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In 2017, menus will continue to evolve - as they must! Taking advantage of industry trends while they’re hot is a great way to show your guests that your brand is current. Restaurants that can satisfy that need will excel in the new year. Another popular trend in 2017 will be meal kits. People will not only want an exceptional dining experience, they will want to be a part of it. Restaurants can take advantage of this by offering cooking classes and whole meal replacement packages of their own. 

Too many restaurant owners and chefs still think they know it all when it comes to guest wants. Their menus are a reflection of this. We often throw around the term “chef driven,” but for too many, the words “chef driven” should really be replaced with “ego driven.” Perhaps in 2017, restaurants should be more “guest driven.” When you are reworking your menu to be more efficient and to satisfy the cravings of the current market, make sure that you use the data from your restaurant POS system. This is a gold mine of information if you tap into it, decipher the data, and apply it to future menu design. Your product mix report will tell you exactly where your guests are spending their money. If you’re smart, you’ll drop the high food cost egocentric items and create more profitable guest desirable ones. 

Another new POS vendor, eTab, debuted its table-side ordering and payment solution this past May at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. The solution allows restaurant and bar patrons to order and pay for meals at their table through a digital menu interface on a portable touch-screen computer, wirelessly connecting each table to the restaurant’s wait staff and existing POS system. 

Earlier this year at the International Restaurants & Foodservice Show of New York, Squirrel Systems announced the launch of the latest addition to the Squirrel Mobility suite of products, Squirrel Professional for Apple mobile devices. Squirrel Professional allows restaurants, bars, and hotels to manage their food and beverage operations from stationary terminals as well as mobile tablets and handhelds like the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

The Automated Attendant is incredibly versatile, allowing callers to be answered by different greetings depending on the situation. If it’s after hours, your customers could hear something like, “Sorry, our restaurant is closed, but, if you leave a message we will get back to you shortly,” or if it’s during peak times, “Sorry, we are very busy attending at the moment but please leave a message at the tone.” If someone does happen to leave a message, the system can send a copy of the voice mail message out as a WAV file to your handheld.

Simply put, the Automated Attendant, voice mail to email, line appearances, paging, and portable phones will all make it easier to answer the call, book the next reservation, and run your business.

The initiative involves automated analysis of point-of-sale-system data to determine, among other things, where servers perform below their same-restaurant peers in different sales metrics, such as number of appetizers or desserts sold nightly, the companies said.

The mentoring system also represents “an opportunity to enhance guest service,” according to Brandon Coleman III, Mac Acquisition LLC chief marketing officer.

Coleman said the mentoring program’s comparative analysis of wait-staff members on a restaurant-by-restaurant basis, as opposed to using chainwide norms for such comparisons, improves the accuracy of its findings and staff buy in. That’s the case, he indicated, because chainwide performance norms might not reflect the very real impact on sales and menu mix at specific restaurants of such factors as location, climate and regional consumer dining preferences.

I think this will become a reality in fast food in the next two to three years. It will be tied to the success of mobile wallet technologies

anywhere in hospitality where speed of the transaction is critical and cash is a big part of the process today

ou can see other customers in the restaurant as they experience the restaurant in their own way – some mesmerized by the robots, others focused on their food and seemingly oblivious to the fact that the robots are even there.  Its an awesome scene.

The robots are fully autonomous, taking a customer order and cooking it from start to finish.  This includes boiling the noodles, pouring broth, adding spices and toppings, and so on.  The orders are complex too, requiring the robots to take customer preference for amount and type of sauce, salt, noodle, and so on.   The finished product is handed off to a human server who brings the food to the customer’s table.  The irony could not be more real as we witness the lowly human in the role of a mere server while the robot takes on the cooking.

The restaurant, called FA-men (pronounced Fu-a-men) based in Nagoya, Japan, takes its name from the phrase “Fully Automated raMEN” says Ni-Lab.  Not content to simply sit around when there are no orders to cook, the robots can be seen doing tricks and even performing pretend combat with a sword (knife) and a shield (plate) in homage to Manzai, a  style of stand-up comedy in Japan.  If you know Japanese, or are just curious, you can check out FA-men’s website.

Fortunately, new technology lets restaurants adopt some of ecommerce’s best practices. From an IT perspective, this requires four key elements:   A system to close the loop at the guest level on promotional offers. It’s not enough to have a POS discount key for “Father’s Day promo” anymore. You need to know which dad (or mom!) responded to that offer, what they bought, and who they brought in with them.   The ability (either directly or through your credit card processor) to access payment data in order to identify individual guests when they return. This data set is essential – it’s the lifeblood of ecommerce. Fortunately, the ecommerce players have pioneered safe, secure ways to get at data without compromising PCI safeguards.   A guest-centric data warehouse to store all the key data sets — check level POS data, payment data, marketing data, loyalty program data if available, reservations, online ordering, guest responses, and third party data such as Prizm or Mosaic.   An analytics layer. The requirements here go way beyond static or standardized reporting. Marketing needs to be able to cut data in an ever-changing variety of ways to identify key patterns and segments.   Marketing, in turn, must partner with IT on determining goals. What is the restaurant trying to accomplish and what can be left out? Take joint meetings with IT to look at vendors to help give a sense of what’s possible. But then let IT do their job. Next, build the business case. Moving to a data driven marketing strategy will require shifting budget from other media, or finding new budget dollars. Determine appropriate metrics and the desired payoff. Setting up high level, high visibility “report cards” is critical. For example, “Our 2015 goal is to grow the annual spend of our top three customer groups by 4%, thereby delivering $17.5M of incremental sales.” That will get the CFO’s attention and the goal is doable. Finally, design and execute the marketing plan. That will likely require a trained data and analytics expert, and/or a close partnership with a company that analyzes data 24/7. Either way, it’s important to not over-reach in the beginning. Year one is about becoming familiar with the data, drawing insights, and learning a new language—segments, deciles, annual spend, customer acquisition costs, and lifetime value. The good news is there is usually a great deal of quick wins, such as offer optimization.     Introducing data-driven marketing may seem like a daunting task, but the ability to predictably drive sales should incent even the most cautious. The benefits of bringing an early mover are huge. These restaurants will have more data to work with two to three years out. More data, gathered over a longer period of time, becomes its own competitive advantage. Just ask Amazon.

