Foodservice Technology Elevates Restaurant Touchpoints vs Pain Points

Gone are the days consumers would worry about finding a seat in your restaurant at dinner time or during the lunch rush.  Today, restaurateurs worry if they have the marketing ability to keep their brand top of mind with consumer when they want dinner, or lunch according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.

Restaurant sales through third-party delivery services totaled $5 billion for the first two quarters of 2018, a 55% leap over their collective intake for the same period of 2017, according to Technomic. That once again was driven in larger part to the increased in The 65 Inch HDTV Syndrome first identified, quantified and qualified by our Grocerant Guru®. Simply put consumers like there 65-inch TV’s and more than ever like to eat in front of them.

For that reason, food delivery is big business and growing each day in both the grocery and restaurant sectors. However, it is a fragile workforce made up of mostly independent contractors who complain about being overworked, underpaid and not appreciated and there just may be a reason for that.  Companies are looking for ways to eliminate the employee pain point while reducing cost of delivery.

One company specificity is working hard at it.  Ford thinks it has figured it out with its current experiment with self-driving food delivery vans in Miami. According to the Verge, “Ford has been using Miami as a test bed for its self-driving vehicles since earlier this year. And now it has joined with Postmates to see how people ordering takeout food would interact with an autonomous delivery van.

Ford has retrofitted a fleet of its Transit vans with touchpad-accessible lockers, from which Postmates customers with the right access code can retrieve their food. The lockers are varying sizes to accommodate different types of deliveries. It's something we conceptualized in our 2016 Trends Forecast—not as pretty, but with the same functionality.

The pilot includes “over 70 businesses” participating, including restaurants and hardware stores. What? What about grocery?

The vans are manually driven by human drivers for now, because Ford is just using them to test different methods of food delivery. Eventually, the automaker says it will deploy a fully self-driving delivery service by 2021. Ford has also tested the concept of self-driving delivery vehicles in partnership with Domino’s Pizza in Ann Arbor, Mich.”

Once again as our Grocerant Guru® continues to point out the restaurant business model is evolving fast more consumers want eat a meal at home with out having to cook from scratch.  Consumer like their 65-inch HDTV and I bet you do as well.  Where are your meals being eaten? Does your brand look more like yesterday than tomorrow?  Are you still waiting to put butt’s in seat or are you looking to put meals on the table?

Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing ideations look more like yesterday than tomorrow? Interested in learning how www.FoodserviceSolutions.us can edify your retail food brand while creating a platform for consumer convenient meal participation, differentiation and individualization?  Email us at: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or visit:  www.FoodserviceSolutions.us for more information.