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“This enduring customer loyalty drives the restaurant industry forward, creating clear opportunities for restaurants to enhance the dining experience through strategic limited time offers, efficient delivery and exceptional in-person service," said Samir Zabaneh, CEO of TouchBistro.
Onlineordering has transformed the restaurant industry, turning what was once a convenience into an absolute necessity. In 2025, the US online food delivery market is expected to reach $424.9 Customers expect to browse menus, place orders, and pay for their meals with just a few taps of their phones.
Solo dining – a time dedicated to eating a meal alone at a sit-down restaurant – is an opportunity for diners to practice self care over a meal, whether that be by relaxing and reflecting at the end of a long day or even by engaging the mind with a book or catching up on the news. Just the “cover count.”
So much data is generated at every point within a restaurant, whether fast casual or finedining. Foot traffic or heat mapping, menu item engagement, or consumer demographics by time of day. The question now becomes – how to make sense of that data and use it to elevate the dining experience.
Understanding your target market is the foundation of making smart decisions for your menu, pricing, and overall guest experience. Without a well-defined target market, restaurants risk wasting resources on strategies that dont connect and menu offerings that dont selltrying to appeal to everyone, but standing out to no one.
Menu pricing isnt just about covering costsits about finding that sweet spot where profitability, customer perception, and operational reality meet. Understanding the Key Factors in Menu Pricing Before you develop your menu pricing strategies, its important to ground your decisions in the numbers.
Every onlineorder, email sign up, and reward program interaction generates valuable insightsbut if that data just sits there, youre missing a major opportunity. Think about it: What if you could automatically send a special offer to a customer who hasnt ordered in a while? Restaurants collect a ton of customer data.
Review and Revise Your Menu Offerings. Before Restaurant Week kicks off, craft a menu that is friendly to both your bottom line and your customers. This way, you can encourage guests to return when your menu isn’t discounted while also encouraging employee retention by showcasing your kitchen team’s talents and creativity.
Reports show that 81 percent of finedining establishments, 78 percent of family restaurants, and 77 percent of fast-casual spots added curbside pickup, pivoting away from dine-in services after March 2020. Also, menus largely went digital, and more restaurants have since adopted digital menu managers as a way of life.
There will *always *be something your staff can do to enhance a patron’s dining experience. Customers on average will order more menu items, resulting in a larger bill for the restaurant and a larger tip for the employee. One major area of improvement we noticed when it came to management: menu costing research.
Have you ever walked into a restaurant, excited for a great meal, but the server can’t answer your questions about the menu? Without the right training, even the best menu or ambiance can fall short due to poor service, leading to dissatisfied customers and lost revenue.
Some great examples for restaurants are: How often the customer orders. What the customer orders. Which of your locations the customer orders from most. What the customer orders. How the customer prefers to order (for delivery, for pick-up or to dine-in). How long it takes your team to prepare an order.
Guests are dining out more often than last year and and rewarding great service, with the highest tips at bars and finedining restaurants, according to hospitality industry data from Lightspeed Commerce Inc. percent) and finedining restaurants (19.9 percent year-over-year at finedining and 3.53
At this point, all it takes is one lousy dining experience to sever the connection you once had with a customer who potentially spent thousands of dollars at your restaurant every year. Its significantly more cost-effective to keep your regulars walking through the door than it is to get a new customer every time you take an order.
A great dining experience starts long before someone walks through your door. If your site is clunky, hard to navigate, or missing basic features like a prominent onlineordering button, your potential customer will bounce because diners have little to no tolerance for friction or confusion when theyre looking for food.
For example, if you run a social media campaign or pay for onlineordering integrations, all of these contribute to your overall marketing expenses. Imagine you own a café, and you’ve just run a campaign to boost your onlineordering. You spent $800 on Facebook ads and in-store promotions over a month.
A well-crafted email can remind a past guest to stop by again, encourage reservations for a new seasonal menu, or even boost onlineorders with a limited-time discount. A well-timed email with a special offer, new menu item, or exclusive promotion can be the nudge they need to place another order.
Restaurants will also explore delivery options beyond costly third-party partnerships, and hike delivery menu prices to make the channel more lucrative as off-premise demand holds steady. Simplified Menus. Menu variety plays a substantial role in every dining experience. Health-Conscious Food Will Dominate Menus.
population that dined out at least once in the past month, hoping to better understand how Americans are approaching dining out in this new era. Here are some key takeaways: Each generation discovers and researches restaurants differently, with younger generations relying more on online review platforms and social media.
Here are some examples of how connectivity technologies are helping QSR brands, like Dunkin’, connect with customers and redefine the dining experience. It allows individual Dunkin’ stores to update their own hours and available menu items in real-time. Enabling Flexible Ordering.
Diners want the convenience of ordering, booking, and engaging with their favorite restaurants straight from their phones. Beyond mobile ordering, restaurant apps support operations in ways that were never available before. Onlineordering and delivery apps. Here is an example of a restaurants branded app.
Every day, youre juggling staff, food quality, inventory, customer service, purchasing, and moreall while trying to cultivate a dining experience that wows your customers enough to keep them coming back. Ignoring compliance can lead to fines, bad press, or even shutdownsso having clear protocols in place is mandatory.
