QSR June 2023

TECHNICAL ADVANCEMENTS

cashierless convenience store, but instead of packaged snacks and drinks, fans are returning to their seats with a Shaq approved crispy chicken sandwich. Just Walk Out lets guests insert their credit card at the loca tion’s entry gate or hover their palm over an Amazon One device before entering. Leveraging computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning—the same technologies that power self-driving cars—it determines what items they take from Big Chicken, and the credit card they inserted or linked to their Amazon One ID is charged for the purchase. “The reason for Just Walk Out is fairly simple,” Halpern says. “Food isn’t the main draw when you go to a sporting event or a concert. It’s a great part of the experience, but the draw is the game or the concert itself. So, the question becomes, how can we reduce friction? How can we get the best food in the short est amount of time possible, so fans can get back to their seats and watch the game?” The location is operated by Delaware North, which manages hospitality services at nearly 50 sports and entertainment venues worldwide. It’s just one example of the company’s focus on tech driven frictionless fan experiences coming out of the pandemic. Jamie Obletz, president of Delaware North Sportservice, says concessions at stadiums and arenas are evolving faster than they ever have before. “You had a period of 12-18 months where everything went dark,” he says. “When venues did start reopening, it was ini tially to no fans or with restricted capacities. It was tough going, but it gave us the opportunity to think about the business at a

deeper level and dream of what it could be when we reopened. Even more importantly than giving us the time to think that through, it gave us the change management inertia we needed.” Conversations around innovation and new service models were happening before venues went dark, but Obletz says that 12-18 months period was the catalyst Delaware North needed to “supercharge” those efforts. One of the biggest changes was taking the business cashless, a move he says simplified opera tions, improved labor efficiency, increased speed of service, and expanded the size of the average transaction. “As we’ve implemented a cashless footprint, we’ve integrated new ways of serving guests,” Obletz says. “We’ve transitioned a large part of our business away from traditional belly-up stands, and we’ve gone to marketplace concepts, where you can enter a market and have more free reign over what you’re picking. Then, when you exit that market, we’ve got everything from self-checkout to autonomous checkout, to digital camera-based checkout.” Aramark also is embracing digital innovation. The compa ny’s data science and design teams were studying technology and consumer interest trends like touchless and frictionless ven dor experiences before the pandemic. By the time reopening began, it had developed a slew of innovations that could limit close contact and reduce congestion at the more than 200 sta diums and arenas it serves. “Our clients were looking for things that were more friction less coming out of COVID,” says Alicia Woznicki, vice president of design and innovation at Aramark. “We have the solutions

to do that, and they also happen to really enhance the fan experi ence, too.” Already commonplace in the greater retail market, self-order kiosks have emerged as a key area of focus. “It was something that we weren’t getting a lot of adoption from pre-pandemic,” Woznicki says. “We’d have a kiosk location, and people would choose to go to the next section over.” She says the biggest change in consumer behavior coming out of COVID was the consid erable uptick in guests using kiosks. Along with speeding up service and freeing up employees to focus on other tasks, data from Aramark show that self-order ing systems lead to an 18 percent increase in sales. Mobile ordering was another area of focus, but Woznicki says the company is still seeing limited consumer adoption on that front. “Despite a lot of our partners

BIG CHICKEN

SPORTS FACILITIES ARE A MAJOR PART OF BIG CHICKEN’S GROWTH STRATEGY.

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JUNE 2023 | QSR | www.qsrmagazine.com