News Briefs

DailyPay, a worktech company and leading provider of On-Demand Pay, has joined the Independent Hardee’s Franchisee Association (IHFA) as a Silver Level Associate Member to offer Hardee’s Franchisees access to DailyPay’s financial wellness platform. With DailyPay, Hardee’s Franchisees who are members of IHFA can gain a competitive advantage in recruiting, retaining, and increasing worker productivity.

Through this membership, information and access to DailyPay is offered through the INSIGHT Magazine, IHFA’s newsletter, the IHFA Vendor Directory, the IHFA Products & Services Directory, and more. Hardee’s Franchisees now have an opportunity to give their workers the ability to simplify and optimize their working lives and better manage the money they make.

”When employers empower their workers with tools to build financial resilience, businesses thrive,” said Phil Mark, Director of Business Development & Partnerships - Franchise, DailyPay. “Joining the IHFA is a testament to DailyPay’s mission to powering opportunities for workers everywhere, enabling them to achieve personal, work and financial goals.”

On-Demand Pay can significantly reduce financial stress by providing employees with visibility and immediate access to their earned pay, addressing two critical aspects of financial management: liquidity and financial planning. According to a YouGov study commissioned by DailyPay, 49% of restaurant employees said early access to earned wages would enhance their view of their employer and 53% said it would improve overall job satisfaction.

DailyPay is a worktech company and a leading on-demand pay solution, DailyPay uses an award-winning technology platform to help America’s top employers build stronger relationships with their employees. This voluntary employee benefit enables workers everywhere to feel more motivated to work harder and stay longer on the job while supporting their financial well-being outside of the workplace. DailyPay is headquartered in New York City. For more information, visit www.dailypay.com/press.
 

Hawaiian Bros Island Grill has selected Lunchbox as its national technology partner for direct digital catering. 

This partnership reflects Hawaiian Bros' investment in growing its catering business with a platform purpose-built to support scale, brand consistency, and profitability.

The company has launched Lunchbox Catering, Order Aggregation, and Delivery Dispatch across all of its corporate-owned locations, with plans to expand the platform to franchise locations over time.

"Lunchbox lives and breathes the catering business," said Chris Habiger, Senior Vice President of Operations at Hawaiian Bros. "We needed a partner that could help us grow catering revenue and support a consistent brand experience at scale. That's exactly what this partnership delivers."

Hawaiian Bros is a fast casual restaurant serving island-inspired flavors through the Hawaiian plate lunch. Inspired every day to show kindness and spread the Aloha Spirit, the brand has grown rapidly since its founding in 2018. Hawaiian Bros owns and operates over 60 restaurants across nine states and began expanding its franchising opportunities in 2023. The company has earned numerous accolades, including the #1 spot on Ingram's Top 100 fastest growing companies and the #7 spot on QSR Magazine's 40/40 List of America's Hottest Startup Fast Casuals.

In addition to the catering rollout, Hawaiian Bros has adopted Lunchbox's Marketing CRM suite, aiming to deepen guest engagement and drive repeat business through personalized campaigns. This investment underscores the brand's focus on encouraging more direct catering orders, allowing for brand-controlled experiences, deepened guest loyalty, and valuable first-party insights.

Key Features:

• Robust reporting tools to track catering sales by location, monitor unpaid invoices, and measure performance.
  Seamless integration with POS systems, ensuring real-time order synchronization
   
• Advanced CRM tools for targeted marketing and customer retention.
   
• Flexible ordering controls, including holiday hours, delivery zones, order throttling, and dynamic lead times.
   
• Order management features like automated prep sheets, house accounts, save-as-quote, repeat ordering, editable orders, and order notes for full customization.
   
• Lunchbox Catering now includes Order Aggregation at no additional cost, streamlining third-party orders into the POS system for simplified operations and better data ownership.

ROH, a payments management platform for the hospitality industry, announced the successful completion of a $9.2 million financing round, led by Highgate Technology Ventures (“HTV”), a venture and growth equity firm focused on the hospitality and travel industries, and Acrew Capital. The investment will fuel ROH’s rapid platform expansion and enhance its ability to process the continuous flow of data from contracts, invoices, payments, folios, and beyond. As part of the transaction, Raja Goel and Kurien Jacob of HTV, and John Gardner of Acrew Capital are joining ROH’s Board of Directors.

