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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

TouchBistro

TouchBistro Acquires Loyalty and CRM Company TableUp

Restaurant management platform TouchBistro today announced its acquisition of TableUp, a company that makes loyalty and marketing software for the restaurant biz. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TouchBistro said in a press release sent to The Spoon that it will fully integrate TableUp’s CRM and loyalty capabilities into its existing platform. Dubbed TouchBistro Loyalty, the new product will be released in phases, with an introductory product hitting North American markets “in the coming weeks,.” Through it, TouchBistro’s restaurant customers will be able to use the software to power loyalty programs, create more personalized marketing campaigns for guests, and offer more promotions. 

Once a simple POS system, TouchBistro has been steadily adding features to its platform to transform it into the kind of all-in-one front-of-house management tool most restaurant tech companies are peddling these days. In 2019, TouchBistro launched its own reservations and guest-management features. Its system works for both in-house orders and those for off-premises.

That ability to serve to-go customers is a must nowadays for restaurant tech systems. With many dining rooms still shuttered because of the pandemic, restaurants have little choice but to focus on their off-premises strategies. Restaurant tech companies in turn must broaden their systems’ capabilities to meet those new requirements. We’ve seen the likes of Sevenrooms, Presto, Toast, and others do just that over the last few months in an attempt to stay relevant in world where the restaurant front of house is becoming alarmingly less relevant. 

At the moment, loyalty programs and personalized marketing don’t rank as high on the list of customer concerns as things like cleanliness or ease of use with new off-premises-focused tools. However, loyalty and marketing features themselves aren’t going by the wayside anytime soon, even if a lot of restaurant dining rooms are. That makes TouchBistro’s acquisition of TableUp a worthy long-term play as restaurant tech companies continue to redefine themselves.

TouchBistro Launches a Reservations and Guest-Management Platform for Restaurants

POS provider TouchBistro this week launched a reservation and guest management platform for restaurants that will compete with SevenRooms, Toast, and others.

Dubbed TouchBistro Reservations, the new platform integrates with TouchBistro’s existing POS system and offers restaurants better communication between the front and back of house, more channels for booking tables, and better data on customer preferences.

While Reservations works as a standalone app, when restaurants integrate it with TouchBistro’s POS, it creates a real-time connection between the front-of-house reservations system and the back-of-house POS. For example, when a server sends an order to the kitchen, the system not only tells the kitchen to start making the food, but also alerts the front of house of that table’s status. Same goes for when the food is served or a table pays a bill. Real-time status updates such as these make it easier for, say, the host to more accurately gauge wait times for other guests. The system also provides the kind of real-time data that’s become increasingly important for restaurants to have in order to better personalize the dining experience for customers: dietary preferences, customer spend, and even when a customer is a first-time guest at the restaurant.

Reservations also allows participating restaurant to accept bookings via Google Search and Maps, their own website, or TouchBistro’s own restaurant discovery app.

Reservations enters some crowded waters in terms of competition among guest-management platforms. NYC-based SevenRooms’ front-of-house-focused platform also offers deeper insights into customer data, and the company is currently testing a voice-tech layer s via Amazon Alexa. Toast’s platform — a mix of its own tech as well as numerous integrations with third-party partners — manages both front and back of house and includes hardware components. Square, Omnivore, and Resy are just a few more companies bringing various solutions to market to handle various aspects of restaurant guest management.

TouchBistro’s differentiation is the connection it provides between the front and back of house. As more tech enters restaurants, businesses increasingly look to solutions that make their operations more efficient without burdening staff with clunky devices or non-intuitive software. Having that seamless communication between what’s going on in the kitchen and dining room will be crucial going forward.

Toast and BevSpot Want to Improve the Way Restaurants Use Back-of-House Data

Yesterday, restaurant-management software maker Toast announced a partnership with BevSpot, whose own software simplifies the order tracking and inventory process for restaurants. The new solution claims to save businesses time and energy collecting and making sense of data from sales, ordering, and inventory.

Toast’s Android-powered platform already combines a POS system, front- and back-of-house operations, and customer-facing technology (e.g., tabletop order kiosks) into a single cloud-based platform. The BevSpot partnership is a boost because it addresses the often arduous process of gathering and analyzing data from activities that happen behind the scenes: taking accurate inventory, checking the status of an order, and calculating things like pour costs. For a restaurant — particularly a large operation — a combined service like the Toast-BevSpot one could speed up and/or automate a lot of these tasks, not to mention make the numbers more accurate.

Inventory tracking alone is tough; screwing it up, even with a tiny miscalculation, can drastically change the sales numbers. With the Toast-BevSpot integration, businesses will be able to see exact numbers on what goes into the kitchen, what goes out, spillage, customer complaints, theft, and a whole bunch of other factors that affect inventory.

And by harmonizing the POS data with inventory and order data (which is all digitized, thanks to BevSpot), businesses will in all likelihood have an easier time spotting trends, whether it’s about which time of day sells the most fries to what days of the week the kitchen goes through more eggs.

The BevSpot integration is part of Toast’s API Partner Program, where companies can partner with Toast to integrate its system into their own software. Among many others, Grubhub, LevelUp, and Hot Schedules all participate.

Toast raised a $115 million in Series D funding in July and is currently valued at $1.4 billion. But’s a crowded market out there. TouchBistro is a popular competitor and raised a $70 million Series D in June, and Square launched its own POS system in May. This partnership with BevSpot is no doubt a way for Toast to further differentiate itself by dabbling in the data issue — a topic that’s only going to get more important as high tech becomes commonplace in restaurants.