Most Popular FoodTech and FoodNet Trends in 2022

15 restaurant technologies to meet the challenges of 2022

FoodTech means introducing technology into the entire food chain: food production — transportation — packaging — delivery — cooking.

The global food technology market is expected to reach $342.52 billion by 2027, compared to $220.32 billion in 2019. According to other estimates, it could grow to $390 billion by 2025 (not including the food delivery segment).

Why do you need to read this text? Because technology attracts investors, the sooner you decide to incorporate it into your business, the more likely you are to stay afloat.

Waste Reduction

Renowned chefs are beginning to tackle food waste to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One of the ways to do this is by partnering with eco-friendly food brands.

Consumers are also becoming increasingly aware of the effects of the climate change. As a result, people are analyzing their own lifestyles and looking for ways to lessen their personal impact on the environment.

Vegan drive-thrus are gaining in popularity. Major brands, like IKEA, are publishing cookbooks with recipes aimed at reducing household food waste.

Drive-Thru Service

In the age of the pandemic, contactless service has peaked in popularity. Today, all locations, from fast-food chains to trendy restaurants, offer the opportunity to order without leaving the car.

At Lexus Culinary Cinema, for example, you can watch movies while sitting in your car. Burger King was one of the first to offer contactless service. The White Castle restaurant chain arranged Valentine’s Day celebration where guests did not leave their cars.

Restaurant Subscriptions

Restaurants, bars, and Speakeasy places (‘secret bars’ with an unusual atmosphere and a wide variety of cocktails) introduce annual and monthly subscriptions. They offer access to chef’s specials, events, and other bonuses. This was done because of the coronavirus restrictions and to increase loyalty.

Coffee subscriptions also remain popular. For example, at the Panera Bread coffee shop chain, for $8.99 a month you get unlimited cups of coffee.

Restaurants that operate exclusively on a subscription basis are opening up. Lynhall, for example, offers home-cooking kits as well as food and beverages.

Farm Digitalization

Brands are launching farm-to-phone apps that allow consumers to order fresh produce from local farmers.

Virtual farmers markets are opening up. For example, Uber Eats in Canada has introduced the FarmFresh function to deliver fresh fruits and vegetables. And the Local Line e-commerce platform was created to bring together customers and local farmers.

Technologies for Quick-Service Restaurants

Other trends are popular for restaurants. For example, QSR-brands (quick service restaurant) that use various technological innovations, from devices that dispense cup lids to contactless drink machines, have started to develop.

Contactless touch screens have been in use everywhere for a while now, but Azkoyen Group developed Air Touch technology that allows you to interact with a touch screen without touching, at a safe distance of 2 cm. Contactless beverage dispensers have appeared.

Mobile Apps That Connect to In-House Technologies

Before the pandemic, restaurants were developing their own apps to connect the brand with their customers, improve marketing strategies, and reduce staff workload.

Today, apps allow foodservice companies to optimize throughput and ensure convenient and efficient service. To do so, however, they need to coordinate with the kitchen and integrate with third-party delivery partners to ensure that orders are delivered on time.

Fast-food chains are implementing advanced logistics to find out where a customer or courier is and then notify staff when they need to start preparing the order. Stores are keeping up with the developments, too. Taco Bell’s Go Mobile locations, for example, will track customers who place orders through their app so that selected items will be waiting for customers at the checkout when they arrive.

Responsive restaurants with good apps, efficient cuisines, and diverse delivery methods are clearly ahead of those who only use aggregators. Panera Restaurant, for example, has added a mobile pre-order feature to its app to allow customers to be notified on their phone when the meal is ready, rather than arriving in advance.

For example, back in 2020 we made a mobile app for the YPA In Food startup, which makes it possible to serve customers in a restaurant without waiters. Its functionality includes:

• real table reservation instead of a callback request;
• order from the menu without a waiter;
• ability to place a pre-order and be notified when the meal is ready, so that the customer can pick it up later;
• automatic payment from the card linked to the account;
• options to call a waiter to your table directly from the app, tips transfer, and much more.

