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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Yelp

Yelp’s New Features Highlight the Company’s Struggle to Stay Relevant in the Restaurant Space

This morning, Yelp unveiled new features: Yelp Connect, a social feature for restaurants, and updates to Yelp Waitlist.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Yelp Connect is a subscription service that lets businesses share information — drink specials, menu updates, upcoming events — with followers in much the same manner they would on any other social network. The feature, priced at $199/month for restaurants, aims to give businesses more control over their own Yelp page by letting them share information they feel will be most relevant to current and potential customers.

Also today, Yelp Waitlist, which lets users “get in line” from their phones and has been around for some time, launched two new features. Predictive Wait Time gathers restaurant data to show users, via a handy bar chart, how long the wait time is at any given hour at a restaurant. Waitlist’s other new feature, Notify Me, lets people schedule a reminder on Yelp to join a waitlist. A user specifies when they want to dine and how many people will be in their party. Using data based on the current wait time at the restaurant, Yelp will then notify the user when it’s time to join the in order to get a table at the desired time. Waitlist starts at $249/month for restaurants.

Both of these are great news if you’re a diehard Yelp user who wants a single app to the find the latest updates on a favorite restaurant and skip waiting in line to eat there.

If you’re not, however, these updates don’t seem particularly competitive at first glance, nor are they particularly unique. Waitbusters, for example, has long had a platform that lets guests “get in line” without, you know, getting in line, and also offers some data analytics for restaurants. At $129/month, it’s a good deal cheaper than Yelp’s offering.

Then there’s Google, with whom Yelp has had a longtime rivalry. Via Maps, restaurant-goers can follow favorite eating establishments, read reviews, join a waitlist, and, yep, view busy times via a bar graph. Meanwhile, Google has also added features in 2019 like menu recognition via Google Lens and a Maps feature that lets you parse through photos and reviews of popular dishes.

Yelp itself has been plagued by controversies, plunging stocks, and increased competition from social media sites like Facebook and Instagram over the years. Unfortunately, a few more incremental updates won’t give the company an edge in this fight. Instead, they feel a bit like a case of too little, too late.

Yelp Has a New Initiative to Help Reduce Plastic Waste in Restaurants

Yelp gave a nod to Earth Day this morning by launching a new initiative that rates restaurants’ eco-friendliness factor.

With Yelp’s Green Practices initiative, Yelp reviewers can answer questions around a restaurant’s takeout packaging — whether the business offers compostable containers, uses plastic bags, or has discounts for things like bringing your own reusable beverage mug. The interface to do so looks and functions much like any other Yelp rating tool:

According to a blog post by Yelp product manager Jason Purdy, Yelp will use the information from the surveys “to better understand restaurant behaviors across the country and inform how we surface information about restaurant sustainability for consumers.”

Single-use plastics are just the start. Purdy noted in the same blog post that Yelp is working with a number of different partners to gather and present information about multiple sustainability issues, including the State of California Air Resource Board, the City of Los Angeles Green Business Program, and Clean Water Action’s ReThink Disposable program.

Purdy’s post also said Yelp will eliminate single-use plastic cups, plates, and utensils from all U.S. offices by the end of 2019.

Reducing packaging waste is a huge topic in the restaurant industry right now, with an ever-growing number of businesses announcing various moves to tackle their reliance on single-use plastic. Starbucks announced last year it would eliminate single-use plastic straws from its 28,000 locations by 2020. McDonald’s is trying to find a more sustainable hot/cold cup. KFC has said it will convert to renewable plastic sources by 2025.

Beyond businesses, the EU vowed it will ban single-use plastics by 2021. Stateside, Seattle became the first major U.S. city to ban single-use plastics, in 2018; California and Washington, D.C. NYC currently has legislation in place to enact a similar ban.

To be honest, there are probably enough initiatives in place at this point to fill a 1,500-word post. The question is whether they’ll have enough of an effect on consumer behavior to change our relationship with single-use plastics in restaurants. To be sure, programs like Yelp’s will get people thinking more about how much waste gets created just by getting a to-go order. Now it’s a matter of using these types of initiatives to get consumers beyond thinking and into action.

Yelp Is Now Listing Restaurant Hygiene Scores, and Not Everyone’s Thrilled

Today, Yelp announced the national rollout of its LIVES program, which posts restaurant hygiene scores alongside other basic info about eating establishments (via The New York Post).

Not everyone’s happy about this. Especially the restaurants.

Yelp started the LIVES program in 2013 in the company’s hometown of San Francisco. To expand on a national level, Yelp teamed up with HDScores, who reportedly has data on almost 1.2 million U.S. restaurants.