ROH is purpose-built to help modernize the hotel industry’s payment processes, providing end-to-end visibility into the payment lifecycle while eliminating the manual labor typically required to manage transactions today. Of the $4 trillion in payments processed annually by hotels, over 80 percent requires manual intervention, including revenue associated with meetings and events, online travel agencies (OTAs), corporate and flight crew bookings, and more. With ROH, properties can now automate the flow of payments, eliminating room for error and inefficiencies while increasing employee productivity.

• ROH Increases Sales Conversion with a Best-in-Class Customer Experience: Streamlines payment processes, reducing friction and boosting conversion rates. Offers more flexible payment options, increasing customer satisfaction and repeat business.

• ROH Boosts Operational Efficiency for Sales and Finance Teams: Automates manual workflows for payment processing, receipt sending, and refund management, eliminating administrative burden to increase focus on bigger-picture goals. Lowers the risk of human errors that can lead to lost revenue.

• ROH Ensures Compliance and Mitigates Risk: Provides tools to stay in compliance with card network rules and safe harbor protections, avoiding costly violations and fines. Simplifies the management of chargebacks and disputes, ensuring a more streamlined process and reducing exposure to financial risk.

• ROH Improves Receivables Management: Enhances efficiency by consolidating payment processes, leading to shorter transaction cycles. Improves cash flow with faster, more reliable payment processing and receivables collection. Reduces past-due balances and aging accounts receivable by automating follow-ups and payment reminders. Increases the effectiveness of collections with automated tracking and reporting minimizing the need to use outside services to collect outstanding payments.

"To have HTV, the leading hospitality technology investor with an established track record, as well as a forward-thinking hotel owner-operator like Highgate, whose portfolio extends across over 400 properties, clearly see the overnight value ROH provides to decrease costs while increasing profits is incredibly motivating,” said Jess Conroy, CEO and Founder, ROH. “The number one priority for hotels today is managing costs while driving revenue. The most effective way to do this is to leverage technology that delivers on both. With ROH, hotels see increased revenue overnight; we can’t wait to expand our reach with HTV alongside us.”

“At HTV, we seek to invest in innovative companies with technologies that have the potential to change long-engrained hospitality industry behaviors, customer traction that signals clarity around a large and hyper-scalable revenue opportunity supported by unique, expertise-led moats, and founders with the determination to win. ROH delivers on all those attributes and Jess impressed us with her expansive vision for the platform and the customer demand to back it up,” said Raja Goel, Partner, Highgate Technology Ventures. “This investment enables ROH to expand its customer footprint, drive innovation, and ensure that ROH will become synonymous with profitability, efficiency, and ease amongst its hospitality partners.”

Select properties within Highgate’s hotel portfolio piloted ROH over the last two years, the results of which drove both this investment and commercial expansion. “We began testing ROH as soon as it hit the market in some of our properties with strong groups and events businesses - think room blocks, corporate accounts, meetings and events, social gatherings, and more. We rapidly realized that ROH unlocks margin across all our contract-based transaction volume,” said Ankur Randev, Principal & Chief Commercial Officer, Highgate. “The value was immediate and obvious from both the automation and profitability perspective. We’re benefiting from greater operational efficiencies, reducing fraud, and freeing up our team members’ time to perform more meaningful work.”

This funding round marks a significant milestone for ROH as the company continues to set new high-water marks across growth metrics. In 2024, the total amount of invoices managed via the platform reached nearly a quarter billion dollars. Additionally, ROH’s proprietary AI application, launched in 2024, which automatically ingests files from property management and other existing systems, saw an increase of 523 percent in automatically generated bookings based on executed contracts. 

For more information about ROH, please visit: https://roh.co/ 

Red Robin Gourmet Burgers Inc. is celebrating National Burger Month with the launch of the Bottomless Burger Pass.

A limited number of passes were available on April 17 and quickly sold out. 

 

Technology Glitches 

The limited time offer encountered some hiccups, including the burger chain's website crashing and some customers being overcharged at checkout. While some were able to purchase the coveted Bottomless Burger Pass with no issue on April 17, some customers were mistakenly charged $682, the full value of the promotion, reported USA Today. 

A Month of Burgers

The lucky guests who purchased Red Robin's Bottomless Burger Pass will receive an exclusive black-and-gold card in the mail, pictured, for redemption from May 1-31. The pass is redeemable for one gourmet burger of guests' choice served with a bottomless side each day of the month of May.  

