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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Wow Bao Launches Hot Bun Vending Machine In The Metaverse

You can now visit a hot bun vending machine in the metaverse.

No, this isn’t a plotline from the sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine, but the next chapter in the continuing push by digital-forward restaurant chain Wow Bao to expand into the Metaverse and web3. The company, which launched its NFT program a year ago, announced last week that Wow Bao has launched on Roblox, a hugely popular virtual gaming platform with over 200 million monthly global users. According to Wow Bao, their launch on Roblox marks the first time that a fast-casual restaurant has launched in the Metaverse with a loyalty program that gives away in-real-life perks.

Those physical, non-digital perks come in the form of a free box of Wow Bao products, which a player qualifies for once they enter the Wow Bao game (called Dim Sum Palace) on Roblox, complete a couple of achievements, and connect their Wow Bao loyalty program (called the Hot Buns Club). Those without a Hot Buns loyalty club membership are instructed how to join, a process that involves leaving the game, getting the loyalty website URL from from a pinned post on Wow Bao’s Twitter profile, and signing up.

With a free box of Wow Bao on offer, I decided to join Roblox and check out Dim Sum Palace. I found the mini-game slick, but after I finished my achievements—earning a bao-themed headdress and a coupon for a free box of Wow Bao—I didn’t have much to do. The most time-consuming part was signing up for and connecting to my Wow Bao loyalty account (which, to be fair, went quickly after I jumped off to Twitter and found the URL).

Stepping back, it’s worth asking why the fast-casual Asian food chain is spending all of this time and resources to create a Metaverse game that likely won’t result in any significant customer revenue in the near future. According to Wow Bao CEO Geoff Alexander, the push into the Metaverse is a long-term play that they believe will pay off as more and more gamers look to garner IRL rewards for their Metaverse exploration.

“One of the things Wow Bao has always wanted to do is be wherever the consumer is,” Alexander told The Spoon. “There are a large number of people who game, and nobody’s talking to them.”

How is Wow Bao going to attract Roblox players to its Minigame? Alexander said they plan to raise awareness through paid advertising in Roblox, discovery on the home screen, and the giveaway of 10,000 UGC.

The company worked with production studio Sawhorse Productions, which developed the mini-game, and loyalty tech companies Flaunt and Paytronix to integrate their rewards program into Roblox. The company also continued to work with Devour for their Web3 ordering.

The risk for Wow Bao is that they invest in building a Metaverse presence, and, as we’ve seen with many brand efforts over the past few years, engagement remains low and overly complex for the average user, and eventually, they exit. According to Alexander, the company thinks being patient will ultimately pay off.

“Anything that you do new and technology takes time for adoption,” Alexander said. “We’re betting that the adoption will come. Today, it might be small. Tomorrow might be a little bit bigger. It might fall, and then it might come back. We’re in for the long game.”

A Tale of Two Ghost Kitchens: Why Wow Bao Wowed and MrBeast Bombed

This week, James Donaldson, known online as MrBeast, sued Virtual Dining Concepts, the company behind his virtual restaurant brand.

In the lawsuit, MrBeast and his legal team claim that “Virtual Dining Concepts was more focused on rapidly expanding the business as a way to pitch the virtual restaurant model to other celebrities for its own benefit, it was not focused on controlling the quality of the MrBeast Burger customer experience and products.”

The complaint goes on to say that low quality products have resulted in thousands of negative reviews and viral social media posts, including this Reddit article which showed photos of undercooked ground beef.

Above: Picture from Reddit post complaining about BeastBurger

Through its lawyers, VDC has dismissed Donaldson’s claims as “riddled with false statements and inaccuracies” and says that he is attempting to use “bullying tactics” to force VDC “to give up more of the company to him” and is using the lawsuit to “undermine the MrBeast Burger brand and terminate his existing contractual obligations without cause.”

While it’s too soon to tell how all this will shake out, there’s little doubt that the Beast Burger brand will suffer from its namesake celebrity creator publicly complaining about the quality of the food. While VDC has shown no intent to relent and shut down the BeastBurger brand, the current trajectory for the world’s most famous virtual restaurant brand doesn’t appear sustainable.

Ever since I first wrote about MrBeast’s growing disenchantment with the BeastBurger project, I started to think back to a conversation I had this spring with Wow Bao CEO Geoff Alexander. Like BeastBurger, Alexander’s company ventured into the virtual restaurant business a few years ago. However, unlike BeastBurger, there is no celebrity discord to deal with, and from the looks of it, Wow Bao’s ghost kitchen business appears to be thriving. In fact, according to Alexander, the company had just expanded its virtual restaurant footprint by over 106 restaurants in about four months, which brings the total number of virtual WowBao locations to over 700 at the time of our conversation.

