QSR December 2022

DIGI TAL INNOVAT ION

really be talking about is how to apply that information so restaurants can focus on the diner experience,” Mobayeni says. The task rings familiar. Mobayeni is work ing to solve the fragmentation that exists in restaurant technology. To do so, her company is strengthening its omnichannel platform to deliver a blended on-premises and off-prem ises restaurant and diner experience. “One specific area of focus is first-party reserva tions,” she says. “We are working to combine reservations, POS, and websites to create a powerful offering that empowers restaurants to engage directly with their diners rather than through a third-party service.” Claiborne Irby Focus Brands S V P O F C U S T O M E R E N G A G E M E N T A N D S T R A T E G Y

ments in how we engage with our customers,” Irby says. “We are using years of historical data to build an impressive offer engine and suggestive selling capability. By leverag ing existing data, we are building the right infrastructure and tools designed to delight customers and drive returns for our brands and franchisees.” In the future, Irby believes the biggest opportunity for Focus Brands—and the res taurant industry overall—is determining what portion of technology should be owned and managed internally versus outsourced. Bring ing in the right tools and resources in-house will lead to significant competitive advan tages, the digital executive says. Sterling Douglass Chowly C O F O U N D E R , C E O Sterling Douglass began his career as an actuary. Or as he puts it, one of “nerdiest jobs” you can have. The combination of statistics and finance, rooted in data, provided him a foundation. But after two years, he noticed every project started with the same six-word question: “What did we do last time?” Eventu ally, he tackled a fresh task that left him real izing entrepreneurship might be in his path. He turned to building a mobile ordering app for bars and taverns. It allowed customers to have drinks brought to their table or be available for express pickup at the bar; no more waiting to close your tab or flagging down a server. Douglass ran into a problem, however. Bars wanted the platform to integrated with their POS instead of getting a separate tablet to receive orders on. So he created one of the first POS integrations back in 2015. It made him face another point, though: If you could integrate orders into the POS, why not just do it for Grubub? Fellow restaurateurs in Chicago said the same thing. And Chowly was born. The POS integra tion company enables restaurants to expand and maintain a diverse set of off-premises capabilities. It integrates online ordering solu tions, such as third-party marketplaces, which include Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Postmates; third-party menu management using POS sync technology; and direct order with Google, an integration for orders placed on Google Search, Google Assistant, or Google Maps—directly into a restaurants’ POS sys tem. The company has expanded to offer tools needed to launch virtual restaurants as well. Douglass founded Chowly with Justin McNally. After the duo integrated their second order at local Chicago pizzeria, D’Agostinos, another light bulb clicked. There was an industry challenge at hand when it came to moving data between systems. In 2016, one of Chowly’s first restaurant partners was part

of the inaugural U.S. launch of Uber Eats. The Chowly integration was live the same day. Then came Eat24, DoorDash, and other marketplaces. Customers turned in requests for call center order integrations. Voice auto mation, which Chowly has had live since 2018, was added as an integration partner. Cus tomers said they needed to sync their menus directly from their POS. Chowly claims to be the first company to release that in 2020. Next, they wanted reporting. After, custom ers asked for a Google integration, and Chowly did so for SMB customers in 2021. Over the past six years, Chowly has added more than 12,000 restaurants to its platform and supports north of 300 online ordering integrations and 50 point-of-sale integrations. “Everyone is talking about virtual restau rants and omnichannel ordering, and they should,” Douglass says of the current and future tech field. “It’s big, and every restaurant should be looking at it. However, underneath the hood, there’s a deeper issue going on at restaurants, and it’s not robots or drones—it’s boring old data. I believe the innovation here will be the next stage of reinforcements restau rants will receive to improve their businesses.”

Karl Goodhew BurgerFi C H I E F T E C H N O L O G Y O F F I C E R

Karl Goodhew is relatively new to the restaurant industry. In fact, BurgerFi is his first executive position in the food and beverage segment, after past stops at Macy’s, Omni Hotels & Resorts, and JCPenney. Yet he’s leading a fast

FOCUS BRANDS

In Claiborne Irby’s role, he is responsible for all customer, commercial, and strategy teams, with an emphasis on using customer insights and data to drive performance of loyalty and digital channels. Focus Brands aims to understand guests better so it can serve up experiences worth repeating. Over the past few years, the restaurant group—comprising McAlister’s, Schlotzksy’s, Moe’s, Jamba, Auntie Anne’s, Carvel, and Cinnabon—has doubled down on its customer-centric approach. For instance, the company created a full machine learning engine that automates better offers to members of McAlister’s rewards program. The engine learns from each successive run and automatically improves offers in the next go-around. It’s an improvement upon wide-casting generic offers that are often more expensive and less effective. A customer who buys just one entrée may not want a BOGO deal, but they may go for additional loyalty points. Focus Brands is now scaling this success to other brands in the portfolio. “We are sitting on a treasure trove of data and have worked quickly to use the informa tion we already have to make critical advance

BURGERFI

casual that always seems to be on the forefront of innovation. As chief technology officer, he’s responsible for all aspects of the customer and employee experience that includes a technological component, in addition to corporate cyber security, internal systems, data, and IT operations. The most public-facing initiative is arguably BurgerFi’s implementation of digital ordering kiosks throughout its company footprint. A pilot resulted in increased sales, 18.5 percent average check growth, and absorption of 133 orders per day on average. Franchisees, which make up about 80 percent of the system, are beginning to pick up the technology, as well. Goodhew also noted the chain’s partnership with Gopuff, a delivery platform that will introduce the fast casual to new markets

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DECEMBER 2022 | QSR | www.qsrmagazine.com