Technology hits a restaurant icon

restaurant icon

Technology hits a restaurant icon

5 minutes

Route 66 was constructed to address a need created by an emerging technology: the rise of the auto in the United States. When completed in 1926, the highway gave motorists quick passage (at the time) from Chicago to Los Angeles. This transportation shift also gave rise to another innovation. In 1947, Red's Giant Hamburg in Missouri opened the first drive-thru window so customers could pick up their food without leaving their car.

This year the drive thru turns 70, and its influence on the food business is staggering. Americans made 12.4 billion trips to the drive thru in 2016, according to a QSR magazine study, which said that quick service restaurants routinely generate 60–70 percent of their business through the outdoor lane. McDonald’s alone reported that the drive thru accounted for 70 percent of its U.S. sales last year.

Driverless cars, mobile and automation

Tech continues to shape the drive-thru with the biggest changes yet to come. One force is the auto industry. By 2030, around a quarter of all miles driven in the U.S. could be in shared autonomous electric vehicles, according to research. Already technology providers are looking at ways driverless cars could change the food business. More immediately, mobile communications, and automated supply chain advances are spurring shifts.

Forecasting food’s future tech

At September’s FSTec restaurant industry food show, where I delivered a keynote presentation on integrated solutions shaping food service, audience questions covered everything from mobility to connected kitchen strategies. Here are a few ideas.

Ever approach the drive-thru in the middle of a rainstorm? You and everybody else. At America’s drive thrus, bottlenecks are often inevitable, and companies are introducing technologies to serve customers what they want when they want it.

Innovation at Habitat Burger Grill

A few years ago, a chargrilled burger from The Habit Burger Grill, a nationwide fast-casual restaurant concept that specializes in fresh ingredients, was named the “best tasting burger in America.” To accommodate growing interest in its food, The Habit Burger Grill opened drive-thru windows.

To handle the numbers of people who want to use the outdoor lanes, the company introduced a careful mix of planning and technology. It turned to Panasonic Toughbooks to take orders from customers while they wait in the drive-thru line. This gives restaurant employees multiple points to take orders instead of relying on the traditional microphone and menu setup. By having employees move up and the down the line while cars wait, ordering and drive-thru pickup is faster.

DQ’s experience

In Texas, select Dairy Queen restaurants have moved toward putting the entire ordering process into customer’s hands. By providing Panasonic’s solution for self-service touch-screen kiosks, the company has put the power to fully customize orders directly into the hands of their tech-savvy customers. Now customers can place and pay for their orders on self-service kiosks. This frees up staff to more quickly complete orders.

For many food franchisees, profit nirvana is the connected kitchen, which links technologies in the front of the house—including drive-thru windows and kiosks—to automation systems in the back. Robotics is one area garnering excitement. More immediately, tech companies are leveraging other forms of automation—such as algorithms and artificial intelligence—to create solutions to repetitive tasks, like predictive maintenance on a deep fryer so food oil is ordered and changed just in time.

For more on how technology is reshaping the restaurant business, read The Future of the Drive Thru: Overcoming Choke Points.

Authors
Jeff Pinc - Director of Food Services at Panasonic
Pinc has more than 15 years experience in the QSR industry.

How a McDonald’s franchisee turns big data into big productivity gains

FSTECmcDs

How a McDonald’s franchisee turns big data into big productivity gains

4 minutes

In the food, beverage and restaurant business, recipes are some of most jealously guarded trade secrets. McDonald’s franchise owner/operator Bill Chao has a secret sauce developed after several years of experience running a number of restaurants, thorough research, and making adjustments to achieve success. And he’s sharing it.  

Mr. Chao’s secret sauce involves a software solution that allows him to analyze the data for all of his four restaurants across Canada from one location. Since implementing Panasonic’s Clearview software solution, he has seen an annual cumulative average of a 2% reduction in operating costs per restaurant and a reduction in the time it takes owners to analyze business information. Meanwhile, he said his restaurants are seeing a revenue growth of about 7-8% per year. 

From individual binders to a dashboard

It hasn’t always been that way. Mr. Chao remembers a time when he would have to travel to each restaurant individually and pilfer through binders of printed Excel sheets if he wanted to examine the back-office records of his locations. At that point, the operations at Mr. Chao’s restaurants relied on old software and that made management of multiple restaurants tricky. The backbone was a DOS-based software that held data on individual restaurants on independent systems, which could not be accessed without traveling to each location.

Meanwhile McDonald’s Canada was encouraging its successful owner/owner operators to expand their franchise business by opening even more locations. Mr. Chao was almost ready, but there was one thing he knew he would need to make this next step in his business a reality—a back office software solution that would allow him to analyze the data his restaurants from one location. 

He investigated the best options and not long after implemented Clearview’s Human Resource Information System under a corporate initiative, which allowed restaurants to move from reporting their labor statistics on paper to the computer. This enabled them to digitally manage employee’s timecards and hours and integrate the payroll system—and make better decisions by analyzing the collective data. Mr. Chao saw two quick benefits: Labor control improvements and the ability to more accurately manage employee information. That meant cost savings and other benefits such as employee satisfaction growth. 