So why is Wow Bao succeeding while BeastBurger struggles? From what I can tell, the two brands have three significant differences: Quality control, partner monetization, and product niche.

From a quality control perspective, Wow Bao and BeastBurger are very different. Unlike BeastBurger and lots of other virtual brands which rely heavily on its various restaurant partners to source and make the food, Wow Bao simplifies the process by delivering ready-to-steam products to the restaurants.

“We ship frozen products around the country,” Alexander told me. “If you can steam the product, you can make the product.”

That’s right; no cooking burgers, fries, or other foods, no assembling different ingredients with varying results. Hearing Alexander explain it, the Wow Bao model is the restaurant kitchen equivalent of me bringing home a bag of frozen dumplings from Costco and throwing them in my Instant Pot.

Another difference is the monetization model. According to Alexander, Wow Bao’s restaurant partners only pay Wow Bao for the cost of the food, a vastly different approach from many virtual brand management companies that take a cut of the overall revenue (while also leaving the cost of food and labor to the restaurants). After deducting labor and food, the third-party delivery fee, and a cut of the revenue to the virtual brand partner, there’s often not enough of a financial incentive for the restaurant operator (which usually has its own branded business to worry about) to give the love and attention a brand like BeastBurger needs.

The third big difference is product niche. Asian food’s popularity has skyrocketed in recent years but is still somewhat underrepresented in quick service chains compared to more standard American fare. A typical midsize suburb town in the US might have five to ten burger joints and a similar number of pizza places but may only have a couple of Asian restaurants (and often very few fast-casual or fast food variations). Wow Bao’s dumplings and buns are more likely to face less competition on third-party delivery apps than other categories.

Finally, one other difference is worth mentioning: Wow Bao is an actual restaurant chain complete with its own restaurants, while BeastBurger was born in the virtual world as a business concept, built around an online celebrity made famous not by food, but by playing video games and tracking his life via almost daily videos uploaded to YouTube. There’s something to be said for food born from an actual restaurant with an actual menu to one born out of a business plan to create a non-core business brand extension.

Beast Burger’s problems are not unique. Over the past year, it became clear that many ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant brands that rolled out in recent years would likely not survive. After Uber Eats and DoorDash began to more closely regulate and cut back on the virtual brands on their platform and chains like Wendy’s started to pare back their plans for virtual locations, it became clear the end of the wild west era in ghost kitchens was near. Now, with MrBeast’s efforts to shut down BeastBurger, we have what looks to be a definitive end to the first chapter of the ghost kitchen industry story.

The good news is some companies like Wow Bao and Hungry House are showing that there are other ways to operate ghost kitchen models and make it a win-win for both the ghost kitchens/virtual brands and their restaurant partners.

As for Wow Bao, it appears they will soon expand beyond their restaurant business and take a page out of MrBeast’s book by bringing their starting their own packaged goods business. This week, Alexander teased the release of Wow Bao retail products with a post on Linkedin.

Wow Bao Launches the ‘Hot Buns Club’, a $99-a-Year Web3 Loyalty Program

Wow Bao, the digitally nimble Asian food startup that’s expanded nationwide in recent years through an asset-light virtual restaurant model, announced the launch of its NFT program last week. The new NFTs, called Digital CollectaBaos, will be proof of membership in a new super-fan tier called the Hot Buns Club within the company’s Bao Bucks loyalty program.

Wow Bao laid out a web3 vision last November that will eventually include such far-out concepts as metaverse vending machines, but before they take their steamed buns fully into the virtual realm, it’ll start onboarding dedicated customers through its NFT-powered subscription program for $99 bucks a year.

The initial benefits for Wow Bao NFT holders include 10% off delivery orders, double Bao Bucks points on purchases, 10% off merch orders, and contest giveaways.

The Wow Bao NFT program is built on the Polygon network, a Proof of Stake consensus algorithm blockchain that proponents say is more environmentally friendly than many other Ethereum-based digital currencies. Despite the blockchain underpinnings of its new loyalty supertier, Wow Bao is – at least for the time being – downplaying the crypto angle given all the bad press the technology has gotten over the past year, positioning it instead as a digital collectible with associated member benefits.

