Despite their novelty to the restaurant industry, robots have been around a long time. According to Eric Roberts, the former director of undergraduate studies for the Computer Science Department at Stanford, the ancient Egyptians used water-powered human-shaped carvings to automatically strike bells marking the start of every hour. In 1961, American inventor George Devol was
When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in July 1994, there were just 10,000 websites on the internet. They were only discoverable through rudimentary search engines that turned up little, if any, information relevant to the locally minded behaviors that companies have since sought to track, from ordering food from a nearby restaurant to searching for the
Back in 2011, a food technology company called Faasos began a new endeavor. To compete in the small format restaurant and delivery space, Faasos opened 75 QSRs by 2013, only to realize that small capital expenditures and low breakeven points were still not enough to scale its operations and serve its customers effectively. After getting
Off-premises ordering totaled $209 billion in 2019 according to some estimates, and the majority, 59.3%, still involved takeout for pickup. With the rise of third-party delivery platforms, more full service restaurants (FSRs) are relying on delivery to grow their sales. Looking at Figure 1 below, third-party delivery has a lot of room left to grow,
Dealing with low employee morale can be difficult for any business, but in the fast-paced world of restaurants, it can threaten to destroy both the experience of your guests and the longevity of your employees. With employee acquisition costs and turnover higher than ever, here are tips for avoiding low morale in the first place:
Drive-thrus are changing with society, with QSRs increasingly focusing on technology to improve their efficiency in a world of complex menu items and changing customer expectations. As shown in Figure 1 below, more QSRs are taking over 200 seconds to complete a drive-thru order, with wait times representing a huge hurdle for QSRs as they
Quick Response (QR) codes have been around since 1994, when a Japanese company called Denso Wave created the two-dimensional matrix barcode system to track products during manufacturing. By 2011, companies like Skanz were betting they would be the next big thing in social media, creating silicon wrist bands with unique QR codes that would direct
The acquisition of Restaurant Magic this month will increase PAR’s cloud restaurant offerings by providing more inventory management, food management, labor & scheduling, and reporting & analytics solutions to support back-of-house operations. Restaurant Magic’s Data Central Management Suite runs on Microsoft’s .Net global application framework, meaning you won’t experience compatibility issues when integrating it with
Even with more technologies to expedite orders, quick service restaurant employees are getting frustrated. In 2018, QSRs experienced a 150% turnover rate, which MIT’s Technology Review reports as being the worst since record keeping began over two decades ago. This seemingly impossible statistic means that even the people hired to replace those who left their
In the smartphone era where everything is right at your fingertips, social media serves as one of the most engaging and influential means of brand-to-customer interaction. According to PAR’s 2019 Restaurant Technology Trends Report, there are 60 million active business pages on Facebook and 3.1 billion people using social media. With so many competitors and
One of your repeat drive-thru customers just ordered 20 chicken nuggets and as they’re slowly pulling up to the pay window, a Silverado with monster wheels and flashy LEDs speeds ahead of them from the next order lane. Another health-conscious customer just got so sick of saying “no” to the double bacon cheeseburger they hear
It’s often been said a picture is worth 1,000 words, but in a world where the average attention span often rivals a goldfish is that really what we want? Restaurant designs, especially new restaurant logo designs, are your best chance to make a great first impression. Mess up that introduction, and customers may get the