In the past year, you’ve no doubt spent a lot of time perfecting your operation to handle take-out and delivery orders. As pent-up consumer demand now drives people back to restaurant dining rooms, will yours be ready? Managing off-premise and on-premise orders and in-restaurant traffic is likely to challenge operators as businesses reopen to more guests. Technology can help here – by managing in-dining room bookings, coordinating orders coming from many directions and enabling quick communication with staff on days when you need to ramp up or ramp down due to fluctuating demand.
Finally, the restaurant industry is seeing exciting signs of life. So what’s the next challenge? Many operators may experience dramatic shifts in business and demand across different channels as people embrace eating out again, or on the flip side, react to potential infection spikes as states open up. According to a late February survey from the polling organization CivicScience, 53 percent of Americans feel comfortable with the idea of eating at a restaurant, while the remainder are more hesitant. Under those conditions alone – ignoring other factors that affect restaurant business each day – it could be challenging to know how much staff to have on hand or how much food to buy on a given day. The capabilities of your POS system are key to fortifying your business for the new environment. As states open back up for business and warming weather brings people out, make sure your system is, above all, flexible – to different forms of payment, an assortment of order streams, shifting demand within those order streams, and to any new features your restaurant needs to adopt as it evolves. Your system should allow you to oversee business across other locations, whether those locations are similar brick-and-mortar restaurants, ghost kitchens or food trucks. Finally, it should account for varying levels of staff knowledge and training by being easy to learn – and user-friendly when it comes to generating the reports you need to manage real-time business fluctuations.
As the restaurant industry has embraced technologies to smooth out the ordering process, artificial intelligence has grabbed headlines, most recently in the form of a text-to-order tool from the software company HungerRush that promises not only faster ordering without the help of a restaurant app but also the near-elimination of order errors. The use of AI for ordering is in its early stages – existing applications focus more on its use in dynamic menus, inventory integration and consumer marketing – but it may represent where ordering is headed and what areas of improvement operators should focus on. As you analyze the data you collect from sales, how does your speed of processing orders now compare with what it looked like last month and last year? Are there common order errors that occur? Can you identify ways to minimize the amount of time your staff must spend processing orders while still ensuring they come out fast and error-free?
A whopping 91 percent of restaurants plan to invest in kitchen automation technology this year, according to a new survey data from the payments company Square. To be fair, Square is among the players providing back-of-house tech tools in restaurants and retailers, but their research still provides some helpful clues about where back-of-house tech is heading in the near term – and it’s not so much about robotic chefs and servers. The key theme restaurants are focusing on is adopting an efficient hub-and-spoke model where the kitchen is at the center and can seamlessly manage customer orders coming from a growing list of sources, including the curb, the drive-through, the dining room and beyond. This tech can also enhance flexibility by enabling a restaurant to integrate a new channel where needed – or scale back on another.
Preparing food in restaurants has become a juggling act this year – with people behind the scenes regularly throwing new balls into the air. According to a Datassential report, 92 percent of restaurant traffic is now off-premise. Drive-thru orders represent the largest growth category, followed by 23 percent order-ahead, 21 percent delivery and 18 percent to-go. A seemingly quiet kitchen could actually be as busy as a restaurant with a line of customers out the front door. This year, more restaurants will be adopting tools that allow them to monitor the various ways in which orders are coming to them – and adapt more easily to their ebb and flow. A new report on restaurant technology trends to watch in 2021 says smart scheduling and booking technology, as well as automated kitchen operations technology, can help ensure food is ready when customers want it.
Imagine driving home one day and telling the voice-powered assistant in your car to order your favorite pizza from Domino’s so it’s ready for curbside pickup when you drive in. Or asking it to make dinner reservations for your anniversary, which always springs to mind during your morning commute but gets forgotten once you arrive at work. This is A-commerce, or auto commerce, and a new study from Rakuten Ready predicts this new form of initiating transactions will become a growing force for businesses in the next five to 10 years. While A-commerce may sound futuristic, by preparing your business for it now, you can reap benefits in the near term and more easily incorporate it into your business model when it becomes more widespread. The study advises restaurants to start experimenting with simple voice-powered mobile applications and business models now. For example, update your Google My Business account to make sure your restaurant is easily found in local listings. Using geolocation tools, which will be central to A-commerce, can also serve you now by helping you develop and fine-tine your local online marketing plans while streamlining curbside pickups.
If you’re struggling to make delivery work, embracing and fine-tuning your curbside pickup service this year could be your best way to reap the benefits of digital orders (like bigger check totals and the ability to retain customer data) while avoiding the disadvantages of third-party delivery. Operators have been making large investments in the digital technology that will make curbside pickup work, according to a Restaurant Dive interview with Jean Chick, principal and U.S. restaurant & food service leader at Deloitte. She said consumers are more apt to go for it if they live within a 10-mile radius of the restaurant because it may end up being faster than waiting for delivery. Curbside offers benefits to both restaurants and customers: It gives a restaurant the ability to control their interaction with a customer and make it a fast, safe, positive, data-rich one. It’s a digital experience, so it is quick, but it is also personal, which can help convert customers into regular visitors. Could you enhance your curbside pickup experience this year?
COVID-19 has forced operators to scale down their dining room business while scaling up their capacity for off-premise orders. But preparing for an increase in online orders isn’t as simple as plugging your existing menu into your website. Your online menu needs to exude the same professionalism as the experience of sitting in your dining room. But instead of relying on your décor and friendly servers, your online menu alone must make people feel comfortable that they are in good hands. Restaurant Den suggests operators keep several tips in mind when revising their online menu, including scaling down choices, clarifying ingredients (and directing those with food allergies to more information on their website), and checking the spelling of each item.
As more quick-service restaurants look for ways to remove friction from the food-collection process, expect to see more vehicle-recognition technology in use that can detect the arrival of a customer and prepare their order for a quick pass off. It might become a useful tool for other restaurants that have adopted curbside collection for the long term too. White Castle, which has adopted a range of technologies in both the kitchen and at the point of sale, is adding vehicle-recognition tech to its lineup. Mastercard is providing it through its new AI-Powered Drive Through Platform.
Well before COVID-19, restaurants had been moving toward the adoption of technology that could support increased off-premise sales. Now, however, such technology is being perceived in the industry as critical to survival in the near term and as a means of becoming pandemic-proof in the future. The investment community is backing up the idea that the restaurant industry needs to make rapid, technology-supported change: AgFunder News reports that while investment into many sectors has slowed while people wait to see how the pandemic plays out, that hasn’t been the case for restaurant technology, where a number of multimillion-dollar fundings and acquisitions have taken place in recent weeks. Restaurants looking to make changes may be more apt to find – or be able to negotiate – deals with tech suppliers right now as a result. Nation’s Restaurant News reports that a number of providers of services including online ordering and delivery, curbside pickup and food safety have been offering reduced rates and waiving startup fees. Just use caution when considering nascent service providers entering the field. Screen offers carefully to ensure businesses have the financial backing and expertise to deliver on contracted services and that you won’t be surprised by high fees a few months down the line.
|
Subscribe to our newsletterArchives
May 2024
Categories
All
|