QSR December 2022

DIGI TAL INNOVAT ION

text menu was just not the right way to put your best foot forward in a digital world rife with expectations, he says. So Popmenu created interactive menus to serve as modern day ecommerce funnels with multiple ways for guests to engage. They feature criteria like photos, reviews, ratings, and social validation. “We treat each dish as a separate, indexed page for search engines like Google, so there is more relevant content to consider for queries such as ‘restaurants near me,’” Sweeney says. “This significantly increases traffic to the website and that traffic converts to sales at a higher rate because of the interactive elements. And because we capture guest data and preferences through out our funnel, restaurants can automatically remarket to them with ongoing engagement plays to keep them coming back.” Popmenu’s offering is core to its all-in one, guest-facing platform that includes digi tal marketing solutions with website design/ hosting and online ordering and delivery. Additionally, there’s AI phone answering with customer responses and other solutions, such as streamlining third-party delivery orders. “The platform is built specifically for restau rants. It was made to fit into their world, not the other way around,” Sweeney says. Popmenu currently provides services to more than 10,000 restaurants. And it’s an origin story that traces back to Europe. Sweeney was organizing an event in Paris when he noticed the restaurants they were considering all had PDF menus. “I kept wondering why a business that is focused on taste, smell and ambiance is using text to showcase its product,” he says. Pop menu’s first-party, first-of-its-kind platform launched in December 2016. Since, Sweeney says, the company has seen more restaurants take a retail approach to marketing—a reality you can blame Amazon for. The ecommerce giant changed the game for how people make purchasing decisions. They expect photos, rich descriptions, reviews, and recommen dations. “Amazon gets you to keep buying because they know everything about your searches and purchasing behavior on the site. Restaurants are bringing those same principles to the hospitality experience and it’s paying off for them,” he says. When COVID hit, restaurant tech adoption skyrocketed. Sweeney says the industry essentially witnessed “10 years of tech adop tion within 10 weeks.” “Agility comes from willingness,” he says. Much of that now revolves around under standing consumer behavior and meeting it head-on. It’s a process, Sweeney believes, that starts from an elemental level. “I’ve often said that the difference between restaurants getting by and blowing the competition away is the answer to one simple question: ‘How well do you know your customer?’” he says. “What you serve, how you serve, how you

market, how you build relationships all be comes smarter and better the more you know your customer. Getting a centralized view of customer preference data is going to be even more critical going forward as restaurants compete digitally. As mentioned, guests have been trained by sites like Amazon to expect— and demand—experiences that are tailored for them. That includes when they make dining decisions.” “It is extremely difficult to design tailored marketing outreach when your guest data is scattered across different systems that don’t talk to each other and are not intuitive,” Sweeney continues. “Building customer preference profiles requires consolidation, needs to be on autopilot and needs to be optimized all the time.”

here, he adds, is to talk more about how tech is helping power personalization. “Which at restaurants can actually mean a better hospi tality experience,” Narang says. “Some guests experience hospitality as engaging directly with a server who might be holding a handheld device, for example, while for another guest the desired experience is about an entirely digital, contactless interaction.” “It’s incredible to think about the pos sibilities with personalization,” he contin ues. “Imagine a world where you walk into a restaurant and the staff greets you by name, knows your food preferences and what you’d like to see on a menu—including elements such as allergy modifications—and you simply walk out of the restaurant when you’re done because the restaurant has your preferred payment method. Toast helps enable all of this to be a reality.”

Aman Narang Toast C O F O U N D E R A N D P R E S I D E N T

Mary Melvin Checkers and Rally’s

D I R E C T O R O F R E S T A U R A N T T E C H N O L O G Y

Mary Melvin has been with the classic chain for three years, and was initially brought

RALLY’S

on to help with the development of its new res taurants’ IT initiatives. That involved bringing together all of Checkers and Rally’s partners to coordinate the installation of new systems. Melvin began her restaurant career as a cashier at Olive Garden. During that time, the company switched out its POS, and Melvin ex celled at using it. Olive Garden then recruited her to work on the help desk for the new sys tem, and she has stayed in the field since. “I got my foot in the door and I never looked back,” Melvin says. Checkers and Rally’s has been implement ing AI-powered drive-thrus with voice ordering since August 2021. The AI recognizes when a car pulls up to order their food and takes the car’s order, leaving the cashier to bag food and hand it off once a guest reaches the window. This takes a lot of the stress off the employee, Melvin says. The initial pilot last August included 10 restaurants, but the company has since expanded that to 75 as of mid-August. This leaves Checkers and Rally’s with 150 corpo rate restaurants to bring the technology to, though some franchisees are also getting in the mix. Melvin says that along with easing the bur den of cashiers, AI-voice ordering is improving speed of service. There’s no wait time when the guest pulls up to order and the AI knows every ingredient and menu item.

TOAST

You could say restaurants found Aman Narang—it wasn’t the other way around. Along with Steve Fredette and Jonathan Grimm, the trio often parked at a local eatery after work to sort through potential ideas. Soon, they had their “aha moment.” “We realized there was a huge opportunity right in front of our eyes to help restaurants,” Narang says. When they founded Toast, the idea of an integrated experience was nowhere near where it is today. In the last decade, operators have seen point solutions expand, integra tions abound, and the idea of an end-to-end solution as a possibility crystalize into view. Toast’s North Star has continued to target the latter, which is to create an all-in-one platform that enables restaurants of all sizes to run. “Combined with our partner ecosystem, we continue to innovate to help our customers stay focused on delivering hospitality—not trying to be CTO,” Narang says. Where Toast—and the industry—goes from

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