So far, 2020 has certainly been a year. How you define it from there really depends on if you’re a glass half-empty or half-full kind of person. For the restaurant industry, one word comes to mind: resilient. Not to describe the year, but all the courageous hard work of essential team members and restaurant operators
For decades, the drive-thru lane has been the gold standard for speed in foodservice. In a matter of minutes, your local fast-food burger joint can take your order, prepare it, and have a piping hot bag of food in your hands. With the coronavirus only just starting to loosen its grip on the United States,
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has already paralyzed our daily lives. As people are re-adjusting their lifestyle from buying daily essentials in-store to shopping online, businesses are also re-calibrating their processes to this changing consumer behavior. In the QSR industry, as more people choose to stay home, increase social distancing, carryout and request delivery, it means
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
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
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
Scenario A It’s 8am, and you opt to evade the usual morning coffee rush by placing a mobile order. You enter the coffee shop only to find your latte lukewarm, sitting on the counter for 10 minutes already. Scenario B After placing your mobile order, you arrive at the coffee shop, join a crowd of
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