This could be a big win for consumers. After all, nobody wants a side of salmonella poisoning with their huevos rancheros. And while some states require by law that restaurants post their health grade in the window, much of the granular information is hard to find. As Yelp writes on its official blog:

“Unfortunately, this information is often buried on clunky ‘dot gov’ websites beyond the easy reach of consumers. Or equally inconvenient, it’s accessible in the offline world, displayed somewhere in the physical business, and not always obvious to the diner.”

Yelp wants to change that by pulling information like inspection type, number and type of violations, and score over time from government databases and making it easy to read online:

 

On the other hand, it could just be another way for Yelp to needlessly ruin the reputations of restaurants. The San Francisco rollout of LIVES was met with some controversy, since SF’s flawed health-inspection system is well-documented and scores could be outdated and not reflect the actual state of a restaurant. But the casual diner looking for a meal isn’t likely to factor that in when they see “Customer Alert: Poor Food Safety Score!” next to a listing. Yelp and independent restaurants have never been great bedfellows anyway. Complaints against the site run the gamut, from the potentially harmful filtering algorithm to accusations of extortion.

But Yelp’s not going anywhere anytime soon, so if you’re an independent restaurant owner, it’s advisable to arm yourself with tools that can make a business more ready for a visit from the health department. Last year, the FDA released software to help businesses better comply with regulations. There’s also a growing number of apps, of varying quality, that cover everything from food temperature and handling to training staff on best practices. These can help restaurants minimize the risk of getting a poor health-inspection score.

Underscore that word “minimize,” though. Health departments around the country are famous for being fickle and sometimes downright unreasonable. Plus, as others interviewed by the Post worry that Yelp, being a business and not a health department, won’t understand the nuances of some laws and violations. There’s also an added complication that restaurant-inspection laws and scoring varies from state to state. NYC, for example, uses a letter grade system, while Washington DC doesn’t follow a score system and instead files reports. How Yelp will standardize this information and make sense of it for the average person looking for dinner remains to be seen.

As of today, Yelp LIVES is focused on restaurants in California, Texas, Illinois, and Washington, DC. It will roll out updates to other states over the coming months. As to whether or not the program will meet with success in these areas, consider the grade still pending.

Guestfriend Makes Restaurant Chatbots Ridiculously Easy to Create

Unless you’re a large corporation, allocating the time and money to create your own chatbot just isn’t realistic. But if you’re a restaurant hoping to stay competitive in the years to come, you’re probably going to need one. This is as true for small, independently owned businesses as it is for a chain like Olive Garden.

That’s where Guestfriend proves useful. Launched earlier this year, NYC-based company creates personalized chatbots for individual restaurants that will answer guests’ questions in real time, using information about that restaurant that’s already available online.

Why, you ask, do I need a chatbot for my restaurant? Recent numbers indicate that almost 90 percent of consumers want to communicate with businesses via text, rather than use the phone. And as Guestfriend CEO Bo Peabody puts it, “If [you] want to be relevant in the conversational world, [you] need a virtual assistant.”

Peabody started Guestfriend in response to restaurants’ need to address the role text-based communication plays in consumers’ lives: “I was just trying to solve a problem for one of my restaurants. It felt like a pretty big problem a lot of small businesses were going to face over time: interfacing with this new thing we call conversational technology.”

Peabody is a longtime serial tech entrepreneur and co-owner of the Mezze Restaurant Group. After realizing it would be pretty much impossible to create a one-off chatbot (“Self-authoring tools for chatbots are what self-authoring tools [were] for websites in the late 90s”), he decided to develop a way to make chatbots for any business.

Implementing a Guestfriend chatbot is a straightforward affair: a user heads over to the Guestfriend site and types in the name of their restaurant. Minutes later, a chatbot is ready to be deployed. Assuming the bulk of the restaurant’s information is already online, there’s little to no manual input required of the user (uploading a menu, for example).

Powered by natural-language processing, the bot then interacts with customers in a back-and-forth style conversation that’s fully automated where the restaurant is concerned. If I want to know whether Joe’s Pizza is open during a snowstorm, the bot will be able to tell based on the information about the restaurant that’s already online.

Guestfriend chatbots are built to work across a restaurant’s different platforms, be they websites, SMS, or social media pages. They’re also built to keep potential guests from wandering off to the Yelps and Trip Advisors of the world to get questions answered, since doing so might mean they never return to your restaurant’s site.

There are, of course, times when a chatbot simply won’t have the answer. That’s usually when a question is too specific. No bot, Guestfriend or otherwise, would be able to answer something like, “What time does the middle table against the wall open up?”

There are, too, people who intentionally try to “break the bot” by asking unusual questions (“Who baked the bread on the menu?”). But 15-plus years of working in the restaurant industry has shown Peabody there are only about 75 to 80 questions that are asked 98 percent of the time, and they’re fairly simple queries: What’s your dress code, Is it good for kids? Do you have a full bar?

