QSR December 2022

DIGI TAL INNOVAT ION

and improve flow. Krupp says efficiencies in throttling and quoting times, and just managing kitchens in general, flashed on the horizon. “When you have multiple commerce channels, POS, on premises, off-premises, third-party, not only do you have six or seven vendors to do commerce, but how do they know to quote the delivery driver the right timing and not effect negatively the people who showed up in the building and are sitting in the tables?” Krupp says. And this is where OneDine staked its future: recentralize commerce and build a platform that brings all of it into a single cloud. With it, they could know what’s happening in the building, outside, in real time. Every table, guest, and third-party. In turn, restau rants won’t have to throttle in a way that had become all too common—an effort to stop people from ordering. Krupp says “throttle” remains a misused practice that can refer to slowing down the business. “For me, throt tling is moving it around to optimize revenue. If you try to place an order for 12:30 and based on your mix and the time and how busy the restaurant is, I’ll tell you it’s 12:42,” he says. “You’ll probably complete the transaction and come 12 minutes later. I can squeeze that over and have that low in the kitchen where I can actually do it. We’re not throttling away busi ness, we’re throttling it to optimize the kitchen to be busy all the time.” Naturally, when COVID hit, these topics lit up. Brands had to rely 100 percent on off premises. Ghost kitchens were thrown into the pool. Now, restaurants didn’t just have to throttle their own brands; they had to throttle multiple from the same station and equip ment. “We had to create a system that was built for commerce and modern time,” Krupp says, “and it didn’t exist.” “Think about how many vendors and how many partners and how many places you have menu curation and databases,” he adds. “All of that is trying to figure out in real time what’s happening. It cannot work. It just cannot. You hit the limitations of the old digital technolo gies of restaurants. POS as an anchor doesn’t work anymore.” To put it plainly, the engine driving the industry was flawed. “The key here is the commerce cloud to really be the one engine to drive 100 percent of commerce,” Krupp says. “Because then all of the features up to that can work. But without that com merce cloud you can build a million features and it won’t work.” The opposite charts as follows: Use a POS to enter orders and collect payments, and nothing else. Deploy a third-party kitchen technology and third-party reporting platform. The same for labor and inventory. “But every thing has to go to that engine because that’s the engine that controls the kitchen at the end of the day. And that flaw is what creates every downstream problem,” Krupp says. On the B2C side, OneDine wanted to funnel

information just as it did with systems. Gener ally today, because consumer data is distrib uted, you can have 100 customers of the same POS companies or online ordering platforms, and 100 profiles. Or 100 times a restaurant needs to set preferences and 100 different systems to conduct machine learning. With one commerce engine, though, Krupp says, there’s a lone identity for every consum er that translates across. “Then when you go to a new restaurant that you’ve never been and you tap in with your phone or you go online to place an order, the moment you interact with anybody in the same commerce cloud, the preference engine, the recommendation engine, the filtering, is applicable to you on the first visit ever,” he says.

and butter at Thanx.” Before Thanx, Goldstein, working as a consultant at Bain & Company, helped bring a private-equity owned restaurant back to life. The chain was debt saddled and new units were less successful than existing ones. Using data, he helped refine site selection, menu innovation, marketing segmentation, and executive hiring. But at the time, Goldstein says, e-commerce giants were growing larger by the day, propelled by the sophistication of their loyalty programs and the ease with which they measured and acted on customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost. “These concepts were largely absent from restau rants and I wanted to change that,” he says. Much has shifted since 2011. Goldstein says the world “loyalty” itself was long a pejorative for restaurants—or something only discount-oriented brands embraced. “While brands shied away from rewards, they also continued fumbling around in the dark with marketing,” he says. “Famously, Chipotle announced they would never launch a loyalty program; theirs is now among the fast est growing in the industry, alongside previous holdouts such as McDonald’s. Loyalty has become essential because brands are com peting in a digital-first arena—not just with each other, but with their third-party partners as well.” And now, other than some fine-dining concepts, nearly every restaurant is lean ing into digital and off-premises, and finding loyalty integral to all of it, especially when it comes to stripping discounts and guarding margins. “This next era in restaurant technol ogy will move beyond ‘does it integrate to my POS’ and toward true data interoperability and transferability,” Goldstein says. No longer will the POS be the core of a restaurant’s tech stack, he adds. “Capturing 360-degree data about your customers and the ability to interact with them personally, regardless of channel, are becoming just as mission-critical as producing differentiated food,” he says. Goldstein believes the next big tech trend will be automation and ease-of-use across tech platforms. “This is an area where set-it-and-forget-it—but with the help of an intelligent engine at the core—is actually pos sible,” he says. Stacy Peterson Androes Wingstop (former) C H I E F T E C H N O L O G Y O F F I C E R Stacy Peterson Androes joined the company in 2013 when online ordering represented 5 percent of sales (she departed Wingstop in December to become CEO at a privately held company). The experience then was so frustrating operators would often turn off the

Zach Goldstein Thanx C E O A N D C O F O U N D E R

THANX

Zach Goldstein founded loyalty and digital engagement platform Thanx in 2011 to help brands use data to drive lifetime value. Like many elements of restaurant tech those days, the industry was lagging other fields, like retail. Goldstein felt if restaurants could catch up, they had an untapped avenue to nearly double revenue without adding a single guest. It would all come from existing users. Thanx focuses loyalty programs on ac cess, status, and personalization over rote discounts, and it delivers marketing automa tions and lifecycle campaigns (like converting a two-time customer to a third visit) to enable segmented, personalized marketing. “Since 2018, I have been writing and speaking about the massive disruption and threat restaurants face from third-party delivery,” Goldstein says. “Never has it been more important for brands to own their customer relationships directly; this starts with exceptional first-party digital experiences [online ordering] and on-brand incentives for customers to come back over and-over again [loyalty]—these are our bread

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DECEMBER 2022 | QSR | www.qsrmagazine.com