Starbucks doubling down on delivery, Smart cooler doors and pizza subscription vlogs
All these headlines and more represent our thoughts and views on the world of restaurants, technology and off premise food in our round up of the last week’s hot news stories - subscribe today to the Monday Minute and register at www.learn.delivery for more bonus content.
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TRANSCRIPT
Carl: Starbucks are going big on delivery, a new tech roadmap and what one San Diego restaurateur is doing to help restaurants learn about tech adoption. That's all ahead on this week's Monday Minute.
Monday Minute works like this, we're going to ask each other five questions about headlines that affect the world of restaurants, technology, and off-premise that in some way link back to our book Delivering the Digital Restaurant. Are you ready? Let's go.
Hi, Alright Meredith. We're in person today. Hi. It's kinda weird, isn't it? It's very exciting. Yeah. Uh, let's get on with the first question. Credit card spend may show that delivery sales are dropping. What's going on here?
Meredith: Yeah, so there are lots of cool credit card panel data sets out there. We are often working with folks like Yipit and Second Measure in order to get access to what's happening in a real-time manner in the world of restaurants.
And Eric Gonzalez, at Key Banc, puts out a summary they do of credit card spend looking at all of the different public companies. And of course these are public companies only, but looks at the world of restaurants that they track and what's happening in them. And I noticed something interesting when the most recent one came out, which was the three month period, August, September, October, compared to the three month period, November, December, January, some growth rates changed.
Hmm. So the first thing that I noticed was that restaurant growth went up. Now, that makes sense because black box intelligence has reported that the decline in transaction has eased, has hasn't, hasn't recovered, but it's eased . Things are getting less bad, I guess. And of course prices continue to increase with underlying commodities.
So it makes sense that the year over year growth rate in restaurants in those three month periods would go up. Went up almost 2x. But when you compare that then to the delivered platform's growth rate, those are going down quite a bit. GrubHub continues to be heavily negative as it's losing share but it's gotten even more negative.
And then Uber growth rates have gone in about half, and DoorDash's growth rate has fallen by about 60%. Now, of course, very tricky to parcel this out because DoorDash includes the growth of the new categories that they're taking on. Uber includes ride share. And then you have on top of that the complexity of potentially a lot of restaurants taking price on the third party platforms earlier in the year versus waiting to do so at their own restaurants later in the year.
And then we also have, I don't know if any of you remember this, A year ago we had the pandemic. We had omicron. ring any bells? I know we're all trying to forget it, but because of that, in-restaurant sales probably would've been lower last year and delivery sales would've been higher. So of course, on a year over year basis, we would expect to see restaurants doing a little bit better than their off-premise counterparts.
But putting all of that together, even with all of those questions it kind of appears that delivery's slowing down a little bit. So we look forward to seeing all of the public company statements coming out. I think many of them are starting to come out trickling here in the next few weeks. And I think that will tell us a lot..
Carl: Yeah. I think this year is still going to be a year of normalization though, I think. But we'll have a better appreciation of the size of off-premise as a channel in general. It's going to be able to contribute to a restaurant overall by the end of this year. So let's see what it ends up as.
My bet is probably somewhere between 15 and 25%. What about you?
Meredith: Well, that's a very big range. I'm on the higher end of that, I think. Good for you. There we go. I like it. So next question for you in-Store Tech is now getting as much of an upgrade as all of the digital interfaces with consumers off-Prem have been getting in the years past. So tell us about what's going on in store.
Carl: Well, to do this, Meredith, I must share a video as always, cause you know, I, I love it when we get to talk about fun tech. , let me do this.
So what I wanted to share with everyone was a video here from Cooler Screens. It's a, a company that featured this demo at the N R F recently, and what they're featuring is technology on cooler doors, you might be saying, well, what do you mean it's a glass door? Is it not? Well, take a look at this. The reality is, is that they are, but as a previous C store leader, I can tell you they're nightmare to clean. They are a nightmare to merchandise. What if you could mask all of that by having a digital screen with an advert of different products?
. Utilizing this technology, which is actually enabling you to promote different products, different items at different times.