In addition to the Bottomless Burger Pass, Red Robin is introducing new menu items for National Burger Month, including the Backyard BBQ Pork Burger and Backyard BBQ Pork Nachos.

"With more than 20 gourmet burgers on our menu, Red Robin is the authority on a great burger experience," said G.J. Hart, president and CEO of Red Robin. "That's why this National Burger Month, we're offering unbeatable value with a month's worth of burgers for just $20. The Bottomless Burger Pass, Backyard BBQ Pork Burger and Red Robin Royalty Sweepstakes allow guests even more ways to enjoy our enhanced menu featuring juicy, flattop-grilled gourmet burgers and premium ingredients, giving them every reason to keep feeding their burger obsession at Red Robin."
 

DoorDash  and  Coco Robotics have teamed up on sidewalk robot delivery for DoorDash customers in select areas of Chicago and Los Angeles.

Eligible customers can see the availability of Coco’s fleet of emissions-free sidewalk robots and may have one assigned to their order from nearly 600 participating merchants through the DoorDash app. This builds on an existing pilot program with Wolt—DoorDash’s international arm—where Coco robots have been making deliveries in Helsinki since earlier this year. 

During the initial pilot phase, Coco completed over 100,000 deliveries for DoorDash customers. This expanded partnership reinforces DoorDash’s ongoing commitment to advancing last-mile logistics by building the most efficient, sustainable, and scalable multi-modal delivery platform.

“Not every delivery needs a 2-ton car just to deliver two chicken sandwiches,” said Harrison Shih, Senior Director of DoorDash Labs. “We believe the future of delivery will be multi-modal, and we’re thrilled to partner with Coco to expand sidewalk robot deliveries that complement the Dasher network as we continue to enhance the DoorDash experience for customers and merchants.”

Robot delivery is part of DoorDash’s broader global multi-modal delivery platform strategy—integrating Dashers, drones, and autonomous robots to meet increasing demand while lowering costs and emissions.

“Partnering with Coco and DoorDash has allowed us to consistently deliver fresh food to our customers on time,” said Eric Dela Cruz, owner of Main Chick Hot Chicken in Los Angeles. “We worked with Coco to establish a ‘taxi line’ of robots so we can get food out to our customers faster, even during our busiest hours. The improved operational efficiency translates directly into happier guests and stronger repeat business. We’re excited about what this partnership means for our growth.”

Coco has been operating in Los Angeles since 2020 and recently launched in Chicago, Miami and Helsinki, Finland. Coco has a fleet of over 1,000 emissions-free delivery robots.

The partnership with Coco was developed through DoorDash Labs, DoorDash’s robotics and automation arm. DoorDash Labs expanded its investment in autonomous delivery through its partnership with Wing, which introduced drone deliveries to the U.S. after an initial pilot in Australia. By leveraging a multi-modal approach that integrates Dashers, robots, and drones into DoorDash’s logistics network, the goal is to ensure the most effective fulfillment method for every order while driving increased demand for local merchants and creating more earning opportunities for Dashers.

Chipotle Mexican Grill has signed a development agreement to open restaurants in Mexico for the first time. In partnership with Alsea, S.A.B. de C.V. (Alsea), a restaurant operator in Latin America and Europe, Chipotle will open a location in Mexico by early 2026 and begin exploring additional expansion markets in the region.

"We are confident that our responsibly sourced, classically-cooked real food will resonate with guests in Mexico," said Nate Lawton, Chief Business Development Officer at Chipotle. "The country's familiarity with our ingredients and affinity for fresh food make it an attractive growth market for our company."

"We are proud to work with an iconic brand like Chipotle and help grow its international business for years to come," said Armando Torrado, Alsea Chief Executive Officer. "Through this development agreement, we will continue to leverage our vast knowledge of the Mexican consumer and restaurant industry expertise to bring our customers the best food experiences and brands from around the world."

Chipotle's International Expansion Continutes

Chipotle signed its first international development agreement in July 2023 with Alshaya Group to open restaurants in the Middle East. Chipotle and Alshaya Group currently operate three restaurants in Kuwait and two in the United Arab Emirates. Chipotle's existing international portfolio of owned and operated restaurants includes 58 locations in Canada; 20 in the United Kingdom; six locations in France; and two in Germany. The company currently operates over 3,700 restaurants and plans to open between 315 and 345 new restaurants this year, with a long-term target of operating 7,000 locations in the U.S. and Canada.