Similar to our recent success story with a Dairy Queen franchisee, Mr. Chao found success in analyzing the data collected with the solution. Danny Shulman, who now serves as Manager of Application Development at McDonald’s in Canada, would go on to other franchisees like Mr. Chao as they modernized back office operations. Working with owner/operators as they implemented Clearview for their own restaurants helped Mr. Shulman develop a model for McDonald’s Canada corporate locations to implement Clearview at their own restaurants. “With those types of activities, having a back office application that provides data from anywhere at any time is obviously useful,” Mr. Shulman said.

To learn more how McDonald’s Canada took Bill Chao’s success and implemented Clearview, read our case study.

Nowadays there are also sorts of applications delivering data—from point of sales systems to online platforms to self-service kiosks. Like Mr. Chao, savvy managers and franchisees in the restaurant industry are using this insight, culled from hundreds if not thousands of sources, to make smart decisions. They’re turning to end-to-end connected restaurant solutions to move people through lines faster (or eliminate lines altogether), get the right menu items and messages in front of customers at the right time, automate kitchen processes to better use staff, and improve operations in countless ways—in large part thanks to rich data. 

Much like Mr. Chao, technology leaders in food service, hospitality & retail increasingly rely on disruptive technologies to accelerate their businesses. They’re investing to improve things like personalization and communication, and see a time when artificial intelligence will play a critical role in their business. These industries and others are adopting 10 leading disruptive technologies expected to generate trillions in economic value in the decade ahead. Panasonic is deeply engaged in these technologies. We believe that connecting them into integrated solutions is essential to creating entirely new experiences. To understand the role they play in other organizations, Panasonic Corporation of North America commissioned a new research series, Moving Forward, on how disruptive technologies are impacting businesses, government agencies and entire industries.

Food service, hospitality & retail firms are especially bullish on artificial intelligence (AI), which can help them better understand the needs and behavior of their customers. Learn more about how tech leaders see disruptive technologies impacting restaurants and other businesses in Moving Forward. 
 

Authors
Che Baird - National Business Development Manager - QSR/Retail Solutions at Panasonic Canada

Kiosks are king for Dairy Queen franchisee

FSTEC 2018 NEW

Kiosks are king for Dairy Queen franchisee

5 minutes

When Michael Clarke jumped to the forefront of Dairy Queen franchises that had introduced Panasonic’s self-service kiosks in his location, he took the opportunity to analyze the ensuing data. The results of this connected restaurant solution, he said, speak for themselves. One of the most positive distinctions of the kiosk program is the increase of the average check size per order, he said. Across the two of his eight locations that piloted the kiosks, the average check is 35 to 40 percent higher on the kiosks in comparison to counter and drive-thru orders.

“That’s one of the most common Key Performance Indicators that the QSR industry looks at: What is the average check and how can we lift that,” Mr. Clarke said. “So, when you find something that works like the kiosks, it’s just a truth whether you compare it to the same store’s drive-thru or counter – before or after implementation – it’s consistently higher every time.”

Location, Location, Location

But, not only did the data indicate the pilot was a success—it also highlighted areas for improvement. This meant reassessing where the kiosks were placed in the store in order to best drive customer traffic to them and maximize the amount of visitors that would utilize this technology. During the first phase of the kiosk pilot program, Clarke didn’t deploy free-standing kiosks because he wanted to defer the expense and disruption until he had the data to warrant the investment and minimal re-model. As a soft launch, Panasonic installed self-service tablets on the countertop. When Clarke’s company, Lickety Split Food Services, launch the kiosk technology across all its restaurants in Q4 2018, it is opting for the free-standing kiosks.

The plan is to place the kiosks in the lobby of the restaurant so that customers approach the kiosk prior to the front counter. Clarke does not plan to reduce the number of service staff, rather his team will be trained to assist guests in how to use the kiosk and spend more time interacting (and less time transacting) with guests. Explains Clarke, “The kiosks have proven that they will drive a significantly higher check and that those guests using them have an overall satisfaction similar to or greater than those placing their orders directly with staff.”

Similar to Mr. Clarke, technology leaders in food service, hospitality & retail increasingly rely on disruptive technologies to accelerate their businesses. They’re investing to improve things like personalization and communication, and see a time when artificial intelligence will play a critical role in their business. These industries and others are adopting 10 leading disruptive technologies expected to generate trillions in economic value in the decade ahead. 

Panasonic is deeply engaged in these technologies. We believe that connecting them into integrated solutions is essential to creating entirely new experiences. To understand the role they play in other organizations, Panasonic Corporation of North America commissioned a new research series, Moving Forward, on how disruptive technologies are impacting businesses, government agencies and entire industries.

Food service, hospitality & retail firms are especially bullish on artificial intelligence (AI), which can help them better understand the needs and behavior of their customers. Learn more about how tech leaders see disruptive technologies impacting restaurants and other businesses in Moving Forward. 

And for more information on how Michael Clarke improved outcomes for his Dairy Queen locations, read our case study.

Authors
Faisal Pandit - Senior Vice President & Chief Digital Officer of Panasonic System Solutions Company of North America