Weekly Roundup: AI May Soon Be Coming To Restaurants And Delivery Company Adds Feature
Here’s your weekly roundup of tech related news pulled from various restaurant industry sites around the web for August 9-15, 2021.
Chefs Being Replaced by Robots?
David Bloom, chief operating and development officer of Capriotti’s Sub Shops and Wing Zone, and El Pollo Loco CEO, Bernard Acoca, discussed in Informa’s CREATE live discussion webinar how investing in people-free automated technology could be the key to meeting the on-demand needs of today’s restaurant customer. This according to Nation’s Restaurant News.
Capriotti’s and Wing Zone, began testing robotic cooking systems and are making the move from not only cashless but cashier-less operations.
“All of this technology, while they’re in the early stages, it all exists; this is not yet-to-come technology,” Bloom said. “So, AI, virtual reality, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, and face recognition technologies all exist today. What’s different today is we’re in the age of convergence: Suddenly you can get all of these technologies to talk to one another in real time.”
You can read more here.
Grubhub Announces Digital Ordering Feature
Grubhub this week announced a new assisted ordering feature, which will begin rolling out to restaurants Aug. 23. The feature replaces phone orders by giving customers three option prompts: place an order, ask questions about a previously placed order or ask any other questions.
In an article on Restaurant Dive, Grubhub has previously attempted to make changes to its phone policy to correct its issues, including the formation of a task force and the launch of a three-point plan, which included an extension of its look-back period for restaurants to review all phone orders.
Assisted ordering could finally nip the issue for good, while simultaneously streamlining the experience for both customers and restaurants. It could also help restaurants facing labor pressures by routing non-germane calls away from their staff. While restaurants cannot opt-out of the feature, the company indicates several times in its blog that a restaurant won’t be charged for customer calls routed through assisted ordering.
You can read more here.
OpenTable Adds Vaccine Requirements Option
As local regulations rapidly change due to the pandemic, diners can now utilize OpenTable to see if an individual restaurant requires COVID-19 vaccination to dine inside. See a national list of restaurants that are requiring vaccination to dine inside here.
As a part of OpenTable’s existing “Safety Precautions” feature, this new vaccine requirement option continues to allow restaurants to clearly communicate what health and safety steps they are taking in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. OpenTable aims to highlight the measures individual restaurants are taking to ease diner and worker concerns and help restaurants better serve their communities.
