News Briefs

Toast for Cafes & Bakeries is a new solution designed to help cafes, coffee shops, and bakeries add new revenue streams, speed up service with faster workflows, meet guests where they are, and grow their business. Catering Online Ordering and Restaurant Retail are among the new features that cafes, bakeries, and all other restaurant types Toast serves can benefit from using. Toast for Cafes & Bakeries builds on recent launches from Toast that introduce functionality tailored for specific restaurant categories, such as last year's releases of Toast for Quick Service and Toast for Hotel Restaurants.

• 71% of restaurants offer catering, 8% plan to add it this year, according to HT’s 2023 Restaurant Technology Study

Approximately four out of five small to medium-sized cafes and bakeries derive a portion of their sales from catering—generating 12 to 32 percent of their revenue from this channel, according to a recent Toast survey. Available in Toast’s Catering & Events Pro module, Catering Online Ordering helps cafes, bakeries, and other restaurants customize their digital ordering experience to fit their catering operations. This provides a frictionless online ordering experience, making prep for large orders easier, and expanding Toast’s digital ordering capabilities to enable restaurants to continue growing their off-premise revenue streams. Restaurants can set separate hours of operation for the catering business, longer lead times for large orders, and even order minimums. Staff can also easily prep for big orders, creating printable pack sheets and prep lists, and tracking catering orders through a shared calendar.

“As a bakery, Toast has been a game-changer,” said Steven Rennau, Director of Operations at Toni Patisserie & Café in Hinsdale, Illinois. “With Catering Online Ordering the entire team saves time. It gives us a bit more control as we can set longer lead times and higher minimum order size. In addition, we were able to roll out an entirely new category of ‘Celebration Cakes’ —we’re talking about $150-$175 cakes coming in online.”

Restaurant Retail—a unified foodservice and retail POS system

For many restaurants, including cafes, coffee shops, and bakeries, food service and retail go hand in hand. Guests may want to get a bag of coffee beans, a branded mug, or other curated goods with their morning latte. Restaurant Retail provides a unified foodservice and retail platform on a single account, giving restaurants like cafes, coffee shops, and bakeries the power to use merchandise, dry goods, and other items to build their brand and cater to their customer base. Restaurants can easily and efficiently manage their barcoded inventory, providing tools that allow them to create and update inventory across multiple locations, generate and print barcodes, and auto-calculate mark-ups to help optimize margins. Restaurant Retail is purpose-built to allow retail items to flow throughout Toast products such as its POS terminals, online ordering, and kiosks, enabling restaurants to seamlessly manage both the foodservice and retail elements together.

Additionally, Toast for Cafes & Bakeries allows restaurants to:

• Input complex orders easily and quickly with Open View: Open View simplifies order-taking by displaying items and modifiers all at once, a critical innovation for establishments with a high volume of highly configurable menu items. Staff taking complicated coffee orders, for example, can input a guest’s exact preferences in any order on a Toast POS terminal via the new layout according to the natural flow of conversation.
• Reduce chaos at the pickup counter with Order-Ready Boards: Toast’s new Order-Ready Boards allow staff to share the status of an order on a guest-facing screen within the restaurant. Instead of staff calling out to guests that their latte is ready, cafes, coffee shops, and bakeries can uplevel the order pickup experience.
• Reward guests for becoming regulars with Item-Based Redemption and Offers: Coming this fall, Item-Based Redemption lets cafes and bakeries configure menu items as rewards, allowing guests to redeem a free item in exchange for loyalty points. Toast’s new Offers feature lets staff create wow-moments for guests by designing custom promotions like Buy One Get One deals or half off pastries after 3pm. With these out-of-the-box tools, cafes, coffee shops, and bakeries can now easily keep regulars coming back without having to devote time and resources to build features like this on their own.
• Be the heart of the community with Fundraising: The Toast Fundraising feature allows restaurants to pick their favorite non-profit to support and gives guests the option to round up their check to the next dollar and donate the difference. To maximize impact and contributions, this can be surfaced to guests on several Toast products, including Toast Flex terminals, Toast Go handheld devices, Toast Online Ordering, and the Toast TakeOut app.

Learn more about Toast for Cafes & Bakeries.

Shiji, a global hospitality technology innovator, has partnered with IPORT, an award-winning manufacturer known for enhancing the usability of iPads and iPhones, to introduce an all-in-one software solution for hotel restaurants. This collaboration will provide hoteliers with a seamless combination of a tablet and payment device to maximize their F&B operations.

