The latest restaurant recipes call for an increased level of automation.
The foodservice employee of the future is smart, tireless, and never forgets a face—or a birthday, a credit card number, or a customer’s previous order. Advanced technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and others have been given entry-level positions in the restaurant industry, where they are helping drive sales gains and increase efficiencies.
“We are seeing AI and machine learning everywhere in our day-to-day lives,” says Nick Low, senior solution manager, Oracle Food and Beverage, citing as an example the “suggested items” on retail e-commerce websites. “These same tools are spreading into the restaurant space, too.”
The restaurant industry is adopting these tools throughout their operations, including menu planning, food-prep scheduling, and determining where to open their next location. In fact, 60 percent of restaurant operators surveyed by technology provider Oracle for its “Restaurant 2025—Emerging Technologies Destined to Reshape Our Business” report said they expect the use of AI in site selection to be mainstream by the year 2025.
Low notes that many of the advanced technologies that some large restaurant chains are experimenting with might not yet be impacting smaller, chef-driven operations.
“Operators should focus on the issues they are experiencing—for example, high labor costs, low customer counts, or bloated inventory—and look for the right technology to solve that problem,” he says.
Automation Innovation
Labor costs have long been a significant challenge for the foodservice industry and are one of the driving forces behind the latest tech developments, says Jeff Spitulnik, head of products, marketing, and design at Eatsa, which is one of the pioneers in restaurant automation.
The San Francisco-based company opened several highly automated restaurants there and in Washington, D.C., and New York before scaling back to two San Francisco locations. Eatsa created an automated front-of-the-house system for ordering and pickup that eliminates the need for wait staff and cashiers.
Customers enter their personalized orders for a menu of quinoa bowls on iPads, and the dishes are created to order by human line cooks who are out of sight behind a wall. When the orders are ready, customers pick them up in the compartments they have been directed to by a digital display.
Eatsa is now supplying its technology to other restaurant operators, including Wow Bao in Chicago, which is using the technology to operate automated dumpling and noodle shops.
Spitulnik says the Eatsa platform creates value by speeding up the ordering process and increasing throughput, allowing restaurants to receive three times the number of orders they would using a traditional system.
“Technology can and should enable businesses to grow through efficient and speedy operations,” he says.
Spitulnik says the technology is designed to make employees’ lives easier and the work more efficient and enjoyable, leading to better retention.
One of the main challenges Eatsa had to overcome in developing its technology was integrating the various ordering channels that customers use—mobile, web, third-party delivery firms, etc.—so that they worked together, Spitulnik explains.“In order to create a seamless experience for both customers and operators, our technology had to be integrated from beginning to end,” he says.
Now orders from all channels are automatically added into the back-of-house system without human intervention, Spitulnik says. The order queueing algorithm also helps ensure accurate order availability times so that customers’ orders are ready when pre-ordering customers arrive.
Flippy the Robot
Perhaps one of the most well-known labor-saving technologies in the restaurant industry is Flippy, the robotic burger flipper developed by Miso Robotics and deployed at the company’s CaliBurger restaurant location in Pasadena.
David Zito, CEO of Miso Robotics, says the key has been developing intelligent, autonomous solutions that can enhance today’s commercial restaurant kitchens.
“The ability to perceive the kitchen environment, safely work alongside staff, cook existing recipes perfectly consistently, all in a form-factor that easily fits into existing workflows and is easily cleanable at the end of the day, is a breakthrough,” Zito says.
Flippy is driven by three core technologies—Miso See, Miso Serve, and Miso Move. The company has developed the technology to the point where Flippy can help with a wide range of kitchen tasks, Zito says.
“We are also continuing to improve our current POS [point-of-sale] integration capabilities and are working to enhance our technologies’ ability to reduce food waste,” he says.
Last year, Miso Robotics launched a partnership with Levy, which provides foodservice in sports arenas and other noncommercial foodservice venues. The two companies put Flippy to work cooking fresh chicken tenders and tater tots at a Chick ’N Tots stand at Dodger Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.
Lu Walker, vice president of analytics at E15 Group, the technology and analytics arm of Levy, describes the deployment as a “great success.”
“We always look for ways to optimize and streamline our kitchens for enhanced quality, speed, and throughput,” he says. “The kitchen assistant, as well as the process involved in deploying the system, enabled us to achieve all of these results.”
Stationed in front of the fryer, the robotic contraption put full baskets of chicken tenders and tater tots into the fry oil, gently shaking them while they cooked. It monitored the cooking time, lifted the baskets out of the fryer when the items were done, then hung the baskets to drain the oil before placing them in a designated area.
