Hey, this is The Table Turn. If you like espresso martinis and getting caught in the rain, this is the restaurant newsletter for you.

Here's what we're serving today:

• Online Ordering Revolution 🖥️

• Heinz Remix 🍅

• Sweetgreen Unveils Robotic Restaurant: The Future is Served 🤖

• Taiwanese Pizza Huts 🤯

Online Ordering Revolution

This week, our spotlight shines on the pressing necessity for independent restaurants to integrate online ordering systems, in a bid to remain competitive and relevant.

Digital Renaissance Online ordering has seen an exponential growth in popularity, and restaurants must adapt swiftly. Thankfully, companies like Lunchbox.io, Toast, and Bento are offering innovative solutions designed to catapult independent establishments into the digital sphere, facilitating them to compete on an even playing field with larger chains.

Key Features These service providers offer an array of attributes designed to enhance the online ordering experience. They provide intuitive platforms for ease of use, integration with established delivery services such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, comprehensive sales tracking and analysis tools, and marketing capabilities to expand customer reach.

An In-Depth Look Lunchbox.io offers a white-label platform, allowing restaurants to craft an online ordering experience that reflects their brand. Toast, on the other hand, blends in a cloud-based point-of-sale system for efficient order and payment management. Bento comes forth with a user-friendly mobile ordering app designed for the modern, on-the-go customer.

Harnessing the Power of Data Beyond their order-taking capabilities, these providers offer invaluable insights through data collection, tracking, and analytics. This can guide strategic decision-making, impacting marketing efforts and overall business performance positively.

Data-Informed Marketing Strategy Restaurants can leverage collected data for precisely targeted marketing campaigns. The tracking tools offered by these companies can gauge the effectiveness of these campaigns, offering real-time, tangible metrics. Through attribution, businesses can identify the marketing channels driving the most engagement and conversion. Pixel tracking allows for nuanced customer behavior analysis, further enhancing campaign effectiveness.

Best Practices For maximum benefit, ensure data is accurate and regularly updated. Choose tools that align with your restaurant's needs and budgetary allowances. Patience is key – substantial data accumulation is required for meaningful analysis and insight generation.

Engaging Customers Directly Leveraging these data insights, restaurants can devise strategies to motivate customers to order directly, rather than via third-party delivery services. Offering discounts, creating personalized experiences, streamlining the ordering process, and delivering exceptional customer service are integral elements of this strategy.

Additional Considerations To optimize the online ordering experience, your digital platforms should be mobile-friendly. Offer a broad range of payment options to cater to diverse customer preferences. Ensure your menu is current and comprehensive. Actively promote your online ordering platform through various channels.

By adopting these strategies, restaurants can steer customers away from third-party services, thereby reducing commission expenses, enhancing customer satisfaction, and ultimately, bolstering sales.

Heinz Remix

In a twist we didn’t see coming, Heinz dropped the Heinz REMIX. Like a Coke Freestyle for sauces, this machine is a saucy DJ, blending up to 200 unique sauce mixes! We're a little bit skeptical...surely, the long-term play here is collecting consumer data? Which the company could then use to gain insights into different markets which could inform future CPG products. But the question we have is will customers actually want to pay for condiments? Soda is one thing as Coke has clearly proven, but we're not so sure customers will pay a premium for a side of slighlty chipotle ranch? Debuting this month at the National Restaurant Show, will this novelty prove to be a spicy addition for restaurants? Only time will tell.

p.s. one thing we're very into though is some of their ketchup merch

Sweetgreen Unveils Robotic Restaurant: The Future is Served

Two years post-acquiring Spyce, Sweetgreen launches the Infinite Kitchen in Naperville, Illinois. Mixing efficiency with technology, their automated system is designed to deliver a fresh, custom experience with a touch of human hands.

This is some major news, while we anticipated Sweetgreen rolling this out for some time, we don't think the industry has fully grasped how this is going to change the fast casual game. This is the first "real" rollout of a fully automated solution of this kind and at the scale of Sweetgreen, it won't be long until these types of technology start popping up in many other chains in the space. We're looking at you Chipotle, Panda Express, etc 👀

What we're really looking forward to though is when similar tech companies start bringing these solutions to independent restaurants. We think there is a not so distant future when most kitchens will be able to leverage these tools to become more efficient and profitable.

Pizza Hut Taiwan: Another Level

Yes, those are Oreos and fried calamari on a pizza...

Get ready to plunge into pizzas laden with a smorgasbord of ingredients you'd never dream of. Octopus? Check. Salmon roses? Yep. Fermented soybeans? Absolutely. It's a smoky, salty, sea-filled fiesta on a slice. On this week's episode of The Dave Chang Show, Chang marvels at the wildly creative, borderline insane topping combinations. There are certainly some combos we'd jump at the chance to try but most of these are a hard pass.

that's all for today...

keep em' turnin 👊,

the table turn crew