And if it can’t answer a question, a Guestfriend chatbot directs the customer to someone who can. According to Peabody, this is a crucial element of a successful chatbot strategy: “Part of good virtual assistant design is doing the error handling well,” he says.

Guestfriend just raised $5 million from Primary Venture Partners, Techstars Ventures, and betaworks. Peabody says the money will go mostly towards product development and marketing. There are also plans to move beyond the restaurant industry, thereby fulfilling Peabody’s original vision of creating chatbots for any small business, hotels, salons, and home services among them.

“I think it’s a scary thing, and complicated,” says Peabody of trying to adopt a chatbot solution from the ground up. “What we’re trying to do is bring that technology to small businesses in a way that’s easy and turnkey and not scary.”

These New Products Make Resy More Than Just a Restaurant Reservation App

Amid a slew of other announcements yesterday, restaurant tech company Resy announced two new products, ResyFly, a table inventory management system, and a new loyalty program, ResySelect.

Resy is already known for its reservations and waitlist system, which streamlines the process of booking a table for both customers and restauranteurs. Right now, the company works with over 10,000 restaurants in 160 cities worldwide, and is definitely giving the likes of Yelp Reservations and Open Table a run for their money.

But these new products also suggest Resy doesn’t want to be pinned into the “restaurant reservations” category, and plans to offer a considerably more robust solution for businesses.

ResyFly solves an issue that’s been plaguing restaurants for years: how to book reservations. As of today, restaurants have two options: “slots-based” reservations, where diners can pick pre-determined times (8 p.m., 10 p.m.) and “inputs-based” reservations, where restaurants build the night’s reservations out on a first-call, first-serve basis.

Neither is optimal. “Restaurants have historically been shackled to imperfect inventory management systems like ‘slots,’ where restaurateurs have complete control over tables, and ‘flex mode,’ taking control out of the equation,” Mike Montero, one of Resy’s business partners, said in a press statement. “But there’s no reason these should be the only options.”

ResyFly, then, is a cloud-based product combining slots and inputs to allow for greater flexibility in scheduling reservations, which could ultimately lead to less confusion, fewer cancellations, and more revenue for restaurants. The product is set for release on May 15.

Another notable announcement was for ResySelect, a new loyalty program Resy will launch in late April. Program perks include exclusive booking windows for tables at popular and/or hard-to-get restaurants, waitlist priority, early access to event tickets, and special events like getting to meet a favorite chef or touring the kitchen. The program will launch as an invite-only beta-version at the end of April, with a broader expansion planned for later on—though the company didn’t indicate exactly when.

Along with those products, Resy also announced ResySurveys, a dynamic survey product that lets restaurants customize private post-meal customer surveys. In doing so, businesses get insights into all aspects of their operation, from quality of service to customer preference for seating and meals.

Meanwhile, Resy’s global expansion efforts are now gathered under Resy Global Service (RGS). With this network, Resy partners with technology companies worldwide to grow the number of restaurants in its portfolio. Partnerships come in different forms. For example, Resy is integrated into the Airbnb app, so users can book a table and even talk to a restaurant without ever having to leave the Airbnb app. (Airbnb led Resy’s $13 million funding round last year). In some cases, Resy has acquired companies with technology that would benefit the overall business, as was the case with Club Kviar, who will be rebranded as Revy Spain in the near future.

And if all that weren’t enough, Resy’s recent integration with Upserve will provide restauranteurs the chance to get more granular insights about their customers.

It will be interesting to see where these offerings land Resy in terms of its place in the overall restaurant industry. It clearly wants to be more than just another reservation system. Which could be a very smart move, considering the telephone is still the preferred choice for customers when it comes to booking reservations. Resy broadening the ways it can help restaurants better personalize their diners’ experiences seems like a much sturdier path to tread over the long term.

Delivery Platform DoorDash Hires Marble’s Robot Drivers For Food Delivery

If you live in San Francisco and order from DoorDash, you might find a friendly Marble robot on your front door step the next time you get takeout. Today DoorDash announced it would be using autonomous ground-delivery robots made by Marble, a robotics startup, for a food delivery pilot program in select San Francisco neighborhoods.

Marble was founded in 2015 by robotics enthusiasts Matt Delaney, Jason Calaiaro, Kevin Peterson while they attended Carnegie Mellon and describes themselves as a “scrappy robotics startup” working to build autonomous urban delivery robots. Scrappy as they might be, DoorDash is the second delivery pilot they’ve announced this year, partnering in April with Yelp’s Eat24.

