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Minimizing Menu Price Increases : Just because diners are still eating out and ordering in, does not mean they are happy about higher menu prices. For back of house, operators should focus on tech that drives speed, efficiency, and cost savings. What can restaurant operators do to bring in new guests and keep them coming back for more?
Tap a few buttons, and your order is sent to the kitchen, where robots are preparing dishes with precision, ensuring perfect consistency every time. Throughout the meal, robot servers deliver your food and clear the table when you're done. You take your seat at a table embedded with a touchscreen menu. Need a drink?
Is your restaurant up to speed with the latest best practices for back of house (BOH) management? Everything from decreasing food waste to exploring how automation can increase revenue for small business restaurants is related to BOH procedures. Here are some back of office trends to watch for in 2023. Two primary methods are involved.
Front-of-house teams juggled high guest expectations with paper logs, manual reports, and legacy systems that weren’t built to keep up with the pace of service. We saw widespread adoption of mobile payments, digital ordering, and contactless dining almost overnight. Real-time insights? Virtually nonexistent.
Steady Online Ordering Brings Food Waste, Donations to the Forefront of Priorities Orderingfood online increases restaurant sales, but it also can potentially increase wasted food if proactive measures aren’t taken – for both the business and consumers at home.
In today’s fast-paced dining world, guest satisfaction goes beyond just great food—it’s about delivering a seamless experience. Internal communication, especially between front- and back-of-house staff, is one of the most overlooked drivers of operational efficiency and l asting loyalty.
To tackle these challenges, restaurant owners are relying more on digital tools like mobile ordering, self-service kiosks, and AI-powered workforce management. Self-order and payment kiosks as well as QR code menus are streamlining front-of-house operations, improving order accuracy and speeding up service.
From salted egg yolks and chili crunch fusions to mushroom-infused teas and freeze-dried fruit powder garnishes, Kimpton’s in-house experts share the standout ingredients, menu items and techniques that will come to the table in 2025.
Adopting in-house technologies became necessary for restaurants to stay open throughout the pandemic, restart operations after temporary closures, and pivot services to maintain revenue while still following enhanced health and safety protocols. Too Much Tech Is Not a Solution. Want to be Tech-Savvy? Start with Your Staff.
A growing number of chefs are shifting their attention to independent operations that focus on foods with wider appeal that need a commitment to excellence. For generations excellent meant complicated, intense, all-consuming, and sacrifice. Fifteen-hour workdays, no time for anything but the pursuit of excellence.
I came across an old quote from Phylicia Rashad (for those my age – the lead actress in the series “Fame” from many years back) that gave me another opportunity to think about the cooks that I know and have known over the past five (nearly six) decades and why I chose to stand in front of a range. Art is the basis of human expression.”
US Foods Holding Corp. launched its COVID-19 online operator resource, the US Foods Restaurant Reopening Blueprint. The Restaurant Reopening Blueprint is informed by interviews with key stakeholders such as diners, restaurant staff and US Foods consultants and chefs. Click here to view the application and instructions.
We’ve all heard the statistics surrounding restaurant closures, from the 50 percent failure rate in the first five years to watching restaurant store-fronts change over year to year. In an industry where every dollar county, rising food costs, labor shortages, and shrinking profit margins quickly become an uphill battle.
MVP Menu Performances More than 200 million people tuned in to the Super Bowl last year—many with a plate of wings in front of them. 11, 2024, comparing it to the average Sunday in 2024 and found that: Wings win MVP with an 87 percent increase in sales The average price of wings ordered increased 18 percent.
Today’s restaurants face obstacles on many fronts. Simplify Front of House Processes. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced restaurants to innovate, creating new revenue-generating workflows, including enhancing their to-go offerings and integrating with to-go order applications. Optimize Food Safety Protocols.
Automating the Front of House. Front-of-house staff can be hard to recruit, are less tenured, and have high turnover. Ongoing staffing challenges have led restaurants to embrace technology solutions, especially for front of house roles. Redefining the Role of the Manager. Simplicity Is Key.
Restaurants are already experimenting with using AI to handle drive through orders to allow human employees to focus on customer interactions in the restaurant. Restaurants are already experimenting with using AI to handle drive through orders to allow human employees to focus on customer interactions in the restaurant.
Nearly every restaurant in the United States relies on a Point of Sale (POS) system for the majority of its front-of-house operations. That system needs access to the internet in order to keep functioning. Not only can that become frustrating for your guests, but it can also make in-house operations much more difficult.
When properly deployed, they can transform the employee experience by improving daily operations, syncing front-of-house and back-of-house communication and execution, and delivering a memorable dining experience that won’t send staff to the walk-in cooler for a good cry. Hospitality is greater than the sum of its parts.
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. Running a restaurant is a balancing act. Its tough, and cant be done passively. What is Restaurant Operations Management?
Increasing your restaurants online order volume doesnt have to feel like an impossible task. In this guide, well walk through seven practical ways to boost your restaurants online order volume. Optimize Your Website and Online Ordering Experience If your restaurants website isnt easy to use, youre probably losing out on online orders.
Since the pandemic, restaurants have endured a plethora of issues ranging from fluctuating dining restrictions to supply chain issues to rising food prices. To take some of the pressure off of an already small staff, restaurants have begun turning to technology solutions with touchpoints in the front and back of house operations.
