News Briefs

Aniai, a robotics company and a provider of innovative kitchen solutions, has announced its strategic plans for North America, marking a significant milestone in the company’s global growth strategy.The South Korean company has established headquarters in New York City, added a key member to its leadership team and plans to hire additional talent to support its expansion into North America.

Aniai’s flagship product Alpha Grill leverages advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to automate the hamburger patty cooking process, allowing restaurant kitchens to operate more efficiently and consistently. Aniai is currently conducting pilot tests in collaboration with several significant North American enterprise hamburger brands and expects to be implemented and active within multiple locations over the next six to 12 months.

Aniai has brought onboard Eric Hansen, a sales leader and veteran of the restaurant technology industry, as the company’s head of sales. With over a decade of experience in business development roles and senior leadership positions at companies such as Uber Eats and Groupon, Hansen is committed to building and cultivating relationships with restaurant brands and driving growth for Aniai.

Alpha Grill is designed to enable restaurant employees to focus on creating high quality burgers and enhance the dining experience by automating a number of repetitive tasks, such as cleaning the grill and managing cook times. Built with a rapid cooking system that highlights a double-sided grill, the automated grill simultaneously cooks up to eight hamburger patties at a time, or up to 200 patties per hour and is equipped with a self-cleaning function. An advanced monitoring system powered by AI and equipped with cameras and sensors tracks individual patty temperatures and quality in real time. 

Since its 2020 inception, Aniai has received multiple awards and accolades for their innovative robotics solutions, including the 2023 Kitchen Innovations Award at the National Restaurant Association Show as well as a GBEC finalist at NextRise 2022 hosted by KDB (Korea Development Bank) NextRound & AWS (Amazon Web Services). Aniai secured a $3 million seed round investment from Capstone Partners and Lotte Ventures in 2023. In South Korea, Aniai’s Alpha Grill is already a leader in the robotic kitchen space, in use at popular and trendy hamburger chains including Downtowner, BAS BURGER and THE100. 

Domino's Pizza Inc. introduces its new and improved loyalty program. 

Domino's Rewards offers loyalty members even more opportunities to earn and redeem points across its corporate and franchise store locations. Domino's enhanced rewards program allows customers to:

• Earn points for less
  • Loyalty members will now earn 10 points on every order of $5 or more
• Redeem points for even more menu items – and earn free Domino's after just two orders
  • Members can redeem a variety of points for more menu items:
    • 20 points: A free dipping cup, a 16-piece order of Parmesan Bread Bites or a 20 oz. drink
    • 40 points: An order of Bread Twists or Stuffed Cheesy Bread
    • 60 points: A medium, two-topping pizza; pasta; Oven-Baked Sandwich; or a 3-piece order of Chocolate Lava Crunch Cakes
• Earn more rewards
  • Loyalty perks are now even better, as members will have exclusive access to member-only deals, special discounts and opportunities to earn bonus points!

"We are thrilled to give the brand's loyal customers additional ways to earn free Domino's items more often," said Mark Messing, Domino's vice president of digital experience and loyalty. "At a time when most brands are scaling back their loyalty programs and making it more difficult to earn and redeem points, Domino's is doing the opposite. We want to make it easier to reward our customers and give them more options so they can get rewarded faster."

Marketing a LTO 

From now until Oct. 22, 2023, rewards members can take advantage of a limited time offer to redeem 20 points for a free order of Domino's new Pepperoni Stuffed Cheesy Bread, which is normally a 40-point redemption, in celebration of the product's recent launch. 

Weldon Spangler, a longtime TGI Fridays board member and highly experienced restaurant executive, has been appointed CEO of TGI Fridays, effective immediately. He succeeds Brandon Coleman, who has resigned for personal reasons.

Spangler will lead implementation of the growth plan to revitalize the brand on a global scale. There are currently 700 TGI Fridays restaurants in 51 countries offering high quality American food and drinks. 

Spangler brings extensive background in the restaurant industry and his impressive career spans over 30 years of experience, during which he has built a reputation for his unwavering focus on customer experience, store operations, and marketing with successful tenures at Subway, Papa Murphy's, Dunkin' Brands, and Starbucks.

Rohit Manocha, Co-Founder of TriArtisan Capital, a New York-based private equity firm and the controlling shareholder of TGI Fridays with extensive experience in the restaurant sector, will continue to collaborate closely with Mr. Spangler and the dedicated team at TGI Fridays in his role as the active Chairman of the company.

Axonify recently polled 500 frontline managers – in retail, hospitality and foodservice – to ask about the state of their operations. What they found was that there are a wide variety of pressures building up that threaten to disrupt productivity, consistency and revenue. And managers’ expectations for the coming year aren’t very rosy. In fact, 43% of hospitality managers believe operational issues will worsen in the next year.

LABOR

Unsurprisingly, labor is a top issue frontline managers are facing. In fact, 63% of managers (60% for hospitality managers specifically) said hiring more workers and staff was one of their most pressing operational challenges. 

