News Briefs

Restaurant365, an all-in-one restaurant enterprise management platform, announced the release of its tip automation tool.

Accurately managing the distribution and accounting of tips is critical to restaurants' day-to-day operations and long-term success.

"Restaurant365 Tip Automation gives me four to five hours of my week back," said Chad Arnold, an Oklahoma-based Summer Moon Coffee franchisee and early adopter of the tool. "Now, it's simple for me to delegate and teach someone how to use tip automation versus a spreadsheet, and from an employee standpoint, it's regulated; they know a software is managing the process, so it builds trust."

Eliminating Manual Chaos  

Previously, restaurants used nonstandard processes to manage how they account for and distribute tips, requiring multiple individuals to make manual calculations, opening the door for mistakes and inconsistencies. Restaurant365 Tip Automation bridges the gap between POS punches and the payroll system, eliminating the need for cumbersome data entry and auditing, while automating record keeping. Users can create as many rules as needed to accurately manage tip shares and pools, eliminating the need for manual work and any doubt that tips are distributed according to company policies.

"As with many other restaurant management functions, we've long seen leaders spending too much time working with disconnected sets of generic tools and spreadsheets that prevent them from performing at their best," said Mark Calvillo, senior vice president of product at Restaurant365. "With Restaurant365 Tip Automation, restaurant companies of all sizes can create automated, integrated workflows that streamline manual work so leaders can focus on what matters most — their guests and teams — with the confidence that tips are properly managed and accounted for."

By moving the entire tip workflow to an automated system, restaurant leaders and employees get greater visibility into the entire process. Employees can see their tips within Restaurant365's mobile app, including total tips earned for each pay period, broken down to shift totals, giving employees financial visibility to better manage their money and expenses. 

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. 

Chipotle Mexican Grill is increasing its commitment to its Cultivate Next venture fund by $50 million, which brings the fund's total investment pool to $100 million. Introduced in 2022, Cultivate Next makes early-stage investments into strategically aligned companies that further Chipotle's mission to Cultivate a Better World and help accelerate the company's aggressive longer term growth plans to operate 7,000 restaurants in North America.

"Our decision to double our commitment to our Cultivate Next venture fund is a clear indicator that we are investing in the right companies that we can learn from and utilize to improve the human experience of our restaurant teams, farmers, and suppliers," said Curt Garner, Chief Customer and Technology Officer, Chipotle. "The parallel growth of Chipotle and our partners will continue to further our mission to Cultivate a Better World by increasing access to real food."

Cultivate Next Investments

To date, Chipotle has invested in a wide range of companies innovating in areas such as farming, supply chain, advanced robotics, and plant-based foods. The new $50 million commitment will expand the company's existing portfolio, which currently features:

• Hyphen

  • Hyphen is a foodservice platform designed to help restaurant owners, operators, and budding chefs move their business forward by automating kitchen operations. Chipotle is working with Hyphen to build a new digital makeline that uses intelligent automation to build bowls and salads while Chipotle employees operate the top makeline to make burritos, tacos, and quesadillas. In the coming months, Chipotle's Hyphen digital makeline will debut in a single restaurant location as part of the company's stage-gate process. Hyphen recently received an additional investment from Chipotle through Cultivate Next.

    In a February 6 earnings call with analysts, CEO Brian Niccol said, “Both Hyphen and Autocado (a cobiotic that peels, cores and processes avocado)  could help to improve the overall experience for our teams by removing less favorable tasks and for our guests by providing on time accurate and delicious food.”                                 