From the front-of-house ensuring a pleasant dining experience to the kitchen crew keeping up with orders and maintaining sanitized facilities, every process needs to run smoothly. Kitchen staff rely on hot water for sanitizing silverware, wiping down food prep areas, and quickly cleaning spills.
We'll look at what artificial intelligence is and how it's being used in three different areas of the restaurant industry: back of the house, front of the house, and marketing. Let's start with the back of the house.
Hospitality operators are rapidly turning to contactless ordering and payment solutions to help navigate the long road back to normal from COVID-19’s impacts. " While contactless ordering and payment is here to stay, many operators remain concerned about how this new service model will impact their guest experience.
Even with this good news for restaurant operators, many challenges still remain – particularly around staffing in both the front and back of the house. ” They enter this demanding industry because they truly enjoy creating excellent guest experiences through outstanding food, atmosphere, and service.
Dark kitchens or virtual kitchens––real places staffed with non-ectoplasmic people—bring efficiencies to running a restaurant by providing off-site commissary services for delivery orders. Growth for most, after all, isn’t walking through the front door, it’s coming in online.
You are sitting in your favorite restaurant and have placed an order on a tablet at your table. After a few seconds of placing the order, a notification appears on your messaging app. Ding* ‘Your order is being prepared by Chef Bot 19 and will be delivered to your table in approximately 19 minutes.
To have a successful restaurant, the owner or manager must be skilled at managing both front-of-house and back-of-house functions. To help increase these profit margins, restaurant owners sometimes focus more on changes they can make to front-of-house, such as increasing their prices or boosting liquor sales.
Adaptability became non-negotiable as takeout, delivery, and digital ordering shifted from secondary revenue streams to essential lifelines." " As we mark the fifth anniversary, MRM magazine surveyed restaurant insiders about the pandemic’s lasting impact on their businesses and the industry.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Paul Dioguardi, owner of Colorado-based Hickory House Ribs, realized there was only so much he could do with the amount of available restaurant tables so he decided to focus on growing the catering side of the business. ’ Just having this van parked out front drove that sale.”
As a step further, offering a flexible menu catered to solo diners – with smaller portions to reduce food waste and allow the diner to taste more dishes – provides waiters with an additional opportunity to make personalized recommendations specific to these menu offerings.
In the back of the house, rampant inflation and ongoing supply chain disruptions are cutting into margins. Simultaneously, staffing is an urgent and ongoing front-of-house concern. Until now, the restaurant industry has operated on outdated, analog technology like faxed orders and invoices in the mail.
Staff training, therefore, needs to include teaching individuals to communicate swiftly, clearly, and confidently with other team members when orders go wrong, or other problems occur. The core teams that need to appreciate and cooperate are the front-of-house waiting teams, the bar staff, and the kitchen team.
Do orders get lost in the shuffle between different platforms? If managing food delivery feels more like a headache than a revenue stream, youre not alone. With 52% of consumers saying that ordering out is essential to their lifestyle, every restaurant that wants to stay competitive must offer delivery.
For franchises, that means making sure your evaluations and data collection house in order. Food service has changed forever and getting an integrated digital approach to managing all your guidelines and compliance issues, especially across multiple locations, is more crucial than ever. Define Data-Based, Measurable Standards.
It blends sales data, food cost, and menu psychology to help you stop guessing and start making decisions that grow your margins. Real menu engineering efforts are grounded in hard numbers: data, food cost percentage, and how much profit each dish actually brings in, so you know exactly what to promote, rework, or cut.
Front-of-House. Henry is ready to order some dinner. He visits your restaurant’s app and orders his favorite dish on the menu. He visits your restaurant’s app and orders his favorite dish on the menu. He receives an estimated wait time for his order of 45 minutes. Contactless Technology.
Another way to slice and dice data is to comb through food costs. So, you could offset increased beef costs by having customers who order a chicken dish foot the bill. You can also leverage POS-gathered restaurant analytics to simplify forecasting, making things like off-premises orders operate more smoothly.
But, along the boulevard of online ordering, new locations are built with a handful of pixels, not a truckload of bricks. Finally, find a place to cook and start filling orders, often alongside tickets from a traditional front-of-house. New idea, online menu, real food. Welcome to the age of virtual restaurants.
While consumers might seek culinary experiences they can’t have at home, they have vastly different expectations for how they engage – whether via phone, app ordering, third-party take-out, or dining in, they want the same seamless interactions they’ve come to expect in all areas of their lives.
With rapid advances happening across various industries, including the food industry, you might be wondering: What does AI have to do with running my restaurant? It allows AI to understand and respond to human language, which is how virtual assistants can answer customer questions or take online orders. The short answer?
Business begins at the endpoint, especially in food service and hospitality. This includes the entire order to pay processes, from employee collaboration to guest interaction, whether via smartphone, tablet, kiosk or VR headset. And this will take some time. Build Data-First Architectures.
“Our conversations with restaurant owners across the country confirm they cannot adequately staff their restaurants. “We are seeing sign-on bonuses at fast food and fast casual locations, something never seen before in the industry. Customers can order and pay without speaking to a human and a runner delivers the food.
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