“We’re staying away from the NFT title,” Wow Bao CEO Geoff Alexander told Restaurant Dive. “The crypto space and NFTs have taken a negative connotation in the last 12 months. We like focusing on making a collectible, we want it to be something that you own.”

The company chose Devour, a Web3 restaurant platform startup, as its partner to power the new program’s web3 ordering. Devour’s DevourGO will enable the delivery of automated promotions for holders of the Wow Bao collectibles when ordering from Wow Bao restaurants in the DevourGO marketplace.

Wow Bao’s entry into web3 is on brand for a company that has seemingly embraced nearly every new technology to enter the restaurant space in recent years. The company was the first chain to sign on to use Eatsa’s automated kiosks (before Eatsa dropped the technology and pivoted to loyalty programs) and has been one of the most aggressive (and successful) companies leveraging expansion through virtual restaurants, opening up close to 700 locations across the US in recent years. The company has also embraced automated vending (of the non-metaverse variety) to dispense bao and dumplings.

Restaurants Are ‘Always Blamed’ When It Comes to Bad Delivery. Here’s How Tech Can Help

Who is responsible when something goes wrong with delivery?

A succinct-yet-apt answer to that question recently came from fast casual chain Wow Bao’s President and CEO Geoff Alexander, who spoke at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Summit this week: “As the restaurant brand, you are always blamed.”

If you’ve ordered via third-party delivery with any frequency, you’ve likely dealt with the following scenario: The order is late or does not arrive. The customer calls the delivery service and gets an automated response. The customer calls the restaurant itself, who may not know where the food is because it left the the building ages ago. If and when the meal finally arrives at the consumer’s door, it will be cold, soggy, dry, or all of the above. It’s usually not DoorDash, Uber Eats, or any other delivery service that gets blamed for these problems. 

By way of example during the event, Alexander brought up Fargo, North Dakota, where Wow Bao operates one of its dark kitchen locations. For these kitchens, other restaurants cook some of the Wow Bao brand’s signature items and sell them on the usual third-party delivery channels as a way to make incremental revenue. Wow Bao has about 350 dark kitchen locations around the country right now, with a “moonshot goal” of reaching 1,000 by the end of the year. 

Brand integrity is always something to watch for with these kitchens. “When an issue happens there, it’s not Wow Bao,” Alexander explained at the event. “It’s somebody running one of our dark kitchens. And [the food is] delivered via one of three or four delivery platforms. I get the phone call. Wow Bao corporate gets the phone call, we get hit on Instagram or social or Google Reviews. That whole brand transfer hast to be the most guarded and respected piece by the brand itself and by the operator to work together. At the end of the day, the way that guest is handled is what’s going to decide if the guest is going to come back and who they’re gonna tell.”

As to how tech can help restaurants guard this brand transfer, the other panelists pointed to tools that can optimize operations. Ava Ghaiumy, Delivery Hero’s regional director for global foodservice operations, pointed out that there is “almost no bigger KPI than speed.” Her company, which is investing heavily in various tech initiatives, is working on things like improved dispatching and rider-tracking features that can help with speed of service when it comes to delivery.  

Olo’s Marty Hahnfeld, who was also on the panel, said it’s all about “precision in operations.” That includes improving order accuracy, making sure menus are up to date across all ordering channels at all times, and that pricing is correct on those channels as well. Olo offers its Dispatch service that allows restaurants to order directly from a restaurant’s own website or mobile app. Though in most cases, there is still a reliance on third-party delivery to handle the last mile.

At the end of the day. the most important technology to keeping brand integrity intact may be one that’s been around for quite some time: the POS integration.

Such an integration connects, among other things a restaurant’s main POS system with the many different channels through which customers buy meals nowadays, including third-party delivery. Whereas in the old days (two years ago), delivery services provided an external tablet and restaurant staff manually key’d in orders to the main POS system, more restaurants are now directly connecting delivery to that main system. Panelists were unanimous in their belief that this is an extremely important technology when it comes to improving order accuracy, timing, and a generally smoother experience for everyone.  

C3’s 10,000 New Kitchen Partners

Unless you make a point of regularly ordering from virtual restaurants, you may not yet have heard of names like Sam’s Krispy Chicken or Plant Nation. They, along with many others, are delivery-only brands created by C3 (Creating Culinary Communities), a restaurant company that’s lately been on a mission to get these brands into seemingly ever pocket of America. The company’s virtual restaurants are in hotels, residential buildings, and even brick-and-mortar food halls. And thanks to a recent deal, they’ll soon be available via a lot more restaurants, too. 

