You don't know anything about food tech
Why go to a restaurant if any tasty and hot food can be delivered to your door at home or office? The global food service market is divided into two large camps: offline restaurants and food delivery. It seems that the former are defeated and lose the battle for customers. But do not rush to conclusions.
Under the cut you will find about “buzzwords” in food technology: smart technologies, big data and artificial intelligence.
LIVIT CEO Benjamin Kayeha is spying on you, and I bet you like it. There is a possibility that he is already tracking your movements while you just walk around the city. For example, he knows for sure whether you are walking past his restaurant. How often do you do this, he also knows.
')
Smart sensors installed at the restaurant's front door count how many times you pass by without going inside. And, when you finally go to the restaurant, those same annoying little sensors count how much time you spend at the checkout line, and how much time in other areas of the restaurant.
But Benjamin Kayekha and this seems not enough. In his new restaurant, he is going to track literally every your movement.
What happens if restaurants can use your phones to determine the exact location in the room and bring your order? A new era will begin, comparable to the revolution that Uber made in the taxi market.
This can change the operation of many fast-food restaurants. At least there is such hope: after all, this innovative technology has never been tested in restaurants.
- Will it work? The big question, says Benjamin and smiles broadly.
This is not the first time that the founder and CEO of LIVIT is betting on changing the restaurant business with the help of technology and breaking the jackpot.
In fact, Benjamin Kayeha did not plan to become a fan of foodtech. As he was not going to become a cool restaurateur.
At the very beginning of this story, he could not even imagine that he would learn so much about pizza ovens, procurement lines or sales features in bars. By education, Benjamin is a master in architecture, and such people, as a rule, find other ways to have fun.
Almost 20 years ago, Benjamin founded his own design agency. Assembling his business brick by brick, he focused on clients whom other architects considered completely unworthy: banks.
“Every architect wants to be the next Norman Foster , build stadiums and skyscrapers, do all these funny things,” Benjamin says. “You will never be on the cover of a magazine if you deal with retail banks. This is the most boring niche that you can choose for yourself as a designer. ”
Then everything started to go “downhill”: from the design of retail banks to retail stores, from retail stores to hotels and, finally, from hotels to restaurants. It was on the restaurants Benjamin Kayeha and hooked. It turned out that making restaurants is even more difficult than building stadiums.
Building restaurants is one of the most challenging areas of design. Retail is easy, restaurants are hard. Operational activities, cooking, hygiene, equipment, guests ... You need to know a lot about many things, and you need to do everything very quickly with a limited budget.
First, hoteliers were asked to do restaurants by his hoteliers. To solve the problem in the best way, Benjamin Kayeha tried to establish cooperation with other design agencies that knew a lot about restaurant business. The catch was that he could not find them.
And here is 2016: Benjamin is the CEO of LIVIT, one of the largest restaurant design agencies in the world with headquarters in Madrid (Spain), it has about 120 salary designers and many famous clients such as Starbucks, Burger King and Pizza Hut. And although he has every reason to be happy with life, Benjamin, however, is extremely dissatisfied with how things are.
Stockholm, where Benjamin lived, was one of the cities claiming the title of European Silicon Valley. Almost every day, Benjamin came across startups and their founders who were trying to blow up markets with new technologies and innovative business models. Against the backdrop of all this high-tech diversity, the restaurant industry looked archaic.
Benjamin tried to get his venerable customers to go on the offensive, to do something bold, but most of them showed no enthusiasm for all this new hype around food tech.
“The restaurant business is an industry with a history, it’s very difficult to change the course of such a big ship,” Benjamin says. “What you do at Dodo Pizza is simply phenomenal. What Dominos does is phenomenal. But this is only 0.000001% of the entire industry. ”
Once, the CEO of LIVIT realized that even large networks with their conceptual solutions only move forward a little bit instead of making big jumps. “All of these large restaurant chains have their own“ conceptual restaurants. ” Although in essence it’s just a touch-screen panel for self-placing an order in the hall or an application in the AppStore, something that was innovative five years ago at best. All these networks are rather trying to catch up with technology, rather than inventing something new.
