Key QSR trends and opportunities for 2024 and beyond: Q&A with Delaget CEO Jason Tober

Predicting the future is a challenge, especially in a tumultuous industry like quick service restaurants (QSR). Jason Tober, CEO of Delaget, knows this better than anyone. Delaget provides technology solutions and services that help QSRs operate more efficiently, serving the needs of franchise owners and brands and helping deliver a better experience to customers.

With all the changes in the QSR industry in recent years, Tober spends plenty of time looking forward, even if there is no crystal ball. In this Q and A, he discusses the trendlines for QSRs in 2024 and beyond, and what the future may hold for the industry and for Delaget itself.

Let’s start by looking back. What have been the trendlines over the past few years?

The QSR industry is always evolving, but a lot of the change in the last three years started with the COVID pandemic and the need to quickly evolve their business model and digest the impact of third-party delivery, which introduces complexities in terms of how you serve it, how you price for it, and how you recover losses. We also saw a staffing crunch during and after the pandemic – you can never have enough staff.

It kicked innovation in the industry into high gear, and QSR brands started or accelerated plans to evolve their playbooks by building or updating their own apps, installing kiosks, expanding drive through and pickup options for customers, and making accommodations for third party delivery partners. All of this has rolled up to the franchise owners and operators, who have to implement these ways of doing business.

What do you think are the most important trends impacting QSRs in 2024?

The overarching trend for QSRs in 2024 is the increasing complexity and data-centricity of the business. The technologies and changes of the past few years I just described took time to plan, build and roll out at scale, but in 2024 we are really seeing them take off, and it’s creating an influx of data that owners need to master, and master quickly.

Now franchises and brands need to manage and cross all the streams in their omni-channel customer platforms – app, in-store kiosk, drive through, and so on – to make them pay off with customer insights. Third party delivery isn’t going away either, it’s expanding. So growing by opening new stores or acquisitions is now much more complex. You have to multiply the effort by the number of platforms and data streams that need to be set up or merged.

What has been the impact of these industry changes on Delaget?

These trends have been around for some time, but their acceleration during and after the pandemic coincides with Delaget’s recent growth surge. Our revenue is up 93 percent over three years, our headcount more than doubled since 2020, and we now support over 130 brands at 25,000 locations, up from 14,000 locations in 2022.

Our product and market fit has never been better. Owners are mindful of the increasing complexity and rapid evolution of their business, and quickly realized they needed an external partner. We have the scale and insights from working with so many QSRs that we can keep evolving and investing in the platform, and keep partnering with new solution providers to make data integration pay off in new ways.

How are restaurants going to evolve in 2024 and beyond?

We are at or near a tipping point for the QSR business where digital ordering – mobile, kiosk and delivery – is just going to keep accelerating. In 2019, those three channels combined accounted for just over three percent of sales. As we found in our 2023 Operational Index, now they combine for more than 25 percent, and continue to grow rapidly. New and remodeled stores will look and operate very differently from those built just a few years ago.

With all the available integrated data, stores can also go deep to optimize their operations. One Delaget customer was able to trace a $15,000 loss by looking through inventory and purchasing data to figure out that they had bought the wrong-sized scoop. They were adding ½ ounce too much cheese to each pizza. We have a customer trialing delivery for the first time because they are now confident they have the systems in place to make it work. Maybe you’ll see personalized offers for known customers pop up on kiosk screens based on their previous behavior. Managing data at that level will now be a fact of life for QSR operators.

What do you see as the next big thing for the restaurant industry and for Delaget?

What we see QSRs wanting, and what Delaget is investing in to provide, is a single source of truth for everything that happens in all of their stores. Owners still have sales, inventory, customer data, scheduling, payroll and more all captured in disparate systems. We already help owners draw connections and inferences, but the holy grail is to bring everything together and simplify the complexity so that a QSR can log in to one place to answer all of their questions.

That’s a big leap, but one we believe is worth making. With all their data at their fingertips, and with new ways to slice and dice it, QSRs will be able to find new ways to make data pay.