Without the proper level of staffing, hospitality managers are worried about a whole host of other problems, including customer service. In fact, 62% of hospitality managers are concerned their team can’t meet customer expectations, and 65% of hospitality managers admit customer service has grown more difficult during the past year. This is likely because customers want more information but often are dealing with less experienced staff members. The data supports this. For example, 58% of hospitality managers are telling senior leadership that customers are requesting more transparency about issues such as inventory, supply chain, pricing, and order fulfillment. And 71% of hospitality managers claim that their customers want more informed and knowledgeable workers.

TECHNOLOGY

To improve the customer and employee experience, managers are embracing AI. For example, 77% of hospitality managers feel comfortable introducing AI to their staff, and 68% of all managers believe AI can improve the customer/guest experience. However, managers still have some concerns. For example, 60% of all managers are worried it will create confusion around job roles and responsibilities, 56% worry it will take away jobs, and 46% worry it could decrease job satisfaction.

Additionally, managers report that there are some major barriers to introducing AI to their staff.  For example, 73% of hospitality managers are worried about a lack of understanding from staff, 61% are worried about unknown ROI, and 48% are worried there will be a lack of motivation from staff to learn a new technology. 

It makes sense that frontline managers are hesitant to introduce AI when they’re having issues just getting their current technology stacks. In fact, Axonify learned that outdated technology is a very large pressure point among frontline managers. In fact, 66% of frontline managers ranked updating their point-of-sale/operating systems as their number one issue. This number jumped to 70% for hospitality managers. 

Rush Bowls has partnered with Como, a next-generation loyalty, customer engagement, and marketing CRM for hospitality – across all 47 locations nationwide. As a fast-casual concept known for its fresh and healthy meals-in-a bowl, Rush Bowls is leveraging Como's industry expertise and solutions to enhance the overall guest experience and align the brand's customer engagement strategy with the needs of its expanding business.

Como's granular reporting capabilities allow Rush Bowls to benchmark location and item performance, monitor promotional campaign success rates, and ensure high rates of guest return. By utilizing Como's  Customer Data Platform (CDP), Rush Bowls is now empowered to conduct in-depth reporting on every transaction, leading to the development of actionable insights using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. 

"Rush Bowls is constantly striving to bring our customers the best experience possible, from introducing new menu items to refreshing perks for our loyal fans. This partnership with Como is an exciting upgrade that will enhance our guest experience strategy from coast to coast." – Andrew Pudalov, Founder and CEO of Rush Bowls

• 71% say the ability to integrate with other systems is driving their POS purchase decisions, according to HT’s2 2023 POS Software Trends Report.

The fast casual franchise will also rely on Como's ability to customize and auto segment its customer base, in order to send automated marketing campaigns targeting specific customer segments – such as win-back campaigns – for guests who have not visited in a certain timespan. In tandem with the partnership launch, Rush Bowls introduces its new mobile app, which encompasses a fully white-labeled, Como-designed app experience that includes such features as a Points Shop and embedded online ordering.

Como is a provider of expanded loyalty capabilities. Leveraging direct integrations with 30+ points of sale (POS) companies around the world, Como collaborates with many businesses like Rush Bowls to drive additional revenue from its customer base, create rich customer experiences, and engage customers in-store to online.

SIHOT, a hotel modular management system, and Mirai, a pioneer of direct hotel sales technology specialist, have partnered to provide hotels with direct connections to metasearch engines for live pricing and availability updates. 

The partnership enables SIHOT users to connect to Mirai Metasearch to distribute inventory and hotel rates directly to the main metasearch engines. Mirai's strategic integrations with Google Hotel Ads, trivago, Tripadvisor, Bing Hotel Ads, Kayak and Skyscanner allows hotels to minimise distribution costs while increasing direct sales and reducing dependence on OTAs.

Metasearch engines are one of the most important customer search windows for the hotels. They allow travellers to compare hotel rates in one place, making the channel choice easier for guests and improves visibility and traffic of hotels direct channel to maximise revenue. 

Metasearch contribution to the number of bookings has grown steadily with 20% more bookings coming from metasearch in 2022 than in 2021, and 41% more than in 2019. Metasearch is now generating between 13% and 25% of total hotel revenue, according to Mirai.

“Hotels investing in the direct channel to drive bookings are seeing the immense value of metasearch that provides guests with transparency of product and rates to identify the best deal. By working with Mirai, our customers can further improve their direct revenue and guest experience, while ensuring their rates and availability are accurate,” said Maria Santoro, Partnership Manager at SIHOT.

Toni Gleitsmann, Head of Quality Management at fidelis hospitality GmbH adds: "Metasearch has become an integral distribution channel for our direct sales business, one that reaches the right guest type and provides one of the lowest acquisition costs. Through the integration and partnership of SIHOT and Mirai we have been able to optimise direct sales even further with real-time room rate and availability updates.”

Patricia Camba, Mirai's Director of Global Partnerships & Alliances, adds: "We are very pleased with this partnership, as SIHOT clients will now be able to optimise direct sales even further. Metasearch ensures hotels are reaching the right potential guests on one of the most important online billboards today, with the lowest distribution cost".