Customers managing thousands of chain restaurants cannot take serious risks simply by believing in an idea. Whatever Benjamin offered them, they rejected, asking: “Is this decision verified? Who is already doing this? ”Benjamin's most honest and common answer was:“ Nobody. ”
Finally, Benjamin made a decision that might seem wild and risky, especially for a consultant. He decided to become a restaurateur himself and show them all to everyone how to do it.
Benjamin Kayeha opened his first 18/89 Fast Fine Pizza restaurant in early 2017 in central Stockholm.
A typical fine dining establishment: fashionable design, comfortable seats, dim lighting ... And, oddly enough, no technical atmosphere - no touch-screen panels with menus, no self-ordering tables, no robots rolling pizza.
But in fact, the pizzeria was teeming with restaurant technologies that were deliberately hidden from view. And this technology has played a decisive role in the organization and formation of the business.
In 18/89, Benjamin Kayeha used sensors that are commonly used in stadiums or large shopping centers to analyze crowd behavior.
Each phone with bluetooth and wifi turned on broadcasts its own unique MAC address. You can detect the signal and determine the location of the device with an accuracy of a meter.
In a sense, it looks like a car number: you don’t know who is driving, but thanks to the numbers and cameras at intersections, you can still track where the car is going.
Benjamin’s experiments are not limited to tracking customer activity and implementing various sensors. Pizza business was not invented yesterday, it has long been verified to the smallest detail, but the team questioned and updated almost every step of the simple and well-known manufacturing process of Pepperoni.
Here are just a few examples.
Everything is simple. The main feature of the next restaurant will be a bar. Well, a few technological lotions:
But these are all flowers, because the biggest bet was made on taking technology for tracking guests to a new level. The current solution can only find and track the device within a radius of one meter. A new and truly innovative algorithm will be able to accurately identify any phone within 2.5 centimeters.
This will not only allow restaurants to get rid of additional beacons (so-called beacons), usually used by waiters to find customers in the hall, but also provide a completely new restaurant experience. Only this time, guests will need to agree to tracking in order to get the best service. And Benjamin Kayeha really hopes they will do it.
“Imagine,” explains Kayekha, “you and I are working nearby, so we make orders from phones.” We leave the office, go to the cafe, just sit where we want, and our drinks bring us without any additional effort on our part, then they bring our food. We eat and enjoy the conversation, and finally we leave without even reaching for wallets or phones, because everything is paid. This is how it looks in my dreams.
Sounds pretty convincing. Do you remember the times when you had to call a taxi by calling the phone number and giving your address to the operator, then you had to look for cash to pay for the trip?
Since the modern services of Uber, Yandex and others came into the transportation industry, this system seems already outdated.
The question arises: can the LIVIT CEO at some point go over to change the role of the experimenter, become a full-blown restaurant magnate and, finally, build his own network of pizzerias? Benjamin does not completely rule out such a development of events - if his new experiment is successful. When you try something new, you can never rule out the prospect of failure.
“But I never expected 18/89 to become such a successful business, and now we are increasing our sales by 18% month after month,” says Benjamin Kayeha. “And I don't know when it will end.”
Maxim asks Benjamin answers.
The restaurant business is now a complete mess. So many things are changing: the delivery market is changing, robots are preparing hamburgers ... In your opinion, where is the market as a whole moving and what strategies should be followed in order to ensure survival in this constantly changing environment?
The most important thing is to choose your own “battlefield”. You cannot be everything to everyone. In my opinion, there will be two categories of winners. The first is those who provide convenience. This is about "I want it here and now." It is in this direction that delivery and all technologies are developing.
The second category is the creation of a unique experience. If I can get any food I want at any time of the day or night anywhere, what will make me leave my comfortable apartment in a restaurant?
But everyone can order food from a trendy restaurant and delivered to the door?
It's not about the product itself or good food and bad food. It is a matter of convenience. Delivery is one story. Creating a space that people will come to eat is completely different.
Suppose I am a restaurant. For this parameter, I fit into the story with experience. At the same time, most likely, I work with the delivery service UberEats, Yandex.Food, etc. It turns out, I'm trying to keep up with two hares. This is mistake?
I think you need to choose one thing. Because it is very difficult to win on two fronts at once. You cannot be Domino's or Dodo Pizza and be a great restaurant at the same time.
Yet many independent gourmet restaurants are joining delivery platforms. Sometimes, it seems that they do it out of despair ...