he fast-food industry might see a major overhaul with robots and digital kiosks

Additionally, a decreased interest in obtaining a job in a fast-food restaurant, particularly serving, is a contributing factor to the current industry crisis

because of the high turnover rate.

This trend is in market from mid-2011 onwards (use-case discussions started as soon as the first iPad was released in 2010) and its gaining momentum now.

Customers will be able to browse the food menu and place their order which eventually gets posted in the kitchen display console. That’s the core functionality.

Customize:

And the end result is going to benefit guests, which opens opportunity for restaurants

At the intersection of much of this conversation is technology. Roughly half of full-service, fast casual, and coffee and snack operators, said they devoted more resources to tech during COVID, including online or in-app ordering, mobile payment, and delivery management, according to the National Restaurant Association’s 2021 State of the Restaurant Industry Report.

Percentage of restaurant operators who say they devoted more resources to customer-facing technology since the beginning of the outbreak in March

former World Bank executive

trustee of the James Beard Foundation and co-founded the JBF Women’s Leadership and the Women’s Entrepreneurship Leadership programs

The culinary “gastro ceiling” is especially appalling with less than 7% leading women executive chefs

It's a mistake to think that a waiter's job is primarily to deliver food. This is one of the primary lessons I get across in my customer service training sessions for restaurant waitstaff: that waiting tables is a multifaceted art form that includes providing guests with feelings of recognition, comfort, and anticipation, providing a bit of theater, and, sometimes, serving as couples counselor and family mediator. Getting food to the table is really the least of what’s involved.

And there lies perhaps the biggest danger when you’re considering a move toward installing tableside technology in a restaurant: losing these less obvious, but emotionally crucial, parts of the waiter role. Another danger is that the implementation will be off-brand and off-putting.  There is a 4-ish star steakhouse with locations in several U.S. cities (think: "Morton’s but regional") whose black-clad, iPad-based menu opens on Page One with cheesy Comic Sans electronic discount coupons and two-for-one offers.  Maybe this doesn’t put you off your feed, but it did me, and I doubt that I’m alone. Which means that all the effort the restaurant had put into properly costuming the waiters, gussying up the dining room, sending its sommelier on vineyard junkets, teaching the waiters how crumb down the white tablecloths (and buying all those silver table crumbers) went down the drain with that one, ridiculously off-brand, choice. Folks: Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it; before you deploy any tableside technology, make sure that every single part of the deployment fits your brand, or at least fits your brand as you want it to be perceived in the future.

Which brings me to Chili’s Grill and Bar, the ubiquitous casual dining chain. Chili’s, which pretty much defines the mainstream of chain restaurants (and is not a place that self-service couponing – free chips with your loyalty points! – will be off-brand), is quickly becoming a definitive mainstream example as well of tabletop point of sale (POS) technology and mobile self-service restaurant technology.

Employee theft accounts for around 75 percent of restaurant losses

The National Restaurant Association estimates that employee theft accounts for around 75 percent of restaurant losses.

MonitorNumbers never lie. Find a way to track transactional data from your Point of Sale (POS) and Back-of-House (BOH) systems. Through ancient spreadsheet methods or with an external system that integrates data from all sources, you need to collect and monitor your data.

A restaurant POS system has three components: software, hardware and payment processor.

There are several options that have minimal startup costs so you can start with just the basics and then add features and peripherals as your business grows. 

Of course, customer satisfaction is always a top priority, but labor challenges are the motivator for restaurants’ automation investment. Just two years ago, increasing sales was overwhelmingly the top reason that restaurants used automation. Though new technology expense is still a concern, current labor limitations have changed the math for many restaurants, likely leading to an ac

eleration of automation and technology, Datassential said.

As consumers grow accustomed to more technology and then reach the point they no longer want to live without it – the restaurant of tomorrow may very well resemble something that’s unrecognizable today. But those operators who push the envelope with new technology will see that consumers are more willing than perhaps ever before to come along for the ride. 

“The Subway case is a clear indication that privileged and administrative accounts are increasingly targeted and used by criminals to steal sensitive information,”

“In this case, the attackers were able to simply do an Internet search for remote desktop applications that were used by the restaurants, and through simple password cracking techniques, they were able to gain administrative access to the systems.  This enabled them to easily steal sensitive financial information from unsuspecting customers.”