Restaurant Tech That Makes Sense.

Why the hospitality industry needs disrupting.

Having worked in several of London’s restaurants and bars throughout my university years, and beyond — I can let you in on the two main reasons the hospitality sector has, so far, lagged behind in terms of adopting technology:

1. Most hospitality based tech products are built for the consumer first: Smart-watches unlocking hotel rooms, ordering food from tabletop-interfaces… There’s usually a high up-front implementation cost, and not much real clarity in terms ROI other than additional visitors driven by the “gimmick-factor”.
2. Misfiring tech is a pain in the ass to handle during a busy shift. Even when I was working for a chain restaurant with 80+ outlets, our tech-support team consisted of one guy working remotely.

That’s why I feel the challenge for developers is to create solutions to every day problems that both the retailers and the customers face.

These solutions need to be super easy to understand and manage, while providing a very tangible incentive for the business side of the equation.

Here’s One I Baked Earlier…

So one of the companies I spent many happy years working at was Yo! Sushi.

For me, the allure of working for “Yo” was pretty obvious: They’re the only restaurant chain (that I know) who have experimented with beer-pouring robots and sushi-burgers delivered by drone!

Low-flying food at Yo! Sushi Soho.

While the day-to-day practicality of some of the aforementioned ideas are questionable, what makes a lot more sense to me is the tech that Yo! Sushi use in their day to day operations:

Everything from the “kaiten-sushi” conveyor belt, through to the bright red button that each table has, which allows customers to get the attention of the restaurant’s waiting staff.

It’s this last concept that I’ve transformed into a fun little prototype called the Yo! Button, to highlight how simple uses of technology could provide a meaningful benefit to restaurants and bars.

The idea is pretty straight-forward:

When a customer walks into a restaurant, they checkin, select their table number, and voila! They’ve got an easy way to get the attention of staff members when they want to get a refill of miso soup, or need to grab the bill and dash off.

Just think back to how many times you’ve had to wave and wait and wave to get a waiter’s attention… or how many times someone else was served before you at a bar, even though you were waiting there first. There are some definite customer pain-points out there.

But the crucial part of this concept is the return on investment for the restaurant itself.

Have a play with the prototype and see if you can spot the opportunities:

A playful way to make sure you get the service you need.

So the way I see it, the demo above opens up 5 cool opportunities:

1. It asks the user to checkin to the restaurant. This is valuable footfall data for restaurants, but also a potential “social-sharing” opportunity, which means free marketing if the customer were able to post their check-in to Facebook.
2. While customers are waiting for their server to show up, the screen is a great opportunity for some up-selling. Splash a drinks promotion that encourages a customer to order an additional drink with their food. Or how about promoting that dish with the high profit margin?
3. This could be super easy to implement. We’re talking two apps: one to call a server over, and another to alert the server to tables that need looking after. I could even see the sever’s app working well on a wearable like the Apple Watch.
4. This type of app would be great for capturing all sorts of data, such as how quickly staff are responding to customers, how often people are ordering.
5. This could be a gateway. If restaurants can encourage their patrons to adopt an app or technology, this opens the door for a whole new way of interacting: push notifications, mobile payments, easy-access promo codes… who knows!