Robots and Humans Together
In addition to demonstrating Flippy’s ability to learn a new task—manning the fryer station—the test also showed how humans and robots could work side by side, the E15 spokesman says. It was important to educate and train Flippy’s human co-workers, and to earn their acceptance, Walker says.
“One area of opportunity for technology is automating repetitive and tedious tasks. Our partnership with Miso Robotics is so promising because the technology isn’t just functionally effective, it’s aware and responsive to the dynamic environments in our kitchens,” he says.
Dawn Sweeney, president and CEO of the National Restaurant Association, likewise sees the promise of so-called co-bots working side by side with humans and taking on roles that help minimize risk of injury to humans.
“Employee recruitment and retention remains the number-one issue facing restauranteurs,” she says. “Today, we have more than 900,000 open jobs in the restaurant and hospitality industry, and over the next decade, we will need to fill an additional 1.6 million positions. A human worker working with a ‘co-bot’ in a kitchen could limit the number of burns a worker might get touching a hot grill or create a safer food handling process. However, a robot will never be able to replicate the full hospitality our industry provides. Creating a welcoming environment and a friendly guest experience marked by creativity, flexibility, and adaptability will continue to be skills uniquely possessed by humans.”
Levy’s E15 Group is working with other sports venues and brands to develop strategies to test and deploy other new technologies, including mobile ordering and payment, in-seat service, and self-service kiosks. For example, E15 helped provide attendees at last year’s World Series with a variety of tech-driven payment options, including ApplePay for in-seat orders and cash-free vending.
E15 is also seeking to leverage self-service technologies that make recommendations to customers based on preference data and is exploring more cashless transaction opportunities such as biometric scanning and self-service mini-marts at its venues.
Another operator that is dabbling in robotics is Spyce. The Boston restaurant, created by four Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, bills itself as “the world’s first restaurant featuring a robotic kitchen that cooks complex meals to order.”
Spyce’s robotic kitchen can churn out up to 150 meals per hour from the menu of grain bowls, curries, salads, stir-frys, and noodle bowls. It features seven robotic cooking woks that prepare each order in three minutes or less. To help launch the concept, the team partnered with acclaimed chef Daniel Boulud, who was named culinary director and invested in Spyce.
“Spyce is at the intersection of hospitality and technology,” the company said in a statement.
Personalized Communications
While labor costs and other efficiencies are driving much of the innovation in the foodservice channel, many operators are also using database technology to create personalized marketing efforts, enhance service, and elevate their communications with customers.
At many casual and fine-dining restaurants, for example, online reservation systems are being leveraged to help restaurants tailor their service to individual customers based on their personal preferences.
New York-based Altamarea Group, which operates several high-end restaurants, uses a digital reservation platform called SevenRooms that helps it identify its VIP customers and offer them customized treatment. The system stores food and wine preferences and other data, such as a favorite table, that the staff can use whenever those guests dine at any of the company’s locations.
The company uses SevenRooms to analyze centrally the customers who are dining at all its restaurants and makes note of customers who stand out because of the frequency with which they dine, or other characteristics that signal their value as customers, says Jonna Gerlich, managing director of marketing at Altamarea.
This information is then shared with the general managers at each location, who can update the profiles with more specific intelligence that they learn from the customers’ visits to their locations, such as the type of wine they typically drink.
“If they walk through the door and say, ‘I want to sit by the window,’ without missing a beat our host at the front is going to put into the system that the customer prefers window seating,” she explains. “It becomes a universal tag that goes in to one profile that’s shared in all of our restaurants.”
Many upscale restaurants have long kept tabs on their best customers’ preferences, but technology such as that used by Altamarea enhances their ability to leverage those insights and share them easily across multiple properties.
Gerlich says the company takes steps to ensure that its use of customer data does not become too invasive. “We try to do it in a way that gathers information that we utilize in great ways that would never intrude on somebody’s experience or become too familiar,” she says.
The system can be thought of as a high-end loyalty program, where the most valued customers can be rewarded easily and in ways that they appreciate. “They’re pleasantly surprised by the recognition and the level of attention that we’re paying to them, without getting too close for comfort,” Gerlich says. “We try to just do a little extra touch here and there.”
The company has set up basic guidelines for its restaurant managers in terms of leveraging the SevenRooms insights to offer rewards. The technology also provides opportunities to up-sell customers on certain specials that might be limited, such as a tomahawk steak that is offered periodically at the company’s Morini’s restaurant. Customers might be prompted to pre-order that item, which benefits both the restaurant in terms of sales and the customers, because they feel they are getting an opportunity to participate in an exclusive, out-of-the-ordinary experience.