C3 announced last week it had struck a partnership with point-of-sale integration company Chowly, whose technology platform makes it easier for restaurants to manage online orders coming from multiple sales channels. Through the deal, Chowly’s restaurant customers will get the option to be a “host kitchen” for C3’s virtual restaurants and share in the revenue from those sales. 

Host kitchens, as the name suggests, are spaces within existing restaurant kitchens that are dedicated to fulfilling orders from virtual, delivery-only brands. Companies like Fat Brands and Wow Bao have popularized the concept among restaurants, giving underutilized kitchen space a purpose and hopefully making the business incremental revenue in the process.

In the last year, we’ve also seen the rise of companies whose main business is to come up with new restaurant concepts and license them out to existing restaurants. Besides C3, Ordermark launched its NextBite business based on this idea, and Virtual Restaurant Concepts (best known for Mr. Beast Burgers) offers a similar concept.

C3’s deal with Chowly will give restaurant customers that use the Chowly platform an easier way to sell delivery-only restaurant brands than they could do on their own. Rather than having to conceptualize and figure out how to market and deliver wholly new virtual brands, Chowly’s restaurant partners can simply license a turnkey solution from C3, who handles the marketing, branding, and technical logistics of the operation via its exclusive ordering/delivery app, Citizens Go. The restaurant just has to cook the food and get it out the door.

These restaurants could also potentially reach a wider demographic by offering more food types on top of their own menus. I never thought I’d write “Captain D’s” and “high-end plant-based burger” in the same sentence, but that scenario’s entirely possible since Captain D’s is an enterprise customer of Chowly and C3 has a plant-based brand called Plant Nation. A Captain D’s location also offering Plant Nation for delivery could reach new and different customers and add more revenues through such a deal.

For C3, the deal is arguably even more lucrative. Chowly has more than 10,000 kitchen partners across the U.S., all of whom will eventually be able to licenses C3’s brands. That’s a major jump from the 250 kitchens in which C3 is currently in. The company says it will reach 1,000 locations by the end of the year and be in 12,000 kitchens by 2023.

The Chowly deal will be a huge help to that process — and enable C3 to expand more rapidly than it would if it had to forge each new individual kitchen partnership. Chowly’s enterprise brands include the aforementioned Captain D’s, Clean Juice, and Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, all of which give C3 and automatic sizable reach. 

The partnership will launch with these enterprise brands before branching out to include smaller restaurants within the Chowly network. The goal is to make all of C3’s brands available to all of Chowly’s 10,000 restaurants at some point in the nearish future.

As C3, Virtual Restaurant Concepts, NextBite and other virtual restaurant companies scale up, one question to keep in mind is how these companies are ensuring quality control across tens of thousands of restaurant partners. In other words, Sam’s Krispy Chicken will need to taste the same in Seattle, Washington as it does in Atlanta, Georgia in order to become popular on a large scale over time. An overnight sensation like Mr. Beast is one thing. Sustained, long-term loyalty from customers is another challenge altogether, and one for which consistency and high quality are crucial.

More Headlines

OpenTable Launches New Tools to Discourage Diners From ‘Ghosting’ on Their Reservations – The initiative will take the form of forthcoming new digital tools as well as “blog and social content educating diners on the impact of ghosting a reservation.”

South Korea: Lounge Lab Opens Brown Bana Robot Ice Cream Shop – South Korean robotics company Lounge Lab announced today that it has opened Brown Bana, a robot-powered ice cream store in Seoul.

Deliveroo Is Running a Reusable Container Program in Paris – Deliveroo France and circular-packaging company barePack have started offering customers of the delivery service the option to get their food delivered in reusable containers.

Wow Bao’s Virtual Restaurant Concept Will Grow to 1,000 Locations in 2021

Wow Bao’s partner kitchen program, which lets other restaurants make and serve its food products, will reach 1,100 locations by the end of 2021, up from 150 now, according to a press release from the company. The anticipated milestone highlights another format of virtual restaurant emerging as restaurants take more business off premises.

Via the partner kitchen program, restaurants cook some of the Wow Bao brand’s signature items — buns, bowls, potstickers, etc. — then sell them on the usual third-party delivery channels. Wow Bao CEO Geoff Alexander told me last year that the idea is to provide any type of restaurant with a relatively easy way to add some much-needed revenue.

“We believe we have created something restaurants can survive with,” he said at the time.