If you want to increase order volume for your restaurant, focusing on online takeout and delivery is key. Since 2014, these channels have grown 300% faster than dine-inand the trend isnt slowing down. But growing onlineorder volume isnt always easy. Use high-quality images and compelling menu descriptions.
Typically, customer data is collected by the point of sale platform and website, along with other online properties, apps, and third-party platforms. When concepts have access to the right customer intelligence information, it makes it easier to understand food costs and simplifies the menu engineering process.
This Valentine's Day edition of Modern Restaurant Management (MRM) magazine's Research Roundup features dining and gifting trends including the importance of experience. Restaurants saw 41 percent more transactions The busiest dining hour? Restaurants saw 41 percent more transactions The busiest dining hour?
Safety is the new “trend” that every dining establishment must offer, and it goes far beyond offering paperless QSR code menus and bottles of hand sanitizer at the host stand. Doing everything to ensure your customers feel safe dining with you will remain priority #1. Which part of town dominates onlineorders?
That includes the ingredients and packaging for your menu items, but not things like rent and payroll. This gives you a sense of how effective your menu pricing is. You can have packed tables, long lines, and strong menu item sales, but if your operating expenses are out of control, you still might be losing money.
This reflects the positive impact loyalty programs have on driving revenue, with 83 percent of restaurant leaders saying their loyalty program successfully drives up order or basket size, as well as repeat visits (82 percent) and return on investment (78 percent). ” A Year of Challenges U.S.
Restaurants will focus on creating story-driven dining experiences, harnessing technology and local partnerships to deepen emotional engagement with guests, according to the "2024 State of the Industry: Future of In-Restaurant Dining" report by Incisiv in collaboration with Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions.
From managing reservations at the host stand or firing orders straight to the kitchen from table side, tablets are changing the way restaurants run. Slim and stylish is fine, but in a restaurant, function beats form every time. But heres the thing: just handing your employees a tablet and hoping for the best doesnt work.
POS systems do more than just process payments they enable restaurants to personalize menus by analyzing customer data. Learn more in our latest post: How POS Systems Enable Menu Personalization. Customer Insights : Track orders, dietary preferences, and trends. Improves Operations : Smarter inventory and menu management.
Suddenly, the ability to engage customers digitally – to take orders via apps and websites, to fulfill orders via delivery and curbside pickup, all occurring “outside the four walls” – became existential. the guest relationship can be deepened, even if the interactions aren’t always face-to-face.
We’re seeing massive disruption to front-of-house systems, too, delivering personalized guest experiences from order to payment to final delivery. One great thing about the online delivery market is that it produces massive amounts of data. Heloise Blaure, founder of HomeKitchenLand.com.
Personalized Dining is the Future. To fulfill these new dining expectations, operators should plan to provide their guests with a quintessential 360-degree experience that is personalized from start to finish. Take a NYC resident who has become a regular delivery patron of one of their favorite restaurants throughout the pandemic.
But as reality of the pandemic sunk in and dining rooms remained closed, it became apparent that ordering delivery and takeout was the best way to help restaurants weather the storm — and there was a significant consumer appetite to do so. By August 2020, Americans reported ordering takeout 2.4 So what’s next?
Every restaurant concept should be intentional about their branding, from food trucks and cafes to brunch spots and fine dininggreat branding is how your restaurant stands out and stays memorable. Your restaurants brand personality, tone, visualseven your menu itemsshould all be shaped around your ideal target market.
Around 950 million mobile users make online mobile payments , leading to the rise of pay-at-table technology. This allows diners to use a smartphone to scan a QR code at the table, which will take them to a digital menu where they can order and pay before the food even arrives. trillion by 2025.
In pursuit of these objectives, restaurants must reimagine dining experiences through enhanced restaurant technology, deepen their commitment to sustainability, and fine-tune their core offerings. Finding the balance between innovation and tradition is the secret recipe for enduring success in the evolving dining industry.
Restaurants can now use customer data to enhance restaurant menu design, creating smarter menus that increase profits and improve the dining experience. Spot Best-Sellers : Focus on the 16% of menu items that drive 80% of sales. Improved Efficiency Trim menus and reduce food waste. Keep reading.
Further Optimize Delivery, Takeout and Curbside Experiences Many QSRs already relieve congested drive-thrus with distinct lines or protocols for call-ahead orders and third-party pickups. One of our clients, a well-known QSR legacy brand, added an express drive-thru lane for customers ordering ahead on the brand’s app.
High-end restaurants that tend to have a pricier menu should look to add more affordable items. If your customers expect you to offer a finedining experience, they won’t be pleased to know that you’ve upturned your entire restaurant. Instead, you can reach a compromise in your menu. Offer Disposable Menus.
However, customers still sit physically in restaurants, blurring the lines between the online and offline. Different innovative payment methods are being leveraged to increase food services efficiency in fast-food joints to finedining. Voice Ordering to Ease Restaurant Interactions.
Airflow within restaurants should flow from cleaner sources to dirtier sources – from dining areas to kitchens, restrooms to pick up / delivery spaces and more. Embracing Different Dining Experiences. Dining al fresco will no longer be a temporary fix to social distancing guidelines, it will become a must-have for years to come.
From the very beginning we worked to attract loyal guests seeking an authentic, family dining experience. With restaurant dining rooms closing unexpectedly and inconsistently from market to market, the industry realized the ability to communicate frequently and rapidly to their customers is critical. Shasta, California.
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