery services and a slew of restaurant-tech products — offer these things for pickup and delivery orders, but they typically come at a high cost and don’t include any solution for the actual dining room.

Allset doesn’t have any significant competitors when it comes to offering a package that addresses every restaurant experience, which is probably a big reason demand for the service is up. Over the phone this week, CEO Stas Matviyenko said the company has been busier than ever as restaurants scramble for solutions to help them navigate the new normal. “[The pandemic has] changed the way people dine, the way people want to dine. The way restaurants have to serve people [has] changed dramatically.”

Allset, which was founded in 2015 by Matviyenko and Anna Polishchuk, started as a service for dine-in restaurant experiences. Users could choose a restaurant via the Allset app, order and pay for their meal ahead of time, and have their meals ready within about five minutes of their being seated at the restaurant. The company added a takeout component to the business in 2019, a fortuitous move considering the entire industry went off-premises a few months ago. 

As Matviyenko explained to me, Allset was actually working with a contactless pickup solution before the pandemic hit. Seeing inefficiencies in the usual pickup order process — flagging a staff person down to notify them of your arrival, waiting around for the order — the company started offering a way for restaurants to streamline that process. The “ideal” experience, he said, would be for a customer to order and pay for their meal, find their food in a designated pickup area, and be able to grab it and go without ever interacting with staff. Allset actually raised $8.25 million to further develop this concept at the end of March, just as dining rooms were shutting down.

But just because the industry is leaning heavily on off-premises nowadays doesn’t mean Allset is forgetting about the dining room. Matviyenko suggests that a technology like theirs is actually more important nowadays. Restaurants — which have always operated off thin margins — now have to contend with lower sales because of reduced capacity requirements in their newly reopened dining rooms. They will want to turn tables faster in order to get more transactions on a day-in, day-out basis, and one way to do that is to cut down the time a customer has to wait between sitting down and actually getting their food. As well, there are people who would just prefer to grab a quick bite for lunch without eating it from a takeout box, and this is an area Allset has always served. 

It doesn’t hurt that the restaurant menu format is also changing, thanks to reopening guidelines that suggest businesses use digital menus. Baking pre-order into that digital format seems just mere steps away, rather than the giant leap it would have been pre-pandemic.

Currently, Allset is waiving all commission fees for restaurants, and the app is free for customers to use. Matviyenko said since the COVID-19 crisis began, they’ve been getting much more interest from restaurants large and small. Moving forward, he says he expects to see the company grow much faster than before.