Restaurants pay a flat fee to participate (~$1,000) that covers supply chain, marketing, and any extra equipment needed. From there, Wow Bao’s food is marketed on third-party delivery platforms via an entirely separate menu from the restaurant’s own. The restaurant makes the food and sends it out for delivery. Today’s press release notes that restaurants maintain about 40 percent of the revenue from each order, even when factoring in things like packaging costs and third-party delivery fees. 

Wow Bao’s idea for the partner kitchen program actually predates the pandemic’s widespread presence in the U.S. However, the concept is an appropriate one right now, given the wreckage COVID-19 has brought to the restaurant industry in the form of dining room restrictions and lost sales. 

The ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant concepts have, in general, proliferated over the last several months. But for restaurants that don’t have a ton of extra money to spend on a major lease with a more traditional commissary, an option such as Wow Bao’s partner kitchen is a promising alternative that doesn’t require a lot of physical space or operating costs.

Wow Bao said in today’s press release that these partner kitchens are especially successful in rural areas, where “food variety is more limited than in metropolitan areas.” Most restaurants, rural or otherwise, have surpassed the expected sales mark of $2,500 in six weeks. 

A new partnership with digital marketplace Franklin Junction will add another 50 Wow Bao partner locations around the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, while a nationwide expansion is expected to take place in the first half of 2021.

Kbox Global Raises £12M to Expand Its Virtual Restaurant Network

Virtual restaurant platform Kbox Global announced this week it has raised £12 million (~$15.5 million USD) to expand its food delivery concept. The round was led by London-based venture firm Balderton Capital, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Founded in 2019 in London, Kbox operates more than 30 delivery-only restaurant brands. It licenses these brands, along with a technology stack, to restaurants and other foodservice operations looking for incremental revenue to add to their businesses.  

To do this, Kbox assesses each restaurant, including its location and main demographic, then uses those factors to choose the most relevant virtual restaurant brands for the business to offer. Restaurants cook and fulfill the orders themselves, with their existing staff, while Kbox’s tech stack integrates with third-party delivery services that handle the last mile of the delivery.

The company says there are no upfront fees for restaurants looking to utilize this concept, which is a way for restaurants to diversify their food offerings without investing in a full brick-and-mortar operation. In essence, restaurants are turning themselves into ghost kitchens for Kbox brands by partnering with the company.

The idea of one restaurant licensing and running a completely different brand from a third-party is a more recent development in the world of ghost kitchens, though Kbox isn’t alone in expanding the concept. Chicago-based Wow Bao said in April it was licensing its own menu to other restaurant brands in much the same manner as Kbox. Some Fatburger locations double as ghost kitchens for the chain’s sister brand Hurricane Grill & Wings. And let’s not forget about the celebrities launching their own virtual restaurant brands that existing businesses cook and fulfill. 

Needless to say, restaurants need any extra revenue they can get right now, thanks to the pandemic shuttering dining rooms left and right and all but forcing many brands to go the ghost kitchen route. However, we’ve yet to see many numbers about how financially fruitful it is to run a third-party brand out of one’s own restaurant kitchen.

For its part, Kbox says it is on track to have 2,000 of these kitchens in the UK before the end of 2021, and is also in the midst of an international expansion. The company has franchise agreements in Australia and India and says operations will launch in another eight countries at some point next year. The new capital from Balderton will support this expansion, as well as help Kbox establish a presence in the U.S. in earl 2021.

Wow Bao Launches an Off-Premises Platform for Other Restaurants

Chicago-based Wow Bao is expanding its presence across the U.S. by opening ghost kitchens inside other restaurant brands’ stores. The fast-casual chain just launched an off-premises platform that allows other restaurants to make and serve Wow Bao’s products via third-party delivery channels and keep the revenue from those sales, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. In exchange, restaurants pay a product fee to Wow Bao to use the platform. 

While it might at first sound odd to add a sales channel to your business by selling another restaurant’s menu, but Wow Bao President Geoff Alexander thinks this strategy could work for just about anyone. “We believe any restaurant can be a ghost kitchen serving Wow Bao,” he told me this week over the phone.

Once a restaurant is onboarded to Wow Bao’s off-premises platform, they are sent their first food shipment and can start selling the chain’s menu items online via third-party delivery channels like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Postmates. Items are sold via an entirely separate menu Wow Bao provides and manages; the Wow Bao name appears in those delivery apps, and restaurants only have to prep the food in their kitchens and hand it over to a delivery courier.

