Trends That Will Shape The Restaurant Industry
We all know the 1985 movie ‘Back to the Future’. Time travel is possible as long as you have a Flux Capacitor — the technology invented in 1955 by Doc Brown, played by Christopher Loyd in the movie. The main character Marty McFly played by Michael J. Fox accidentally travels back to 1955 in the time machine invented by the Doc. Marty ends up stuck in the past and has to convince the Doc to help him get back to the future. It is much like IT trying to convince Restaurant Operations about the benefits of implementing new technology. It can be very difficult at first, and it feels like you traveled through time before everyone is happy and the decision is finally made.
Check This Out: Food and beverage technology trends
Since we have the Flux Capacitor let’s go back in time to the intersection of technology and the restaurant industry. In order to alter the space-time continuum jump into my 1980’s stainless steel DeLorean, rev up the 1.21-gigawatt nuclear power plant and let’s take a trip back to the future.
Check out: Top POS System Companies
Let’s see, I believe the first stop is at the turn of the century when the first fast-food restaurant was created by a company called Horn and Hardart. The restaurants were called Automats, where attendants would push food through the back of a bank of vending machines. Customers inserted coins and selected sandwiches, soups, entrees, drinks, and desserts.
- Check This Out: Food and beverage technology trends
Vending machine technology merged with a cafeteria to produce fast food. Who would have thought so?
Restaurant technology for the first three-quarters of the 20th century was limited to process improvements and kitchen equipment developments.
All accounting, bookkeeping, distribution, fulfillment, was done manually for a good part of the century. Cash registers were basically large manual adding machines with a cash drawer. Mid-century, the first modern-era computer was created in 1946, the Eniac computer. It used vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tons, took up 1800 square feet and it could perform 385 multiplication operations per second. Pretty cool isn’t it? Your smartphone today can perform 100 million.
McDonald's was one of the first to introduce a touchpad terminal that had buttons for burgers, fries, and shakes
The next stop is the year 1955 and Ray Kroc opened the first of his McDonalds with the Speedee Service System. This system streamlined workflows in the kitchen to mass-produce a limited menu of hamburgers, fries, and shakes. The technology was called Business Process Optimization (BPO) but back then they just called it mass production. Over 300 billion sold and counting, modern-day fast food was born It wasn’t until the 1970’s that a microprocessor-based POS was born. And as you would expect McDonald's was one of the first to introduce it.
Check This Out: Food and beverage technology trends
It was a touchpad terminal that had buttons for burgers, fries, shakes, etc. It could accumulate totals, calculate tax, total and print the check. After all we just landed on the moon, invented Velcro and Tang. Our technology was very impressive. What else did we need? Fast forward forty years to today. New innovations in restaurant technology are occurring at a dizzying pace. POS systems are still primarily an order entry device. An essential point in the restaurant operation, where totals are accumulated and orders are distributed much like the earlier models. Though the constant need to improve has led us to Mobile Payment Systems, POS in the cloud, Handheld POS, POS on Tablet computers, POS in Kiosk’s, Tabletop POS, POS in an App, and POS in your Smartphone.
Yes, we finally figured out how to better utilize those 100 flops. Actually, when ordering food on your smartphone there is no real need to perform massive amounts of calculations. But it’s nice to know you could if you wanted to.
Benefits of Big Data in Restaurants:
The food and beverage industry is no stranger to the use of big data to analyze customer engagement and choices, and successful marketing strategies. Smaller, independent restaurants that are unable to gather sufficient data by themselves frequently rely on external factors to see things in a certain way, such as larger bookings in the holiday season. By analyzing their data larger restaurants can find patterns and trends in their data much more easily.
Restaurant management
Big data aids the restaurant world in the following ways:
- Self-Promotion — Big data analysis helps restaurants track the effectiveness of special offers. It also helps in personalizing the customers and tracking their bookings and preferences, thus predicting the effectiveness of an offer in drawing them back to the restaurant. By observing and analyzing customer choices, restaurants can set up loyalty programs that customers can register for. These loyalty programs are largely used for data attribution.
Check This Out: Food and beverage technology trends
• Improving the Menu — Big data analysis not only helps in tracking the popular menu choices but also the unpopular ones. This can lead to introspection on part of the staff to understand the reason for its unpopularity, which might range from reasons like being too unfamiliar for the regular restaurant-goers in that location to not having enough options in a certain cuisine, which makes people venture elsewhere for more variety in the same, or simply that the restaurant’s expertise lies elsewhere.
- Maintaining Sufficient Stock — The popularity of a certain dish could shoot up during a certain season, causing an increase in consumption of a wine that pairs well with it. People might lean towards different menu options in different seasons. By analyzing trends, big data helps in predicting customer orders, and hence allows the restaurant to stock up sufficiently both on the ingredients and sides for the same.
See Also:
- Check This Out: Food and beverage technology trends
- Check This Out: Restaurants are Ripe for Innovation
- Check This Out: Back to the Future: The Intersection of Technology and the Restaurant Industry
