TECHNOLOGY: 4 Restaurant Technologies Changing the Restaurant Industry
Mobile technology in our industry is not just about your guests ordering and paying online or via mobile app. It can also make tracking your inventory easier, track your food temperatures for consistency and food safety, freeing up your servers and more. Here are four emerging technology that’s already changing how we do things.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Beer Delivery Team Saves a Life
We all could use a feel-good story nowadays. Here’s one about a two-man Michigan beer delivery team saving another man’s life by offering him a case of beer. The two men came across another man on a bridge looking to end his life. The delivery men stopped, started up a conversation and offered the guy a beer (Coors, to be exact). The only downside is the guy never got his beer (he was whisked away by medical), but one of the delivery guys offered him a free ticket to his next comedy show.
World’s Fastest Gamers
Are you showing eSports yet? No? Well ESPN has seen the future. They’ve reached out to F1 and eSports fans to create a new four-part series, World’s Fastest Gamer. The show will follow the McLaren race team in their search for a new simulator driver, and episodes will air between practice and qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix and then replayed during the rest of the F1 season. Add it to your show schedules!
Tech Penetration in U.S. Households
Television still remains highly ubiquitous and its present in nearly all U.S. households with 96% penetration. The unstoppable rise of the smartphone has seen ownership hit 87% while the laptop rounds off the top-three with 72% penetration. Elsewhere on the list, emerging tech products are seeing their ownership rates soar, though they still have a long way to go to catch up with the mainstream products at the very top. Smart speakers have a household penetration rate of 22% while the smart watch has 18%. Here are the most popular tech types in the US.
KEEPING TABS ON YOUR TABS
Why It Matters to You: Restaurants are trying to make tech more personal for better service.
A solid server will have their regulars’ likes and dislikes memorized – everything from what the guest might like to drink all the way down to preferences of what their preferred internal temperature of a steak is. It’s about to get a whole hell of a lot easier to become a good server. The New York-based LDV Hospitality, which owns a mix of higher end establishments across the country, is testing out customer personas that will offer perks to their best customers (discounts, free dishes, etc.). The offers are based upon guests previous ordering history at LDV establishments all over the country.
This sounds pretty dang cool for their guests and if you are management you’ve gotta love that you have such a powerful tool for your wait staff to take advantage of. Customer personas can be a powerful tool once created and maintained,but they should never be used as a replacement for personal interactions with your guests. People still need real interactions with real people, so finding the right balance with this information is key. Whether we have to train the servers to be natural about having the diners’ information, offer them the abilities to tweak certain aspects of a guest’s profile, or whatever else we land on, we must find the line where perfect service vs creepy & impersonal service lies.
[Source: Restaurant-Hospitality]
BIG BUCKS, BIG BUCKS… NO WHAMMIES! STOP! [CLIP]
Why It Matters to You: Spending at U.S. restaurants has surged to an all-time high, but should we be concerned?
The industry is in a bit of an upswing currently, partly thanks to restaurants becoming the new anchor-tenants to the sheer explosion of new establishments. It is a great bit of progress to see, but should we be worried at all? Industry data is showing restaurant sales as growing while simultaneously showing customer traffic as declining(higher spends on the customers’ tabs basically). Many experts are telling owners to potentially prepare for slower coming months.
What would we do in this case? Maximize our sales as much as possible while simultaneously trying to streamline our establishments’ spending and not over extend ourselves by opening unnecessary restaurants. The first places to go when there’s a slowdown are the newer, trendier restaurants that haven’t proven themselves yet. We say just be careful and make the most of the uptick in customer spending while you can, but plan for the worst. Winter is coming after all.
[Source: Table.Skift]
