From fine dining to fast-casual, new technologies are helping food-service businesses to survive and thrive.
Christine de Wendel, U.S. CEO at sunday
Running a food-service business isn’t for the faint-hearted: even before the COVID-19 crisis, one in three new restaurants didn’t survive their first year. Layer on a global pandemic, of course, and the going gets even tougher. During 2020, U.S. restaurants saw revenues plunge by $240 billion, and over 110,000 restaurants were forced to close their doors, leaving 8 million employees out of work.
To survive, restaurateurs have been forced to find new ways to serve customers. About half of all restaurants — across every category, from fine dining to fast casual — have made new investments in technology during the pandemic, helping them to provide online ordering, curbside pickup, and other services designed to help keep the doors open during these turbulent times.
Now, restaurants are starting to transition out of crisis mode — and leveraging and building on those pandemic tech investments could be key to their continuing success. As food-service businesses reintroduce themselves to customers who crave in-person dining — or who’ve simply grown tired of takeout and home cooking — they’ll need to deliver safe, streamlined, elegant experiences. Here are three ways tech can drive success for food-service businesses in the post-pandemic era:
1. Improved customer experiences
After over a year of Grubhub and Doordash, customers are bored with staying home — but they want stellar real-world experiences delivered with the streamlined convenience of these all-too-familiar click-to-order food services. Fortunately, many restaurants responded to the pandemic by investing in customer-facing tech: about half added digital menus that can be accessed by QR code during 2020, while 40% added contactless payment options.
Customers are paying attention: almost a third of diners now say they’d choose a restaurant offering mobile payment services over one that doesn’t. Importantly, it’s not just young, digital-native diners who appreciate these technologies: the pandemic made us all more tech-savvy, and created a broad appetite for tools that make dining experiences safer, easier, and more enjoyable.
Importantly that tech doesn’t just help customers; smart tech solutions can also help waiters, managers, and chefs to do their jobs better. Digital reservations, ordering, and payment systems reduce the potential for errors, and free up valuable staff time for cooking, cleaning, and checking in on diners. Armed with these technologies, restaurants are finding it easier to consistently deliver exceptional dining experiences.
2. Hassle-free implementation
The first digital technologies used in the food-service industry often required major up-front investments and complex infrastructural overhauls. Today, that’s changed: SaaS tools enable restaurants to drop in sophisticated solutions — from online menus to digital transaction tools — with virtually no setup costs or other complications.
Better yet, both service staff and managers are now digital natives, so transitioning teams onto new digital tools is easier than ever, and actually improves the employee experience. The hospitality industry has already realized that tech investments are key to retaining talent, and a similar trend is now playing out in the food-service space. As restaurants reopen, service workers will gravitate toward employers that use tech to make their work easier, safer, and more fulfilling.
All this means that restaurants’ focus on tech during the pandemic is paying big dividends: establishments that invested in online ordering, contactless payment, or digital tools for takeout and curbside services can now easily implement on-premise tech, adapting existing tools without the need for additional infrastructure. Restaurants don’t have to build from the ground up: they can just look at the investments they’ve already made, and extend them into the real-world dining experience. It really is that simple.
3. Bottom-line benefits
Two-thirds of quick-service restaurants and over three-quarters of fine dining establishments say they’ll be keeping at least some of the changes implemented during the pandemic in place as they look to the future. It’s easy to see why: digital tech drives efficiencies that yield real bottom-line results, at precisely the moment in which restaurants need to keep costs low, turn tables faster, and maximize revenues.
That’s especially important as restaurants reopen their doors to in-person diners, while simultaneously grappling with the complexities of recruiting and rehiring staff in the midst of a labor shortage. For today’s food-service brands, the ability to maintain high standards with limited resources has never been more important — and smart, robust tech is a key part of the solution to that problem.
This isn’t just about keeping costs low in order to weather the continuing storm — it’s about positioning restaurants for maximal growth and profitability as the economy recovers. Restaurants that maintain and lean into their tech investments will be best-placed to catch the coming economic tailwinds, and to build vibrant and enduring businesses in the months and years to come.
Thriving, not just surviving
Of course, there are further challenges in store for the food-service industry, and many restaurants are still fighting simply to survive. The good news, though, is that restaurants’ customers remain highly invested in their success. Some 92% of U.S. consumers worry about their favorite businesses closing due to the pandemic, and 60% have already seen restaurants in their neighborhoods permanently close their doors.
As the recovery continues, those customers will put their money where their mouths are, and turn out in droves to dine in-person at their favorite restaurants. There’s enormous pent-up demand for the full spectrum of in-person food-service experiences ranging from elegant celebratory meals to popping out for a quick bite, and restaurants that can provide safe, pleasant, and engaging experiences can count on plenty of business in coming months.
To take full advantage of the surge in in-person dining, restaurants need to take this opportunity to reintroduce themselves to customers, and remind them just how great a good meal can be. There’s no better way to achieve that than by using new technologies to deliver the best possible experiences, from making the initial reservation right through to paying the check. Restaurants that get this right will be best-positioned not just to survive, but to thrive and drive lasting success in the post-pandemic era.
Christine de Wendel is the Co-Founder and U.S. CEO at sunday, a disruptive new payment technology provider for the hospitality industry.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.