And they don’t even make money on it ... And many of them don’t even understand it.
In our experience, when it comes to delivery platforms, this is not always a mutually beneficial partnership. In Russia, for example, we decided to stop working with them because they promoted themselves in contextual advertising using our brand and then sold us our own customers back ...
And they most likely took a commission of 20-25% for this. This is madness! I think that these delivery companies will be the strongest competitors in the restaurant industry. Think about what Deliveroo is doing in the UK with its mobile “dark kitchens”. They know exactly what you want to order, they know when you want to order it, and they know how much you are willing to pay for it. It’s very easy for them to create a menu and create another dark kitchen near you. You will not win this battle if you are a restaurant or cafe. The delivery service will always have more data than you.
If my restaurant is working fine today, what should I do tomorrow?
Continue to improve the experience. Why do your customers come to your restaurant? What makes people come together and come together? What is there in your restaurant that people cannot get at home?
And what could it be?
At home you cannot look at others and show yourself. People are still social animals. People will always go out to enjoy wonderful moments together in a restaurant. It will never fade.
Who, in your opinion, is the most vulnerable in the catering market? Large networks or piece establishments?
The biggest problems now are fast-food restaurants that do not create an extraordinary experience for guests and which cannot provide convenience. Imagine you come, wait for the waiter, sit down at the table, make an order, and it takes X minutes, then they bring food, and then you have to pay ... The price is so-so, the food is so-so, the service is so-so.
What about large networks that are trying to build their own delivery system? Is it worth the effort trying to compete with UberEats or DeliveryClub?
Of course, there is room for several players. The world is great. People will not eat pizza from one company. This will never happen. There will be losers and winners, and there will be some consolidation in the industry. It may not be that you had twenty delivery companies, this makes no sense. Look at other industries, such as telecom, advertising agencies, hotel business. Each country has room for five major service providers. Marriott has about twenty brands, as does Hilton. You might think that you are working with a cool independent advertising agency, while in reality this is probably part of Publicist or Leo Burnett ... The point is in consolidation, but there is definitely a place on the market for several players.
What is attractive in terms of technology? Mobile order, touch-screen panels for ordering in the hall, drones, robots?
I do not think that robotics can already work in full measure. And it will not be soon. I think the client side of technology is a huge area for development. We need to think about the feelings of the guests and what the experience creates. For example, in 18/89 we invested heavily in acoustic panels. I don’t know if you noticed that the music plays in the background, but you can hear it. And at the same time, volume allows you to talk to your companion over dinner. This is critical to the customer experience. These are very important areas, but they are often neglected.
Here, in 18/89, you have experienced a lot. Which of your innovations do you recommend to adapt in the first place, which innovations bring the most value for the least amount of money?
Music. The combination of the type of music with various playlists for different events ... You can implement this in different ways - using smart technologies or using manual programming. In terms of the impact on the customer experience of guests and business, for me this is where you get the most powerful effect for just one dollar.
Under the cut you will find about “buzzwords” in food technology: smart technologies, big data and artificial intelligence.
Who is Benjamin and why is he spying on you?
LIVIT CEO Benjamin Kayeha is spying on you, and I bet you like it. There is a possibility that he is already tracking your movements while you just walk around the city. For example, he knows for sure whether you are walking past his restaurant. How often do you do this, he also knows.
')
Smart sensors installed at the restaurant's front door count how many times you pass by without going inside. And, when you finally go to the restaurant, those same annoying little sensors count how much time you spend at the checkout line, and how much time in other areas of the restaurant.
But Benjamin Kayekha and this seems not enough. In his new restaurant, he is going to track literally every your movement.
What happens if restaurants can use your phones to determine the exact location in the room and bring your order? A new era will begin, comparable to the revolution that Uber made in the taxi market.
This can change the operation of many fast-food restaurants. At least there is such hope: after all, this innovative technology has never been tested in restaurants.
- Will it work? The big question, says Benjamin and smiles broadly.
This is not the first time that the founder and CEO of LIVIT is betting on changing the restaurant business with the help of technology and breaking the jackpot.
The journey from a boring restaurant architect to your business
In fact, Benjamin Kayeha did not plan to become a fan of foodtech. As he was not going to become a cool restaurateur.