Read more about the application in our case study.

Robotization

Robots are designed to relieve people of dirty, boring, or dangerous work, improve quality by eliminating errors, and reduce production costs. Today, they can almost entirely replace ever-increasingly expensive labor in various areas of the catering industry. This is an important step in automation, which will lead to faster and better food preparation and delivery.

With the cost of robots dropping 1.5 times in the last 30 years and labor costs doubling, the idea to completely replace humans in the kitchen with a robot is obvious.

Fully automated burger joints, operating almost without people, in which customers simply order via screens and then get their food cooked and delivered by robots, are getting closer.

Analysts forecast that the food robotics market will reach $3.1 billion by 2025, with annual growth of 12.7%.

Of course, they cannot completely replace couriers, cooks, and pickers yet, but they will reduce the workload on the staff, for example, by handling preparations.

It will certainly take more than a year for robots to play a significant role in the catering industry. For now, large chains are only testing different ways to deploy them in the back office to save on labor costs. For example, Miso Robotics has already built an autonomous assistant that can cook and season tortilla chips, as well as a robot to work on the frying station.

What else can machines do? For example, they can improve order accuracy and consistency when assembling products. Or the preparation of meals such as pizza, where the exact amount of cheese or other ingredients determines the amount of food waste.

Some restaurants are planning to implement a combination of self-service kiosks or other technology to automate payment at the front office and robots at the back office.

Computer vision, which can use up to 50 cameras to monitor operations and notify staff of inaccurate orders, is becoming increasingly popular.

Creating Artificial Substitutes for Milk, Meat, Eggs, Seafood

Producing one kilogram of plant-based meat requires 14 times less land, tens of times less water, and reduces the carbon footprint by 8 times. Over 2018 and 2019, sales of plant-based alternatives increased 1.5 times. That is why those companies that are engaged in the development of this area receive the most investment.

For example, Upside Foods, a producer of cultured meat, was granted unicorn status after raising $400 million in a C round investment. The startup plans to spend the funds to build a facility to produce alternative protein sources for retail sales.

The first product will be chicken fillet grown from animal cells. Upside Foods is partnering with Michelin-starred chefs to promote it.

Another plant-based meat company has announced the development of new technology that will create a plant-based counterpart at the price of traditional meat. It will reduce the cost of production by 95% through automation, reduced energy consumption, and 90% reduction of waste.

Africans, too, have taken to making cultured meat: one company’s debut product is a hamburger steak made from cow cells. According to the founders, the next product will be sausages, as well as meat suitable for frying and use in national dishes. The products are scheduled to go to retail within the next year and a half.

Burger King has launched the Even More Confusing Times campaign to show its involvement with trends. Along with tough questions like, ‘Is eco-friendly Black Friday shopping really good for the planet?’ or ‘What is worse — texting an ex or deleting a text after you send it?’ comes the question, ‘How can plant-based nuggets taste like chicken?’.

Back Office Automation

According to Square’s The Future of Restaurants: 2022 report, 91% of restaurant owners believe that automation related to equipment upgrades will be of primary importance. In addition, 62% believe it will help manage online ordering and delivery. But at the same time, only 36% of these respondents updated their business strategies and technology over the last year.

Of course, there are reasons to be cautious when it comes to investing in new technology. Modern solutions can be very expensive, which is why SevenRooms CEO Joel Montaniel advises restaurants to research first to see the pros and cons of the technology of interest.

Not sure what is right for your organization? Contact us for a consultation.

Transparent Production

Six out of 10 consumers want to know more about the origin of the food that ends up on their plates. The information that manufacturers place on packages can help.

The innovations that have emerged as part of this trend are digital shelf life tags that help monitor product quality in real time; blockchain to track the product’s path from farm to table; and automation and robots that can guarantee stable supplies and safe production.