The companies report that the pilot will allow them to “explore how to best optimize last-mile deliveries” and the first restaurant to take part in the robot delivery program fast food chain Jack in the Box. They made a quick video to show off Marble robots toting its first DoorDash deliveries in the North Beach neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Jack in the Box | Robot Delivery

The revenue model for robotics companies to partner with retail or food delivery services hasn’t been fully divulged; a spokesperson did say that Marble is being compensated for the work done in the pilot but declined to elaborate. However, delivery fees for a robot driver versus a human are the same for DoorDash customers. Marble said it didn’t have any hard data about how robot drivers create cost savings for delivery companies but that it hoped to share that information down the road.

Food delivery is an increasingly crowded space; aside from traditional restaurant delivery, “new delivery models” – companies like DoorDash, GrubHub and Eat24 – is expected to be a $20 billion market by 2025 according to a McKinsey report. In order to create efficiencies and differentiate, companies are looking to innovations like robot delivery drivers to stay ahead. And Marble isn’t the only game in sidewalk robotic delivery – former founders of Skype launched autonomous robotics startup Starship and received a $17 milllion investment earlier this year from carmarker Daimler Benz.

Starship had also announced a pilot in Redwood City, CA with DoorDash earlier this year. When asked if this program was designed to replace the competitive pilot, DoorDash responded that it was “…continuing the existing pilot with Starship in Redwood City, Washington DC, San Carlos and Sunnyvale. The Marble partnership adds to that relationship, allowing DoorDash to bring robot deliveries to San Francisco while also testing a new type of form factor and technology.”

Meanwhile, if you happen to see a Marble delivery robot on the sidewalk, you’ll probably see a human chaperone with it to answer questions and assist with interactions. At times when there isn’t a person nearby, Marble says they have remote operators ready to assist with issues and so far, they haven’t encountered any problems in the neighborhoods they’re serving.

Even With a Goliath, Competitors Abound in the Online Reservation Space

If the restaurant savants at Zagat are correct, more than half of diners make their reservations over the internet. Folks in San Francisco and Washington D.C. jump significantly above that number, while only 21% of Portland hipsters would stoop as low as to be so technologically mundane. Snobs aside, going online has become the de facto way of securing a favorable table time.

Even in a crowded marketplace, online dining reservations remains a popular frontier for budding food-tech entrepreneurs. The top layer of the market is dominated by Open Table, offering huge breadth –but little depth — in terms of customer options.  The key differentiator for Open Table, which services 21 million diners across 40,000 eateries, is the vast number of restaurants it serves. For each reservation made via its website or app, the company receives a fee as well as revenue from a propriety reservation/CRM-like terminal it offers to its clients.

The top of the res-tech space is rich with mammoth players. Open Table was purchased for $2.6 billion in 2014 by Priceline Group. Open Table has leveled the playing field by acquiring such competitors as Quickcue and Rezbook. Following in the big fish eats little fish scenario, Yelp purchased Seatme, Michelin Travel bought U.K.-based Bookatable and Tripadvisor put European online res company La Fourchette into its fold for $140 million. Some acquisitions added new features to the mothership such as improving wait times for tables while others added more client bases.

Sensing opportunities to provide more in-depth services, newer entrants such as Scottish-based Eveve, Table 8, Resy, Nowait and Nextable are digging deeper into layers of value that go beyond clicking for table times. Newer firms are working to create communities between eating establishment and their patrons. Going far beyond loyalty clubs, the goal of these hopefuls is to maximize mobile technology and data to create dining experiences where the maître d knows his or her customer’s favorite table and server.

Among those with a new vision for the online res space, Table 8 suggests it can provide seating priority at restaurants that don’t take reservations; Nowait attempts to empower customers by upgrading the waiting in line experience; and Seven Rooms goes deep into CRM, allowing eateries to gather sophisticated data about their diners.

Included in this new crop of restaurant tech companies is Reserve. Offering what it calls “premier table management software” for restaurants which allows its clients the ability to more efficiently with a CRM component to understanding the behaviors of its diners. This includes “identifying VIPs and tracking visit history, learning about diners with social media profiles and food/beverage/service tags, searching for guests via any detail in their notes, and sharing diner data across locations in a group.” The company says it differs from Open Table in that they select a curated list of establishments it and charges establishments a monthly fee, as opposed to a per reservation fee.

With all the established players and newcomers to the res-tech space, a crucial opportunity seems to be falling by the wayside. As most online reservation spaces provide some sort of feedback loop, those comments—especially the harmful negative ones that make their way to social media—are not easily managed through current reservation systems. To handle a review crisis, restaurants rely on all-purpose social media management firms such as Bazaarvoice or specialty consultants like Reputation Ranger.

It seems fairly obvious that one way of competing with the online reservation Goliaths is to provide the tools to forestall social media disasters. Res-tech wannabes, take note.