5 Ways Technology is Directing Food into Your Face
Changing societal norms are driving the food business to innovate beyond the classic sit-down-and-eat experience.
The history of dining has seen a variety of experiences grace its multitude of menus. From 5-Star fine dining to drive-in fast food; we’ve been served an abundance of different ways to cater to each of our own unique pallets.
Many restaurants are finding themselves on the technological horizon.
It’s eat or be eaten in this world, both figuratively and literally. Only those businesses that learn to adapt their routines will be able to preserve a seat at our selective dinner table.
I’d like to explore the startups that are helping restaurants maintain relevance, and others that are bringing meal-preparation back into our homes.
1. Food from Doorstep to Dinner table
For many of us, the restaurant experience is stifled by inconvenience. The ability to have food in your hands without leaving your home is growing at an exponential rate.
We’ve all got at least one of these delivery apps on our phone. Whether it’s Grubhub, Uber Eats, Seamless, Caviar, DoorDash, Postmates… the list goes on and on.
We’re over 5 years removed from when Tacocopter delivered its first taco by drone, and we all know that with great innovation comes acquisition.
Grubhub’s recent acquisition of LevelUp, which does online ordering and customer loyalty, allows the company to corner the market on the food delivery fulfillment space. Businesses can build their own ordering app through LevelUp or facilitate ordering through Grubhub’s delivery network, which includes Yelp as of late last year.
There’s many small businesses looking to take a stand against Grubhub’s absurdly high fees. One company helping in this fight is Slice, which is looking to carve out a section of the pizza market segment, without carving as much revenue from the pizzerias as Grubhub does.
Either way you slice it, there’s no doubt that all this competition will help bring food to our desks, dens, and doorstops at ever-accelerating rates.
2. Ditch the Servers, Order on your Own
Let’s take a step outside, and into the restaurants, where our ordering experience is changing drammatically.
You’ve probably already seen it first-hand at some of the more frequented fast food restaurants. McDonald’s is looking to replace cashiers with kiosks in an effort to combat rising minimum wage, while also appealing to the growing customer sentiment that is “anti-commotion”.
No longer will patrons need to perform the dance that comes along with reciting an order to a cashier. That’s the same cashier that you realized, while you are already halfway home, forgot your side order of fries.
Instead, restaurants are stepping in with systems that are automated enough so that you can customize and place your order without stepping foot on line.
7 Day Weekend, a new Vegan concept from the same folks that brought us Bareburger, is allowing its guests to purchase their meal directly from their phone and have it delivered right to their table.
In this way, the restaurant is enabling a new type of relationship; one where the only thing that stands between its guests and the chef is a smartphone.
3. Bring the Chef home with you
Exploration isn’t just limited to inside the restaurant, as more and more people are turning themselves into their own personal chefs.
Services like Blue Apron, AmazonFresh and HelloFresh are titans in this space. If customization and personalization are what you desire in a meal, then look no further than doing it yourself.
Even Martha Stewart has entered the space with Marley Spoon, in a further mission to make her branded recipes and products become a staple in your home.
4. Leftovers without the Main Course
If fresh food isn’t as much as a selling point to you as reducing waste, then you still have options thanks to Food for All.
The service allows its users to purchase excess food that didn’t sell on restaurant tables, at slashed prices.
Innovation in the restaurant space is not only motivated by cost and convenience, but it is also can be guided by reusability and sustainability.
5. Tinder for your Next Meal
Lastly, if anyone who has ever been plagued by the repeating question of “What are we eating today?”, there’s an app for that.
The aptly titled “What We Eating Today” is an app which aims to close the gap that indecisiveness creates between restaurants and all of us.
The service currates 4+ starred restaurants from Yelp that are open now near you, based off your food and price preferences. Then it returns to you a random restaurant from this pool every spin.
The more you spin, the more choices that it spits out for you until you’ve found your restaurant match. Where online ordering and automated kiosks facilitate delivering the customer’s desires, apps like these help the customer find out what they desire in the first place.
As we see restaurants make upgrades to their menus, their interior, and their ordering systems, we should look out for more apps like this that help us discover all that fancy technology.