The integrated iOS and payment device solution simplifies guest service for hotel restaurant servers, providing them with an effortless tool to cater to their guests' needs. As a certified Apple partner, Shiji and IPORT guarantee exceptional performance and reliability. Hoteliers can choose from multiple device options, including iPad Pro, iPad Mini, and iPhone, ensuring flexibility and compatibility with their operations.

“IPORT products are built around modularity and flexibility that empower our hospitality customers to do more with the iOS platform. We are thrilled to partner with a leading iPad and iPhone cloud PMS and POS platform provider like Shiji,” said Chris Lawson, Head of Partnerships, IPORT. “We look forward to innovating with Shiji in disrupting legacy, monolithic providers who have limited the industry from harnessing the power of iOS and mobility. The future is bright, and the possibilities are endless with IPORT, iOS, and Shiji.”

"The partnership with IPORT is a significant milestone for Shiji in our commitment to provide innovative technology solutions for the hospitality industry," said Ryan King, Senior Vice President of Shiji in the Americas. "By combining our expertise with IPORT’s hardware solutions, we empower hoteliers to streamline restaurant operations and deliver exceptional guest experiences. This collaboration represents another step forward in our dedication to driving success in the Americas, and globally."

The tablet and payment device solution seamlessly integrates with multiple payment gateways, allowing hoteliers to choose the system that best suits their needs. By simplifying the payment process, it reduces operational complexities, minimizes errors, and saves valuable time and resources for hoteliers.

Subway  unveiled MVP Rewards, a refreshed loyalty program launching September 9 in Canada, the U.S., and Puerto Rico. The new and improved program gives Subway guests the MVP experience with more ways to earn, more perks, and more earning power as customers ascend from Pro to Captain to All-Star status tiers. Consumers can earn points by ordering their favorite sub in Subway restaurants, on Subway.ca or the Subway app.

MVP Rewards replaces Subway MyWay Rewards. All 30 million MyWay members across North America will be enrolled in the new program, and their unspent tokens will automatically be converted into points, giving them a head start on reaching status and earning MVP Rewards' best perks. New members will receive 250 bonus points when they join**.

"Subway fans are the best in QSR and to thank them for their loyalty, we're giving them the star treatment as MVP Rewards members," said Mike Kappitt, Chief Operating and Insights Officer at Subway. "Consumer input helped inform our refreshed loyalty program to create a best-in-class experience. MVP Rewards gives our guests more of what they love from Subway, with a few hidden surprises baked in, so every guest feels like an MVP and comes back to Subway more often for their favourite subs."

As part of its loyalty refresh, Subway made the program easier for guests to sign up, earn and redeem points, as well as advance from Pro to All-Star. Besides craveworthy signature subs and meal upgrades, members at the Captain and All-Star tiers will soon have access to special Subway merchandise and members-only VIP exclusives:

For a complete overview of Subway MVP Rewards and Subway's new loyalty program benefits, visit Subway.ca/rewards.

GauVendi is advancing its disruptive approach to rethinking inventory, which has already been successfully implemented in the GauVendi Sales Engine, towards an open, feature-based inventory platform.

GauVendi started in 2020 with an innovative AI-driven booking experience that provides accommodation providers with a comprehensive solution for hyper-personalized sales and fulfillment automation. It was mainly deployed as a stand-alone solution. With this evolution, accommodation businesses and technology providers can now explore new avenues in sales, distribution, operational efficiency, and marketing of inventory. They benefit from highly automated processes without major system overhauls.

"We aim to offer every operator the opportunity to distribute their inventory in a scalable manner, much like it was previously only possible through personal sales - and all of it fully automated," says Markus Müller, CEO, and co-founder of GauVendi. "With the open API interface, all technology providers can now sell relevant and customizable inventory through their platforms. Our solution acts as an additional layer integrated into the existing tech stack, enabling differentiated sales and automation without significant changes to the current system landscape," adds Müller.

GauVendi's platform is the only one worldwide that provides a feature-based language and a dynamic product management system with its approach. The open API approach ensures seamless integration with other technology providers. Feature-based inventory can be transformed into relevant and tailored accommodation products using the AI recommendation model. The result is a transparent guest experience right from the booking process and significant time savings during reservations through intelligent and optimized room assignments.

The newly established inventory management platform and the associated new products and solutions were developed based on experiences gained from implementing the Sales Engine with existing hotel customers, their achieved results, and the acquired data. The new data structure enables the introduction of advanced automation possibilities, including dynamically optimized and intelligent room assignments using AI (Reinforcement Loops), going far beyond the largely manual and limited assignments used until now.

In today's era of personalization, the data structure in the form of categories for inventory management has proven to be inadequate. It lacks information about individual room features in data formats, making it challenging for operators to fulfill guest requests without significant manual and operational efforts. Any inquiry about specific room characteristics is handled offline and requires manual processing. Monetizing these features is also not possible, and the lack of personalization reduces the competitiveness of accommodation businesses compared to others.