Using a hypothetical Italian restaurant as an example, Alexander explained that kitchen staff might be cooking their usual pasta fare when a Wow Bao order comes through the ticket system. Without really interrupting the flow of the regular work, a chef or staff person could quickly put the item on the stove to cook or steam and continue going about their usual tasks. 

Nor is it a lengthy, complex process for a restaurant to get set up on the platform. Businesses pay a startup fee of $2,000 to get set up with reference books, a supply chain, digital marketing, and any necessary equipment. Wow Bao will also help restaurants get set up on third-party delivery platforms if they aren’t already, and the flat fee also includes the first order of to-go packaging supplies.

Versions of this concept exist in the restaurant industry. In 2019, Fatburger turned some of its stores into ghost kitchens selling food from the chain’s sister brands. However, that operation remains within the Fat Brands family. Wow Bao, on the other hand, wants to make its off-premises concept available to anyone — chain restaurants and independents alike — in the hopes that it might be able to increase sales.

Restaurants need all the help they can get in terms of improving their bottom lines. Right now, 3 percent of restaurants have already shuttered permanently, according to the National Restaurant Association, and another 11 percent anticipate doing the same within the next 30 days. Those hanging on are struggling to quickly pivot to a delivery/takeout model in the hopes that those off-premises sales will be enough to keep business going during dining room closures and social distancing.

Alexander told me this concept isn’t actually a response to pandemic or subsequent restaurant industry fallout that’s currently happening, it just happens to line up timing-wise with current events. “We think we found a way to grow our brand and more importantly help restaurants at this time,” he said.

There aren’t yet numbers to show if this concept will indeed be profitable for other restaurants, though Alexander told me restaurants could make as much as a 40 percent bottom line profit with little extra labor and almost no disruption to daily operations. “We believe we have created something restaurants can survive with,” he said.

At the moment, Wow Bao is operating one of these ghost kitchens in the San Francisco Bay Area. Miami is next, followed by several other cities over the next few weeks.

Quick-Service Restaurants Are Quickly Turning to Facial Recognition

Once upon a time in the not so distant past, most considered ordering food via facial recognition either a gimmick that was either unrealistic or just creepy.

Times have changed, thanks in large part to technologies like the iPhone X, which you can unlock using your own mug. And while we’re some distance from facial recognition becoming a facet of everyday dining everywhere, there’s a growing number of restaurants now offering customers this option when it comes to ordering.

CaliBurger was the latest to join that group this week when it launched self-ordering kiosks at its Pasadena, California location. If customers like this move, the company said it plans to roll out kiosks to all 40 of its locations in the future.

It’s the quick-service restaurants like CaliBurger where facial-recognition ordering appears to be making the biggest impact. It’s not hard to understand why. Quick service got its name for a reason, and facial recognition can certainly speed up the order and payment process. 

Just look at UFood Grill, who earlier this year debuted self-order kiosks in its Owings Mills, Maryland location. According to the restaurant, customers using the kiosks can order and pay in less than 10 seconds. Kiosks use facial recognition to remember customers’ orders for future visits; they’re powered by technology from Michigan-based Nextep. 

Addressing the need for restaurants to increase speed, Nextep president Tommy Woycik recently said, “Imagine visiting your local drive-thru and ordering your favorite customized coffee drink with a quick glance at the camera.” Likewise, if you’re in China, you can pay for your next KFC order just by smiling at the camera.

While it’s not a quick-service restaurant, Dallas’ Malibu Poke opened this past November with the option to order via facial recognition already in place. Talking to the Dallas Observer, owner John Alexis referenced the new iPhone, saying that thanks to the phone, ordering via facial recognition is no longer gimmicky. He was also quick to point out that the system Malibu Poke uses actually prevents him or anyone on staff from accessing the scanned faces from customers: “I literally would not know how to find [a customer’s face] if I wanted to. If you want extra cucumbers, that’s between you and the machine.”

Data—who sees it, where it’s stored—is definitely one of the challenges that has to be addressed in order for facial recognition to become a more widely used way of ordering. (See this year’s lawsuit against Lettuce Entertain You, who owns the Wow Bao quick-service chains.) Just because, for example, Malibu Poke can’t access your facial scan doesn’t mean some ill-humored cyber criminal can’t.

Data will continue to be both a question and a challenge moving forward, but so far, it doesn’t appear to be raising too many concerns for businesses. Restaurants themselves are more likely to be occupied by things like increasing the speed of these kiosks and dealing with some of the reported glitches around lighting and camera angle—basically things that will impact the business’s bottom line today.