And I think this representation here that you can see gives you an idea exactly as to what they are envisioning. It's also gonna demonstrate to many retailers out there that they can use this to also give their customers more, they can educate particular customers about the nutritional profiles.
They can push certain promotions. We've talked before on the Monday minute about how facial ID can perhaps use profiling. So imagine someone like me that buys a lot of that Haagen Dazs ice cream walks across, well, maybe that's the screen that pops up in front of us so that it actually helps me understand what's available for someone of my particular profile.
So who knows how long it's gonna take for this type of technology to become prevalent in retail stores, but I think there's definitely a role for it to play as restaurants think about how to merchandise their menus for their on-premise customers that are coming in and perhaps looking at digital menu screens today.
So, keep an eye out for that one.
Okay. Third question. Starbucks are in the news as they often are these days since , the certain CEO returned, but they're doubling down on coffee delivery. What did you learn about this one?
Meredith: Well, they put together an exclusive deal with DoorDash to bring coffee delivery all across the country.
And I think what I find most fascinating about this move is that historically Starbucks, of course, has been known as the third place. But now I think their strategies telling us that they're really embracing off-premise and whether it's the drive-through, whether it's digital order ahead, and then walking in, picking it up and taking it out, or now delivery, a significant portion of the coffee is actually consumed off premise, which is quite amazing. The other thing about this article that really amazed me is that they referred to the changes that they've observed going on in other countries, particularly in China. And so this is a great example of a multinational using reverse innovation where they see a trend develop in another country, they see how well it works, what the consumer demand is, and then they bring it back to the US to implement in the US stores here. As we often say a lot of other countries internationally are farther ahead than the US on the digital delivery journey in restaurants and you know, Starbucks we consider absolutely a leader.
One of the first with digital ordering and for them to be bringing stuff back from other countries, I think is very interesting. Now, you all might be saying, but we are all doing DoorDash. It feels like they're last to the party. And I remember a few years ago they tested an Uber exclusive deal.
And they've really kind of just had their toe in the water and I don't really think figured out how to deliver coffee well and have it be hot and fresh. And so I think this is a new attempt at them trying to put together a great consumer experience for something that consumers clearly demand.
Okay, so Carl, would you subscribe to pizza?
Carl: That's a good way of getting into this next one. This is not so much a news article, but it is something that I think our listener base would be interested in hearing about. A restaurant in Ramona. It's called Mama Ramona's Restaurant. It's a pizza restaurant, and it's outside of San Diego. But what I thought you'd be interested in hearing about with this one, Meredith, is that he is pushing his journey, his tech adoption journey
out there for people to understand and listen and learn about what he's finding about his experience. And he's been doing things like a subscription plan, which he launched last year, where folks can order a cheese or a pepperoni pizza and they can get a cheese or pepperoni pizza a week. And that's something like $572 worth of value for $149.
So a year's worth of pizza for $149. Wow. I mean,
Meredith: I'm in. I'm in.
Carl: I mean, Panera, Panera did a bit of this and now it's clearly happening in the pizza space. On Black Friday of last year, Andrew took the price down to $99 and he sold almost the same amount of pizzas on that day as to what he typically sells in a typical year. right? It's just crazy. Now the subscription redemptions have been around 65%, but what he's seen is, is that on top of someone utilizing that redemption from the subscription, they're also purchasing about $18 worth of other items like desserts or lasagnas or drinks. And that is a 73% increase upon what he's seen in prior years.
I think it's fascinating to hear a about subscription, but it doesn't end there. He's also sharing through www.pizzatv.com /Andrew his video vlog his blog of his experiences about other technology that he's bringing in. So, for example, he moved away from Square and he is brought in Toast and he's talking about things that sometimes don't get a huge amount of attention, like how quick is the customer success support to address inquiries.
According to him, pretty good. How easy is it to take the equipment outta the box and actually turn it on and make it functioning? Again he talks pretty positively about that, but then he touches on other pieces of technology that is helping him with this. So the subscription platform, for example, is managed by Incentivo and he's using things like Turbochef Ovens to help.
