Tripleseat, the fastest growing sales and event management platform that helps restaurants, hotels, and unique venues streamline the planning process and increase event sales, launched new features specifically designed for hotels. New key functionalities include the ability to book group businesses in one or hundred of hotel, manage event and guest room blocks easily and access a flexible and dynamic sales and CRM platform. When I was a Manager with Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, we used Tripleseat for our private booking and catering software. I found it extremely user friendly and efficient, and the platform was a great communication tool for all of the managers.

RealView is a Chicago-based mobile software company that assists hotels with emergencies by equipping first responders with hotel's up-to-date floor plans and other relevant information. "We provide a preplan program where we make everything a responder would need available to them ahead of time," Stephen Nardi, CEO of RealView, said. "With planning, both employees and responders won't be operating on trial and error but reality." All of this information is streamlined to portable tablets or security stations and can be updated remotely and shared digitally. This software is important not only because of the safety of hotel patrons and visitors, but also to protect a hotel from a liability standpoint. "The front-end policies you have will protect you in the moment and in the end," Justin Parafinczuk, a partner for the defense law firm Koch, Parafinczuk, Wolf and Susen said. ""Any break in the chain is a liability. It's a minefield." In my opinion, this type of software not only makes sense but should be required in all hotels. When dealing with emergencies that involve life and death, seconds matter. It is software like RealView that can be the difference in saving peoples live's. RealView offers the ability to streamline real time information and make it easily sharable. I believe that not having this type of software should be considered a legal liability to hotels and they should be held accountable if they do not have this type of software implemented.

Plate IQ has formed a partnership with Square announcing an integration with Square's new Restaurant service. Plate IQ's daily dales software enables restaurants to "automatically input guest payment data from Square for Restaurants into many existing accounting software platforms and create valuable summaries of daily transactions." This integration has multiple benefits including more accurate, faster and detailed bookkeeping and more efficient cost of goods sold management. At my restaurant, we use a very similar software to this called Avero. Avero is integrated with our Aloha POS system and the information is automatically inputted every morning from the day before. As a General Manager, I find software like this necessary to day to day operations. It enables me to generate reports on product mixes, individual server sales, categorical sales and even enables me to monitor labor compared to my revenue.

Square has created a new point of sale system and corresponding software that integrates offline and online sales. With many restaurants turning to delivery for additional revenue, trying to manage both to go and dine in orders has resulted in headaches over a variety in hardware. After releasing Square for Retail, Square has now shifted it's focus to restaurants. "Every restaurant is becoming an omnichannel business," says Gokul Rajaram, Caviar lead at Square. For the first time, he says, restaurants "will have a unified view of their sales and their customers, and be able to understand how each channel contributes to their overall business." One of there largest hurdles will be the price associated with switching costs. As a General Manager, I can see the need for this software that will mainstream all of these channels into one. Currently at my restaurant, we have partnered with three different third party delivery services as we look to find revenue outside of our four walls, one of those companies being Caviar. This has led to our host desk being bombarded with three different tablets, and hourly employees being responsible to manage them from accepting orders to then entering them into our POS system. This is not only time consuming and inefficient, but also costly.

This article discusses the increasing demand for e-commerce and third party delivery in the food and beverage industry, as well as the costs associated with it. Restaurants are currently facing a growth problem in the United States as foot traffic has declined due to a "millennial generation shift" that sees diners doing more in their homes, while third party companies like Grubhub have seen it's stock rise 141 percent from a year ago. For many restaurants, it is a matter of opportunity cost. As explained in this article by Warren Solocheck, a restaurant industry analyst at NPD, "We're going to see more and more quick-service chains begin to try out delivery," he said. "The margins associated with third-party delivery may be slimmed down. But, the question for restaurants is, 'If I don't do it and I'm not delivering my food, am I in the game anymore? Am I in people's consideration? It boils down to being an opportunity cost. The hope is that at some point people will like the food enough to come in and sit down." I found this article very interesting as a General Manager. We recently decided as a brand to begin offering delivery through third party services as we noticed a decline in covers leading to a decline in revenue. This new revenue stream, although at a higher cost, still brings in revenue that we would be missing out on either way. We also offer free appetizer cards for a consumer's next in house visit to help attract new guests.

Even though the wine industry was once considered more of a "boy's club", woman are now leading the way in the growing Natural Wine Movement as a market dedicated to organic ingredients and sustainable practices continues to emerge. This is largely due to the fact that women outnumber men as the lead consumer of wine in both retail and restaurant bottle purchases, as well as several studies that suggest that woman eat/drink more nutritiously than their male counterparts. This has led to organic and biodynamic wines growing at rates between 10 percent and 20 percent per year in volume from 2013 to 2016, and organic vineyards almost tripling word wide over the last decade. Being in charge of the Beverage Ordering and Menu Creation at my restaurant, I have seen first hand the increase demand for organic and biodynamic wines. It has become so prevalent that I have begun printing menus with asterisks to highlight which of our wines fall into either of these categories. According to a Mintel Study, 60 percent of millennials and 55 percent of Gen-Xers are concerned about harmful ingredients in their food and groceries. With millennials constituting for 36 percent of wine consumers, according to a report by Beverage Dynamics, it is a essential that both the restaurant and wine industries continue to cater and adept to our consumers wants and needs. It would only make sense that Women are the ones leading this growing trend, as they constitute the majority of the market for it as well.

This article is about the fast casual restaurant chain Vita Mojo and how they have incorporated software that has enabled them to provide a fully customizable meal service to their guests. With over 9 billion possible meal combinations, Vita Mojo uses iPads at their three locations to help customers create a fully customizable meal. The average lunch costs between $6.50 and $9.50 which is on average with most fast casual restaurants in London. Customer's are also able to create their meals based on the nutritional information of each ingredient and offering, and the average meal takes about 3 to 5 minutes to create. This software also enables Vita Mojo to track POS data and aids them with predicting future sales, reducing food waste, and staying on top of trends. Being a restaurant manager myself, I found this incorporation of softwares into the restaurant industry very fascinating. I can see how the POS tracking software would be extremely beneficial in menu planning and managing cost of goods, as well as continuously being able to adapt and stay on top of new dining trends. So much of what makes restaurants successful is the ability to evolve and adapt with consumer needs and expectations. Also, the ability to customize your own meal accompanied with nutritional information seems very appealing from a consumer's point of view. Our generation has become more interested in expressing themselves uniquely and creatively, while also being more health conscious, and Vita Mojo has found away to appeal to both senses. The incorporation of iPad ordering and the minimizing of labor costs has also enabled Vita Mojo to price itself competitively, while offering higher quality ingredients, while also providing their goods in a timely fashion.