Saving reputation during the crisis

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing conflict has had serious global geopolitical and business implications for everyone. Millions of residents have left their homes. Major restaurant chains, including Burger King, Dunkin, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, ceased or scaled back their operations in Russia.

In the United States, the reaction was almost immediate: consumers rushed to support Ukrainian businesses, and stores removed Russian products, such as vodka, from shelves. At some point, Google Trends showed a spike in the number of ‘Ukrainian restaurants near me’ queries; the numbers went up by 580%.

Any crisis situation can negatively affect the reputation of a restaurant, even if it is not directly involved in the current events. Consider a Russian teahouse in New York. Yes, it was originally opened by Russian immigrants, but it has been owned by a New York corporation for decades. Nevertheless, anti-Russian sentiment has had a strong negative impact on the popularity and sales of this famous establishment.

The ability to deal with these challenges and manage a restaurant’s reputation online is critical in 2022, as bad reviews and misinterpretations by customers can seriously impact business operations.

QR Codes

58% of consumers would like to pay with a QR code in restaurants or grocery stores. Consumers who have already used such a service, in 70% of cases described their experience positively.

During the pandemic many restaurants added QR codes to the tables, with the help of which it was possible to access the menu. It allowed to get rid of the customary printed versions, which require disinfection after each guest. At the same time 45% of restaurants plan to introduce QR codes after the crisis caused by COVID-19 has subsided.

As we can see, this technology will become more and more common in restaurants, because it can significantly improve efficiency. For example, customers will not have to call a waiter to place an order or pay the bill. The ability to focus on delivering food and beverages to the table, rather than taking orders and processing payments, will allow waiters to serve 7–10 tables instead of 4.

Self-Service Kiosks

Ordering through kiosks in fast-food restaurants is gaining popularity, especially at airports. McDonald’s Restaurant of the Future renovation, which included new digital kiosks, is emblematic of this trend.

This innovation allows customers to place orders through a simple, customizable interface displaying the menu. This saves customers from face-to-face contact with a cashier and significantly reduces service time. This is a great opportunity for the institution to save on labor. Instead of three people at the cash register, it is enough to have one employee on standby in case someone needs help with an order.

Voice and Face Authentication

Customers will increasingly be ordering voice automation technology similar to Apple’s Siri functionality at car service stations.

Companies are developing facial recognition technology that identifies customers, shows their previous orders, and allows them to pay with their face, such as at Fair Oaks Burger in Altadena, California. Customers simply ask to use PopPay, and the camera takes pictures of them and then deducts funds from the guests’ account. PopPay, which is part of PopID, began as a facial recognition system to help speed up the checkout process at the kiosks located at CaliBurger.

Deli Time, Dairi-O, Port of Subs Belcamp, and Bojangles are rolling out an existing service, PopID. Visitors are identified with a PopPay camera and charged to their account.

Financial Planning Tools

These tools help analyze the impact of weather conditions on work processes or verify the correctness of the built supply chain. Professionals can forecast scenarios to better understand their potential positive or negative impact on the company.

If a restaurant wants to increase sales by a certain percentage, these tools can be used to calculate how many employees will be needed to achieve the goal.

If restaurants better understand customer habits and can integrate this data into a single solution, customer engagement and loyalty will definitely increase. Aggregated data will tell us how customers are responding to marketing and the impact campaigns are having on the restaurant’s revenue.

Here are the examples of loyalty program implementation in the Beerpoint and John Dory apps. And this is not the only functionality there. To learn more about how you can supplement the apps that have replaced discount cards, read our article The Perfect Retailer Loyalty Program App.

For example, the combination of access to loyalty points, contactless table ordering, and online payments are the real opportunities for growth in the future.

So restaurants can use geo data to understand what day and time customers visited a certain location, and then send push notifications at the same time the next day to inform them about new offers or ask them if they want to order something the same day.

In conclusion, we would like to remind you that before introducing any technology, you should think and calculate how quickly it will pay off, or contact us for advice.