At the very beginning of this story, he could not even imagine that he would learn so much about pizza ovens, procurement lines or sales features in bars. By education, Benjamin is a master in architecture, and such people, as a rule, find other ways to have fun.
Almost 20 years ago, Benjamin founded his own design agency. Assembling his business brick by brick, he focused on clients whom other architects considered completely unworthy: banks.
“Every architect wants to be the next Norman Foster , build stadiums and skyscrapers, do all these funny things,” Benjamin says. “You will never be on the cover of a magazine if you deal with retail banks. This is the most boring niche that you can choose for yourself as a designer. ”
Then everything started to go “downhill”: from the design of retail banks to retail stores, from retail stores to hotels and, finally, from hotels to restaurants. It was on the restaurants Benjamin Kayeha and hooked. It turned out that making restaurants is even more difficult than building stadiums.
Building restaurants is one of the most challenging areas of design. Retail is easy, restaurants are hard. Operational activities, cooking, hygiene, equipment, guests ... You need to know a lot about many things, and you need to do everything very quickly with a limited budget.
Building a skyscraper cannot be compared with building a restaurant. In the first case, an extra million dollars does not matter, in the second - every thousand in the account.
First, hoteliers were asked to do restaurants by his hoteliers. To solve the problem in the best way, Benjamin Kayeha tried to establish cooperation with other design agencies that knew a lot about restaurant business. The catch was that he could not find them.
And here is 2016: Benjamin is the CEO of LIVIT, one of the largest restaurant design agencies in the world with headquarters in Madrid (Spain), it has about 120 salary designers and many famous clients such as Starbucks, Burger King and Pizza Hut. And although he has every reason to be happy with life, Benjamin, however, is extremely dissatisfied with how things are.
HoReCa is the industry of the future ... although wait, it seems, is still the past
Stockholm, where Benjamin lived, was one of the cities claiming the title of European Silicon Valley. Almost every day, Benjamin came across startups and their founders who were trying to blow up markets with new technologies and innovative business models. Against the backdrop of all this high-tech diversity, the restaurant industry looked archaic.
Benjamin tried to get his venerable customers to go on the offensive, to do something bold, but most of them showed no enthusiasm for all this new hype around food tech.
“The restaurant business is an industry with a history, it’s very difficult to change the course of such a big ship,” Benjamin says. “What you do at Dodo Pizza is simply phenomenal. What Dominos does is phenomenal. But this is only 0.000001% of the entire industry. ”
Once, the CEO of LIVIT realized that even large networks with their conceptual solutions only move forward a little bit instead of making big jumps. “All of these large restaurant chains have their own“ conceptual restaurants. ” Although in essence it’s just a touch-screen panel for self-placing an order in the hall or an application in the AppStore, something that was innovative five years ago at best. All these networks are rather trying to catch up with technology, rather than inventing something new.
Customers managing thousands of chain restaurants cannot take serious risks simply by believing in an idea. Whatever Benjamin offered them, they rejected, asking: “Is this decision verified? Who is already doing this? ”Benjamin's most honest and common answer was:“ Nobody. ”
Finally, Benjamin made a decision that might seem wild and risky, especially for a consultant. He decided to become a restaurateur himself and show them all to everyone how to do it.
First experimental restaurant: why not?
Benjamin Kayeha opened his first 18/89 Fast Fine Pizza restaurant in early 2017 in central Stockholm.
A typical fine dining establishment: fashionable design, comfortable seats, dim lighting ... And, oddly enough, no technical atmosphere - no touch-screen panels with menus, no self-ordering tables, no robots rolling pizza.
But in fact, the pizzeria was teeming with restaurant technologies that were deliberately hidden from view. And this technology has played a decisive role in the organization and formation of the business.
Smart technology at the heart of everything
In 18/89, Benjamin Kayeha used sensors that are commonly used in stadiums or large shopping centers to analyze crowd behavior.
Each phone with bluetooth and wifi turned on broadcasts its own unique MAC address. You can detect the signal and determine the location of the device with an accuracy of a meter.
In a sense, it looks like a car number: you don’t know who is driving, but thanks to the numbers and cameras at intersections, you can still track where the car is going.