Müller adds, "These problems are a thing of the past with the use of GauVendi. The results our customers achieve with our current solution validate this: significant increases in room revenue, considerable time savings through new automation features, a reduction in phone and email inquiries, and better guest reviews and check-in experiences."

 HotelIQ, a global hospitality technology company and member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), announced that their business intelligence and analytics tool, Decision Cloud, is available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace and can be deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and integrates with OPERA Cloud Platform via Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP). Hotels are now able to more quickly and easily integrate HotelIQ Decision Cloud with OPERA Cloud, enabling more efficient implementation and increasing ROI. Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a centralized repository of enterprise applications offered by Oracle and Oracle partners.

Leveraging the power of OHIP to enable integration between HotelIQ Decicsion Cloud and OPERA Cloud offers significant benefits for hoteliers. HotelIQ is able to capture and analyze property data and provide hoteliers with easy-to-digest, accurate, and consistent data to internal departments which were previously siloed. This makes it easy for revenue management, marketing and sales teams to work together to identify revenue opportunities and discover new ways to optimize operational processes. Hotel IT teams also benefit from OHIP’s self-service onboarding process, which eliminates the need for outside vendors to get a partner connected. In addition, OHIP’s APIs allow partners to ensure both systems are in sync, minimizing the work for hotel IT or outside vendors.

“Traditional PMS data integration and implementation have historically been our biggest pain points when onboarding new clients,” said Andrew Fessenden, Director of Implementations and Integrations at HotelIQ. ”By making OHIP free for hotels using OPERA Cloud, we are able to offer self-service implementation benefits to users of HotelIQ Decision Cloud on OPERA Cloud.”

Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a one-stop shop for Oracle customers seeking trusted business applications offering unique business solutions.

OCI is a deep and broad platform of cloud infrastructure services that enables customers to build and run a wide range of applications in a scalable, secure, highly available, and high-performance environment. From application development and business analytics to data management, integration, security, AI, and infrastructure services including Kubernetes and VMware, OCI delivers unmatched security, performance, and cost savings. In addition, with multicloud, hybrid cloud, public cloud, and dedicated cloud options, OCI’s distributed cloud offers customers the benefits of cloud with greater control over data residency, locality, and authority, even across multiple clouds. As a result, customers can bring enterprise workloads to the cloud quickly and efficiently while meeting the strictest regulatory compliance requirements.

IDeaS, a SAS company, a provider of hotel revenue management software and services, announced today that Summerstar Tourist Parks has adopted the IDeaS’ G3 Revenue Management System (RMS) across fourteen of its Australian-based caravan and holiday park sites.

Summerstar previously relied on manual-based approaches to forecast demand and set prices. However, as its business grew, manually collecting multiple data sets and calculating information via spreadsheets became time-consuming and susceptible to errors and missed opportunities. To modernize its business processes and evolve its approach to pricing, Summerstar adopted IDeaS G3 RMS across all its properties.

• Assessing property performance and market demand: IDeaS G3 RMS will automatically assess Summerstar property performance and market demand while deploying pricing decisions and length-of-stay controls across distribution channels. G3 RMS generates prices that adapt to market changes while considering the competitive landscape and a guest’s willingness to pay.
• Streamlining head-office resources: IDeaS will help Summerstar grow as a business without additional head-office resources dedicated to revenue management. Using its advanced, automated RMS the properties can minimize the loss of ‘in-head’ knowledge and user error in the revenue management space.
• Optimizing revenue streams to increase profitability: By continually analyzing data and adjusting pricing strategies, IDeaS enables the optimization of revenue streams to increase profitability. Through monitoring market trends, competitor pricing, and customer behaviors, hoteliers can better adjust pricing and distribution strategies and maintain a competitive edge to capture market share. 

James Corbitt, director, Summerstar Tourist Parks, said: “Summerstar Tourist Parks sites are located across western and southern Australia, all of which have different peak seasons, special events, and guest preferences when it comes to booking. We realized that to continue operating successfully, Summerstar must provide both the best customer experience and prices possible. As a result, it was critical that our length of stay and pricing be balanced through practicing effective revenue management.”

Jurgen Ortelee, managing director of APAC, IDeaS, said: “To provide accommodation options for every budget and attract guests at the right price, Summerstar must continually meet the market from a revenue management perspective. By analyzing historical data and market trends, IDeaS enables Summerstar to forecast future demand accurately. This forecasting capability helps them to plan resources, inventory, and capacity effectively, ensuring that their properties can attract guests while minimizing costs and maximizing revenue.”