After attending Hospitality Technology’s MURTEC event at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas, these were our main takeaways.
Restaurants are having a banner year
After getting kicked in the groin in 2020, consumers have been flocking to restaurants in record numbers. 2021 restaurant sales were up substantially over 2019 even, visualized in Aben below:
Cost headwinds are real
But restaurants shouldn’t get overly confident.
Food prices are already up 21% YoY, and with Russia stepping all over Ukraine, analysts expect food prices to rise another 20% this year.
Will food dollars start flowing back into grocery like they did in 2020? How do restaurants then intelligently predict where to reposition?
A proverbial canary would surely be delivery: who can afford a huge premium on delivery in addition to the marked increase on the underlying item? For example, if a burger goes from $10 to $18, delivery will likely also rise from $8 to $16.
How many people are going to pay $34 for a delivered burger, especially as their wallet gets hit in every other part of life?
Labor continues to be front and center on people’s minds. Brands are increasingly considering automation to lower costs and provide higher operational confidence.
Brinker shared their story of using Rita, a robot from from Bear Robotics, as a host, to deliver food to tables, and to bus dirty dishes. More brands were talking about back of house automation as well.
Technology heralded as a panacea
Jon Taffer – a conference keynote – noted that technology fixes many of these ails.
There’s some truth to this, but all that glitters is not gold.
With the costs of producing technology falling, there is a seemingly infinite number of gadgets for restaurants to spend their money on.
Some deliver ROI, some promise to eventually deliver ROI, and some are tenuous at best.
It’s getting harder for restaurants to sort the wheat from the chaff, and demands on operator time are higher than they’ve ever been, implying that less diligence is likely undertaken in choosing tech solutions.
This is where consultants (the list maintained by Restaurant Technology Network, the membership community tied to MURTEC) can help operators arrive at better decisions in a more efficient manner.
Tech companies vs product features
Compounding tech confusion was the observation that it was hard to discern between a truly innovative tech company that could be a stand-alone business, and a tech feature that would accrete to a larger, existing provider.
For example, just about every cloud SMB POS company offers QR ordering. Some QR ordering solutions have even gone the other way, building a POS around their QR ordering feature, recognizing the fundamental change in data flow as consumers use their devices.
Somewhere in between the ends of the spectrum will be a lot of carcasses, as there can only be so many QR ordering tools a merchant will use.
The same could be said for many of many different solution categories.
This only makes it more difficult for operators.
Restaurant martech is still early stages
It was clear that larger restaurant brands are still in the early innings of building their customer data infrastructure while smaller operators are generally even further behind. It’s great that there’s finally recognition of the need to collect and use data for decision making, although restaurants are still a decade + behind retail.
As part of related side conversations, it sounds like Toast might finally share cardholder data that belongs to their merchants with… the merchant.
Yea.
Hopefully this trickles downstream to all Toast merchants but we won’t hold our breath.
All in all it was good to see people in-person, and kudos to the Restaurant Technology Network for executing Start-Up Alley at MURTEC and supporting innovation. By and large venture capitalists eschew solutions that focus on the restaurant vertical so if the industry doesn’t foster its own innovation few others will.
Add comment