Technology and the Human Touch in Delivery and Hospitality Operations
On June 27, TechTable and Culinary Agents hosted a TechTable Talk in Chicago. We were joined by Chicago-area industry pros Mark Wilson from Fast Company, GrubHub SVP Operations Stan Chia, Kevin Boehm, Co-Founder, Boka Restaurant Group, Nick Kokonas, Co-Founder and Co-Owner, The Alinea Group and Tock, and Kimberly Galban, Partner and VP of Operations for One Off Hospitality Group. The talk, which focused on delivery, new operations technology, scalability, and the importance of collaboration between technical and guest-facing teams in a restaurant.
First, Wilson interviewed Chia one-on-one on the white hot topic of delivery; its challenges, opportunities, and future. Then, Culinary Agents founder Alice Cheng moderated a restaurant ops-focused discussion. Below, four inspiring revelations that emerged from the discussion.
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Food technology is growing and becoming more refined, but that doesn’t eliminate real-life logistical challenges — like traffic.
Chia shares one of the biggest challenges to the hospitality-tech space: the inconveniences of everyday life that technology can’t — or hasn’t been able to — solve. Because GrubHub is a delivery business, it’s subject to traffic delays and parking restrictions — things that are hard to predict and even harder to adjust for. His solution: working with restaurant partners to understand and manage every possible aspect. “Our vision is that chefs make the product and we get it to consumers hands exactly the way they want. That means we have to consider things like the amount of time food can be sitting at the restaurant. We have to understand accuracy, exactly how long it takes a restaurant to make the food. We do temperature studies, monitor stability in vehicles, and are trying to tackle the humidity problem: How do you deliver fries and not have them be soggy?” (We agree, this is a toughie!)
“Hungry people have very different expectations,” Chia continues. “All of this is built into how we solve the very hard problem of delivering a hot meal, and I think we do that well.”
Developers must build tools for the businesses and people that use them.
Collaboration between operations and restaurant technology is essential, and there is no substitute for empathy and experience on the floor. As a product developer, it’s too easy to go head-down in your work, but don’t forget who you’re building for. Restaurants operate with varying levels of tech savvy, but all are looking to streamline or otherwise improve their business. “I got into the restaurant business having never been in the restaurant business,” says Kokonas. “I assumed there would be a lot of really advanced systems.” He was surprised to find that wasn’t the case, and as a result, he leveraged his trading background to eventually build his own internal solutions.
“We had partners still comfortable with taking reservations by hand,” adds Galban. “To intro any technology was a big change.”
For any technology to be worth adopting, especially in an environment where changing any system or process requires training and staff cooperation, it must be easy to use (or at least not challenging to learn), consistent, and, ideally, adaptable to different types of circumstances. “When we pick a system, we pick a system that we can use everywhere,” says Boehm, speaking of Boka Group’s 13 restaurants.
Kokonas talks about the way his team develops products, noting the time an engineer was embedded into the restaurant and noticed the staff constantly texting each other during service. Immediately, he realized that the browser-based table management software the team was building needed to have a chat window. So, it does. This sort of collaboration, which is standard practice for Tock, means the technical team takes direct feedback from restaurant operations team. This step has become integral to their business and success.
This advice goes for those building the software restaurants use, but sometimes it makes more sense for restaurants to build their own. The most famous example: the Tock ticketing system, built for the Alinea Group. “I had a lot of people tell me it would never work. Then they told me it would never work for fine dining, we did it anyway, and it worked for Alinea. Then, they said it only worked for Alinea because we were a special case. But then we had 17 other restaurants around the country call us. We gave them this software with no support and it worked in those 17 other restaurants, too.” The moral of this story: Kokonas says they succeeded because they adapted to the needs of the actual users and the industry. And then they convinced people the world wouldn’t collapse if they changed something.
The evolution of tech products is happening now, and operators want centralized tools.
We’ve reached a consensus that technology helps and enhances the hospitality experience, when done right. The first versions of restaurant tech are becoming outdated, and operators are right to want (and expect) streamlined experiences that mirror what we’re used to seeing in the world.“There’s a reason that POS systems don’t talk to booking systems,” says Kokonas, speaking about outdated, siloed technology. “They’re old. And at the end of the day if you have to service 10 versions of your software and it’s not web-based and not in the cloud, you’re going to have a hard time, no matter who you are.” Outdated, inert infrastructure stands in the way of much-needed flexibility in these cases — many old operating systems can’t be updated easily without an entire system upheaval, which is a significant commitment for a restaurant to make.
Boehm adds, “If you ask a company why they’re doing something a certain way and they say it’s because they’ve always done it that way — that’s a sign of a dying company.” The most successful new tech his team adopted, “helped us look at the company from a macro perspective, stop being micromanagers, and start being macromanagers.”
“There’s so much opportunity right now,” adds Galban, noting that her restaurant group currently uses 23 (and counting!) different systems. There’s room for a few key players in the space, though any industry leader should aim to provide a full service — not just one or two elements per product. This is part of the internal growth process too, she says. “We need to consider all of these systems and figure out what’s wasting time right now.”
Kokonas has an informed prediction for the future. “Search and social is the way to discovery. Everything that we’re building is integration with social media and search,” he says.
Hospitality still requires the human touch first. Technology should enhance hospitality, not stand in its way.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about hospitality, that personal touch, the warmth,” says Galban. “I’d rather be with the people talking to them and not on a system and looking at what the numbers tell me.” This is a great reminder that people are the most important component to a successful hospitality business.
“There’s an arms race now,” says Chia. “For us, the arms race isn’t just acquiring diners, it’s acquiring drivers.” Representing chefs and restaurants is paramount, he adds. “We want to make sure restaurants have a voice and identity on our platform. We want to represent them in a superior way, and we consider how we can allow them to represent themselves the way they want to.” That said, Chia did have some fascinating insight into how GrubHub might use drones in the not-too-far future. “There’s opportunity outside of the traditional drone that takes food from point to point.” He, again, notes the traffic and parking problems in Chicago’s Loop. “What if we could program drones to bring food from the restaurant out to the car? This is a tough but important step that we can automate in an interesting way.”
“All three of our restaurant groups are thriving in our own niches,” says Kokonas of he and his co-speakers. “The reason that we’re all here and have these problems is because we are thriving.”
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