- At 18/89, outdoor sensors monitor passers-by and calculate what percentage of people passing by become a restaurant guest. Returning customers are also tracked. The data obtained is compared with other factors, such as weather, holidays or city events, so the algorithm can make accurate forecasts for traffic, the optimal stock of products and the schedule of kitchen shifts.
- Sensors monitor how people move around the pizzeria, where guests prefer to sit in the morning, during lunch, or in the evening on different days of the week. For example, this way you can calculate how many double and how many four-seater tables you need in every hour of Friday. Based on this analysis, the table layout is changing throughout the day. This ensures optimum performance.
- The music in the hall is also controlled by smart technologies. When there are a lot of people in the hall, it becomes louder and more active. When there are few people left in the hall, the music changes to slow, so that guests stay longer and enjoy desserts and drinks. The algorithm always knows how many people are in the room and takes this into account to set the optimal sound level.
- To increase traffic and sales, the hall is flavored. Based on experiments and computer analysis, odors change throughout the day. For example, in one experiment, it turned out that replacing the “campfire” aroma with the “fresh basil” flavor increased sales of salads by 13%.
- Lighting changes throughout the day based on information from light sensors on the facade. What is the purpose of this? To make the restaurant more attractive for people walking along the street. It is based on the following insight: when it is sunny on the street, no one wants to go into the cave; when it’s dark outside, too bright lighting in a restaurant can also be frightening.
And even Pepperoni can be cooked more technologically?
Benjamin’s experiments are not limited to tracking customer activity and implementing various sensors. Pizza business was not invented yesterday, it has long been verified to the smallest detail, but the team questioned and updated almost every step of the simple and well-known manufacturing process of Pepperoni.
Here are just a few examples.
- A stove with a bundle of firewood at the base only looks like an ordinary stove. In fact, this is a customized electric smart device that can control the temperature of the dome regardless of the temperature of the moving round base (otherwise the base can cool down quite quickly during peak hours - a typical problem in a pizzeria).
- When the pizza is ready, it is not transferred to a regular shelf, but to a shelf with many round openings (something similar to a counter with draft beer). Due to this shelf design, unwanted moisture is removed.
- The delivery box was designed from the ground up to serve the same purpose. And the special tray-plate heaters ensure that your thin-crust pizza gets on the table as hot as it was right after the oven.
What's next?
Everything is simple. The main feature of the next restaurant will be a bar. Well, a few technological lotions:
- In the United States, fragrance cartridges will change automatically, while in Stockholm this is still done manually.
- In Stockholm, the wine list includes only wine and beer; the LA location will have a full bar.
But these are all flowers, because the biggest bet was made on taking technology for tracking guests to a new level. The current solution can only find and track the device within a radius of one meter. A new and truly innovative algorithm will be able to accurately identify any phone within 2.5 centimeters.
This will not only allow restaurants to get rid of additional beacons (so-called beacons), usually used by waiters to find customers in the hall, but also provide a completely new restaurant experience. Only this time, guests will need to agree to tracking in order to get the best service. And Benjamin Kayeha really hopes they will do it.
“Imagine,” explains Kayekha, “you and I are working nearby, so we make orders from phones.” We leave the office, go to the cafe, just sit where we want, and our drinks bring us without any additional effort on our part, then they bring our food. We eat and enjoy the conversation, and finally we leave without even reaching for wallets or phones, because everything is paid. This is how it looks in my dreams.
Sounds pretty convincing. Do you remember the times when you had to call a taxi by calling the phone number and giving your address to the operator, then you had to look for cash to pay for the trip?
Since the modern services of Uber, Yandex and others came into the transportation industry, this system seems already outdated.
The question arises: can the LIVIT CEO at some point go over to change the role of the experimenter, become a full-blown restaurant magnate and, finally, build his own network of pizzerias? Benjamin does not completely rule out such a development of events - if his new experiment is successful. When you try something new, you can never rule out the prospect of failure.
“But I never expected 18/89 to become such a successful business, and now we are increasing our sales by 18% month after month,” says Benjamin Kayeha. “And I don't know when it will end.”
Q&A or why the restaurant does not need delivery
Maxim asks Benjamin answers.
The restaurant business is now a complete mess. So many things are changing: the delivery market is changing, robots are preparing hamburgers ... In your opinion, where is the market as a whole moving and what strategies should be followed in order to ensure survival in this constantly changing environment?
