QSR December 2022

DIGI TAL INNOVAT ION

Restaurant technology is no longer the laggard. Pandemic conditions— namely the inability to dine in—cracked wide a world of innovation that historically had trailed other industries, like retail. The reason why wasn’t a great mystery. Food is a personal experience and operators have longed relied on their gut instincts to survive. But today’s landscape, rife with technology, flooded in thanks to adoption and, also, what’s fast become an understood point— that guest experience and solutions can, in fact, live side-by-side. As breakneck as these innovations arrived over the past couple of years, however, restaurants are now recalibrating and asking themselves what comes next. There’s no lone answer or sure-fire reality. Yet there is, without debate, a lot to discuss. For the second year, QSR recognizes its

locally but the database is running in the cloud; but there’s software running in the building. That means you have to upgrade it, version control it. We don’t. Even the software is running as a web service. So there’s noth ing really deploying to the field. And that’s a brand-new way to look at the industry, which is you don’t need actual software to run the physical locations.” OneDine early on created handheld tablets that interfaced with a merchant’s existing tech stack. It was a solution focused on labor and creating a contactless and efficient ordering and payment process for servers and diners. It established PCI and EMV compliance and eliminated fraudulent chargebacks. However, this was just an opening shot. OneDine expanded to incorporate addi tional contactless payment tech, mobile menu browsing, and curbside order and payment options to help restaurants gener ate off-premises revenue. AI surveys, guest preference tracking, and offer management eventually made their way into OneDine’s 360-degree solution as well. It then expanded to accommodate multi-merchant venues (like malls), hotels, airports, retail establishments, and event venues, such as the stadium case. In Krupp’s two-plus decades working with restaurants—he spent 16 years with Custom Business Solutions before Marketing Vitals— he’s seen the space evolve from POS’ infancy in 1996 to now. And what’s happened since, he says, is commerce has become increasingly decentralized. That began in the early 2000s as online ordering arrived. Krupp himself was involved in launching the integrated system for Jason’s Deli from the internet into the POS in 2000. Restaurants quickly had different chan nels for online ordering and different ones for digital menus. It was an OK concept when that slice of business represented a “few percent age points here and there,” Krupp says. But in 2018, the world had morphed to 30–50 percent of sales for countless brands sector-wide. So given how many transactions were now decentralized, the amount of effort it was tak ing operators to manage commerce ballooned into a massive, and often messy, undertaking. “Because everything was still anchored in the POS systems,” Krupp says, “and the POS system was built to run the brick-and-mortar; they were never built to run kind of an Amazon concept. An ecommerce concept. Commerce is not only happening in multiple channels for you as a brand that you can control—com merce was also happening in channels you couldn’t control.” Krupp is referencing streams like third party marketplaces and Google ordering. Again, going back to the ideation of OneDine, Krupp says he didn’t look at the industry’s evolution only through the lens of labor. There were a bevy of solutions working to help restaurants maintain new channels

Rom Krupp OneDine F O U N D E R A N D C E O

ONEDINE / JOHN DAVIDSON

The year was 2018. Rom Krupp cleared the table and got dystopian for a moment. What if the restaurant industry never existed? Could a tech company approach food as an all-new sector? Krupp not only thought it was feasible, but fundamental to where consumers were taking restaurants. An industry built on guts was beginning to understand the value of data, as Krupp’s 2012-founded Marketing Vitals was proving out. But the next great disruption was unfurling within the structure of restaurants themselves. “The industry that we’re going to build will serve people food the way today food is being served,” Krupp says. This was the starting point for OneDine, a company that’s capabilities web out into a lot of areas. At its center, though, it’s a platform that supercharges existing POS systems to enable contactless ordering and payment, to optimize labor, eliminate fraudulent chargebacks, and create a “triple-win for servers, managers, and guests alike,” the company says. What Krupp, who has been in the business for 26 years, recognized was a lack of agility among POS devices. As he explains it, “a ground-up rewrite of looking at the restaurant industry as a brand new industry. Not one trying to adopt all of the things that have been adopted for the last 40 years.” Krupp doesn’t believe restaurants need a brick-and-mortar tech stack anymore. Consider a project OneDine recently tackled. It completed a baseball stadium setup—23 concession stands, eight kiosks, 12 hand helds for VIP suites, 7,000 QR codes, and 180 pickup cubbies. But the key was OneDine did so without installing a single piece of software in the building. Everything runs from secure browsers. “Cloud-based POS are not really cloud based POS, they’re cloud-based databases,” Krupp says, “which means the POS is running

Digital Disruptors: the change-makers and innovators laying the blueprint for a more connected restaurant world than ever.

/ B Y D A N N Y K L E I N , B E N C O L E Y , & I S A B E L L A S H E R K

ADOBE STOCK / BY BLANKSTOCK

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