Such marketing strategies tend to work well for special occasions such as holidays, Gerlich says—for Valentine’s Day, for example, diners might be able to preorder chocolates for the table.
Delivery Technologies
Digital ordering for delivery or to pick up food for off-site consumption is one of the fastest-growing areas of the industry, and technology is enhancing that aspect of the industry as well.
Pizza-delivery giant Domino’s has been at the forefront of the innovation in this area, with user-friendly, app-based ordering technologies and digital loyalty programs that are considered among the best in the industry. The company was also among the first to jump on the voice-based ordering wave, integrating with Amazon Echo and Google Home, for example, and adding a voice assistant to its smartphone mobile app.
The pizza giant’s “AnyWare” approach to digital ordering technology was designed to let customers order from a wide range of platforms—from Apple TV to Ford Synch, smartwatches, Twitter, and Facebook Messenger, among others.
Domino’s recently said it would create a “tech garage” in Ann Arbor, Mich., where it will seek to develop a new, state-of-the-art POS system, among other tech innovations. Restaurants with more limited resources can tap into the technological capabilities of third-party ordering platforms such as GrubHub, which provides intelligence and analytics to help its foodservice partners operate more efficiently.
“Our mission is to be a true partner for restaurants by going beyond simply connecting them to the diners,” GrubHub said in a statement, citing tools that can assist restaurants with everything from demand generation to order fulfillment. “We work very closely with each restaurant partner to help drive pickup and delivery orders and increase their loyal diner base.”
GrubHub offers tools, for example, that allow restaurants to update menus and delivery boundaries in real time.
Facilitating Customer Pickup
Eatsa is also evolving its technologies to accommodate the increasing demand for off-premise dining, says Spitulnik.
The company recently unveiled the Spotlight Pickup System, for example, which seeks to simplify and streamline the pickup process for customers, restaurant staff, and delivery service providers. After entering the restaurant, a customer or delivery employee checks the digital board to see the status of his order, and is then guided to an automated service pickup “Spot” where the customer’s name is clearly highlighted on a digital display, which can also be used for other customized messaging.
Spitulnik says the technology seeks to provide a solution to a key organizational challenge facing operators: how to increase off-premise order volume while alleviating overcrowding and bottlenecks often caused by mobile ordering and third-party delivery.
Early adopters of Eatsa’s Spotlight Pickup systems include the fast-casual, mac-and-cheese restaurant MAC’D in San Francisco; gourmet salad-to-go restaurant Evergreens in Seattle; and Wow Bao in Chicago.
Eatsa says that orders placed through mobile or kiosk devices are 20 percent to 30 percent higher than non-digital orders, and mobile customers visit 20 percent more frequently.
In the future, the emergence of 5G technology and remote networking software will lead to developments such as the increasing deployment of “cloud kitchens” that will use robots in commercial kitchens to prepare a variety of food orders on demand, says Zito of Miso Robotics.
“As these connected hubs merge with AI, machine learning, and IoT [Internet of Things] offerings, the ability to apply intelligent automation in the commercial kitchen will accelerate,” he says.
More Foodservice Automation Technologies
Technology that relies on sensors to automate tasks in the restaurant industry is being used on more than just robots.
“There are automation technologies available now that free up staff from compliance tasks and that don’t directly affect the restaurant goer’s experience,” says Nick Low, senior solution manager, Oracle Food and Beverage. “Solutions that automate tasks, like temperature logging, let restaurant operators focus on creating the best products instead of recording values,” he says.
Technologies poised for more widespread deployment in the restaurant industry include:
- Wearable technology, such as smartwatches, which can be used by customers for ordering and payments as well as employees for various tasks. Technology company Presto, for example, which offers tabletop solutions for restaurants, recently introduced wearable technology that can be used to notify servers of customer needs.
- Driverless cars, which are in the early stages of testing at Domino’s and Pizza Hut, as well as at third-party delivery providers such as DoorDash. Similarly, drones are in the early stages of testing as delivery vehicles.
- 3-D printing, which could be used for everything from preparing food items or adding finishing touches, or even creating plates and cutlery. Oracle cited as an example the restaurant La Enoteca in Barcelona, Spain, where chef Pasco Perez uses a 3-D printer to create an intricate coral-shaped centerpiece made from a seafood puree.
- Virtual reality, which is being tested both as an enhancement to the customer experience and for training employees. Fast-casual chain Honeygrow, for example, has used virtual-reality training to help onboard its employees.—M.H.
Mark Hamstra is a regular contributor to Specialty Food Magazine.
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