The most important thing is to choose your own “battlefield”. You cannot be everything to everyone. In my opinion, there will be two categories of winners. The first is those who provide convenience. This is about "I want it here and now." It is in this direction that delivery and all technologies are developing.
The second category is the creation of a unique experience. If I can get any food I want at any time of the day or night anywhere, what will make me leave my comfortable apartment in a restaurant?
But everyone can order food from a trendy restaurant and delivered to the door?
It's not about the product itself or good food and bad food. It is a matter of convenience. Delivery is one story. Creating a space that people will come to eat is completely different.
Suppose I am a restaurant. For this parameter, I fit into the story with experience. At the same time, most likely, I work with the delivery service UberEats, Yandex.Food, etc. It turns out, I'm trying to keep up with two hares. This is mistake?
I think you need to choose one thing. Because it is very difficult to win on two fronts at once. You cannot be Domino's or Dodo Pizza and be a great restaurant at the same time.
Yet many independent gourmet restaurants are joining delivery platforms. Sometimes, it seems that they do it out of despair ...
And they don’t even make money on it ... And many of them don’t even understand it.
In our experience, when it comes to delivery platforms, this is not always a mutually beneficial partnership. In Russia, for example, we decided to stop working with them because they promoted themselves in contextual advertising using our brand and then sold us our own customers back ...
And they most likely took a commission of 20-25% for this. This is madness! I think that these delivery companies will be the strongest competitors in the restaurant industry. Think about what Deliveroo is doing in the UK with its mobile “dark kitchens”. They know exactly what you want to order, they know when you want to order it, and they know how much you are willing to pay for it. It’s very easy for them to create a menu and create another dark kitchen near you. You will not win this battle if you are a restaurant or cafe. The delivery service will always have more data than you.
If my restaurant is working fine today, what should I do tomorrow?
Continue to improve the experience. Why do your customers come to your restaurant? What makes people come together and come together? What is there in your restaurant that people cannot get at home?
And what could it be?
At home you cannot look at others and show yourself. People are still social animals. People will always go out to enjoy wonderful moments together in a restaurant. It will never fade.
Who, in your opinion, is the most vulnerable in the catering market? Large networks or piece establishments?
The biggest problems now are fast-food restaurants that do not create an extraordinary experience for guests and which cannot provide convenience. Imagine you come, wait for the waiter, sit down at the table, make an order, and it takes X minutes, then they bring food, and then you have to pay ... The price is so-so, the food is so-so, the service is so-so.
What about large networks that are trying to build their own delivery system? Is it worth the effort trying to compete with UberEats or DeliveryClub?
Of course, there is room for several players. The world is great. People will not eat pizza from one company. This will never happen. There will be losers and winners, and there will be some consolidation in the industry. It may not be that you had twenty delivery companies, this makes no sense. Look at other industries, such as telecom, advertising agencies, hotel business. Each country has room for five major service providers. Marriott has about twenty brands, as does Hilton. You might think that you are working with a cool independent advertising agency, while in reality this is probably part of Publicist or Leo Burnett ... The point is in consolidation, but there is definitely a place on the market for several players.
What is attractive in terms of technology? Mobile order, touch-screen panels for ordering in the hall, drones, robots?
I do not think that robotics can already work in full measure. And it will not be soon. I think the client side of technology is a huge area for development. We need to think about the feelings of the guests and what the experience creates. For example, in 18/89 we invested heavily in acoustic panels. I don’t know if you noticed that the music plays in the background, but you can hear it. And at the same time, volume allows you to talk to your companion over dinner. This is critical to the customer experience. These are very important areas, but they are often neglected.
Here, in 18/89, you have experienced a lot. Which of your innovations do you recommend to adapt in the first place, which innovations bring the most value for the least amount of money?
Music. The combination of the type of music with various playlists for different events ... You can implement this in different ways - using smart technologies or using manual programming. In terms of the impact on the customer experience of guests and business, for me this is where you get the most powerful effect for just one dollar.
We, as a cyborg company, closely monitor new technologies that bring the future closer (robots, nanotechnology, tastes, AI, grasshopper meat). We study questions in batches and tell the most interesting things in our Telegram channel.
From Dodo Pizza Engineering with humanity
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/461859/
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