And he is also working with Picnic to automate pizzas, which are churning out pizzas at the rate of 130 per hour. Now, why am I sharing all that with you? Well, I'm sharing it with you because I love it when restaurateurs put information out there that can help others think about the tech journey.
We've got our new book coming out in February called The Path to Digital Maturity. And in many ways that's what we are trying to help anyone that chooses to read it with, in the sense of understanding how to think and navigate their, their journey to adopting different types of technology and when to do it.
And the more folks like Andrew put out information, sharing the trials and tribulations, the wins, the failures. He hasn't had too many, the better I think we're all gonna be to be able to learn about how to take advantage of the, the various options out there. So good on you, Andrew. Really pleased to listen in and follow your journey and good luck as you explore things in the months and years ahead.
Okay. Our last question this week Meredith, is not so much a question, but we uh, we noticed something rather interesting this week and that is Brizo, released something called a tech map. What exactly are Brizo doing this for and what observations did you find?
Meredith: Brizo does something very interesting, which is that they scrape the internet for data about restaurants.
Any restaurant that leaves a digital footprint somewhere online because of online ordering, because of how they're scheduling, because of anything they do online, they can grab that data. What do they have on their menu? How is it priced? Which tech providers are they using? and they can put that in a giant database so that anyone who wants that information for whatever purpose can have access to it.
It's very cool. So if you were, for example, a restaurant chain, you could get information about other restaurants. If you were doing something like what you're doing at Juicer, Carl, you could maybe find prices of all restaurants everywhere. That's incredible dataset.
Carl: I was interested by that social media piece that you told me about.
Meredith: Only 70,000 restaurants live on LinkedIn. , but like 670,000 live on Facebook. Anyway, there's just tons of great data in the Brizo food metrics tool.
They put out this market map. And as you said, Brita has put out a market map previously, and these are incredibly helpful because there's so much innovation going on right now. It's so hard to keep track of all these companies. It's great to be able to see them all in one place and go, now what do they do?
Now I myself might have subdivided into a few more categories just so I could find them. And I think honestly, like Carl, that's probably the reason that we're not on here. So Empower Delivery crosses across many of these different categories, so it'd be hard to put them in one. Juicer doing dynamic pricing doesn't really fit neatly into any of these categories, so I might have a few more subcategories.
But it's so great to be able to look and see, gosh, I'm thinking as a restaurant that I might want to do something in the sort of marketing loyalty space. What do I have to choose from? I'm thinking that I need a new POS, what do I have to choose from? That's fantastic. And we talk often about gosh wouldn't it be great if when you went to a conference they would organize the vendor hall based on things like this.
Which sadly we have not found a conference yet. Who does that? ? But I think restaurants can take this cheat sheet now with them and say how I talk to all the relevant ones. I don't know. Anyway, thank you Brizo for putting this out. And definitely check it out. And next year, don't forget Juicer and Empower Delivery.
She whispers . Hopefully you heard that. But anyway I agree. I think these types of things are really helpful. I'm hoping our book will be actually a helpful resource as well because the challenge, I think even on this list is just shows you how many players are out there. There are so many players and I think it's incumbent upon each of the folks that are on these roadmaps to be able to say, What type of market are you servicing?
Are you servicing the independent mid-enterprise? Are you an enterprise solution? Are you for someone that is really progressed in their own maturity on what they're trying to do with their digital off-premise footprint? Or are you actually in a place where you need the customer success support to really help you understand the best practices.
That's where I think a lot of the folks on maps like this really need to find a position and hopefully someone one day will create a map that actually helps those people that are trying to say, I'm a beginner , who are the best suppliers for this? And I'm an expert. I need next level functionality.
Yeah.
For sure.
Carl: All right, well look, that's it for this week's Monday Minute. As always, thank you for your comments on prior editions. If you've got any thoughts, questions, comments about this week's Monday Minute, please put them in the comments below. We always love hearing from you. And in the meantime, if you've got anything that you'd like us to touch on next time, feel free to get in touch as well.
But thanks as always for listening.
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