• Local Line
  • Local Line is a leading local food sourcing platform for regional food systems, serving farms, producers, food hubs, and food buyers. In less than a year, Chipotle's investment has helped Local Line digitize their operations, increase their retention rate of customers, build their farm database, and expand to serve international farms in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. In tandem, Local Line has been a key partner in enabling Chipotle to meet its local produce sourcing goals.
  • Due to the early successes with the platform, Cultivate Next has made an incremental investment in Local Line. Chipotle will also leverage Local Line to fund grants to local farms within 350 miles of its new restaurants. The company plans to open 285 to 315 new locations in 2024.
• GreenField Robotics
  • GreenField Robotics is a company founded with the vision of making regenerative farming more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable by leveraging the latest advances in AI, robotics, and sensing technologies. The company's autonomous agricultural robots can weed crops both day and night, while reducing the need for toxic herbicides. With its Cultivate Next investment, GreenField will continue to build out its robotic fleets, which are currently running on farms in several states, and release additional capabilities for the robots including micro-spraying, cover-crop planting, and soil testing.
• Nitricity
  • Nitricity is a company seeking to tackle greenhouse gas emissions by creating fertilizer products that are better for fields, farmers, and the environment. Funding from Cultivate Next will be used to scale up Nitricity's production of nitrogen, build out the company's infrastructure, and support the launch of its first commercial product within the next two years.
• Vebu
  • Vebu is a product development company that works with food industry leaders to co-create intelligent automation and technology solutions. Chipotle is collaborating with Vebu to build and scale Autocado, Vebu's proprietary avocado processing cobotic (collaborative robot) prototype. Autocado is currently progressing through Chipotle's stage-gate process and will undergo an operational test in one restaurant this spring.
• Meati
  • Meati Foods serves nutrient-dense whole-food products made from MushroomRoot™. Chipotle is continuing to explore opportunities to bring real, fresh vegetables to the center of the plate with menu innovations that uphold its Food with Integrity standards.
• Zero Acre Farms
  • Zero Acre Farms is a food company focused on healthy, sustainable oils and fats that is on a mission to end the food industry's dependence on vegetable oils. The company has introduced a new category of healthy oils and fats made by fermentation that are more environmentally friendly. Chipotle is in the early trials of testing Zero Acre Farms at its Cultivate Center test kitchen in Irvine, California.

"It is incredible to see the possibilities that exist when we bring the right founders, startups or ventures into collaboration with Chipotle," said Christian Gammill, Cultivate Next Fund Manager. "Witnessing the progress of our cohorts over the past two years has motivated us to scale our efforts and drive real change in the supply chain, agriculture, restaurant innovation, and automation sectors."

The Future of Cultivate Next
Chipotle will continue to provide updates on the Cultivate Next venture fund in 2024 and beyond. Companies interested in collaborating with Chipotle through the Cultivate Next venture fund can apply by emailing [email protected].  

Designed by sustainable tourism experts, Weeva champions continuous improvement actions, backed by consistent data management, to boost efficiency, reduce wastage and, ultimately, support profitability and business resilience within the industry. 

Renowned for establishing partnerships that keep its member hotels ahead of the curve, Design Hotels is currently hosting an ongoing series of online workshops and virtual roundtables to connect its members with partners, industry experts, and each other around actionable insights and forward-thinking ideas and practices. 

The first of these conversations, hosted by Elin Kann, Director Sustainability & Culture at Design Hotels, and moderated by Dr Andrea Ferry, Head of Sustainability at Weeva, focussed on the importance of developing an internal culture of sustainability. A key takeaway was: 

“If ‘vision’ is where you are going, ‘culture’ makes sure you can get there.”

Weeva’s reporting tools can generate tailored Impact Reports for hotels to share with their guests, tour operators and other suppliers. Reports show metrics such as the carbon footprint per bed night or an overall view of a property’s impact. It’s not about being perfect, but rather quantifying goals and showing improvement. Using a system like Weeva helps streamline internal management, sharing the load between departments, from HR employee wellness surveys for to showcasing your community projects. It is also an invaluable data aggregator for those wishing to gain certifications. 

Julie Cheetham, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Weeva commented: 

“We’re so excited to onboard many of the Design Hotels member hotels into our system in 2024, giving them access to all our best-practice educational guides, suggested improvements and easy-to-understand tools and dashboards that track results in real-time. 

The travel industry has long needed affordable, accessible sustainability technology to measure and improve operations for the benefit of profit, people and the planet – so it is wonderful to see our software being adopted by hotels of this calibre globally.”  

Stijn Oyen, Managing Director of Design Hotels, said: 

“We are delighted to collaborate with Weeva to share the exemplary sustainability efforts and successes of our member hotels in transparent, measurable ways. 

By utilizing Weeva’s data-driven, science-backed approach, our aim is to learn more about the impact our hotels have on the planet, and apply these insights to develop new, meaningful initiatives that guide them towards a more conscious, sustainable future.” 

Tenable®, the Exposure Management company, today announced the release of Tenable One for OT/IoT. It is the first and only exposure management platform that provides holistic visibility into assets across IT and operational technology (OT) environments. 

The convergence of physical assets and IT – such as HVAC systems in data centers, badge readers in office buildings, cameras on manufacturing floors, and many more – has resulted in a broader cyber attack surface. As IT, OT and IoT assets become increasingly interconnected, cyber attacks are often originating in IT systems and then spreading into OT environments, with potentially devastating results. Today's CISOs find themselves responsible and accountable for securing OT and IoT environments.

Tenable One for OT/IoT extends visibility beyond IT, to include OT and IoT, and helps security leaders gain a clear picture of true exposure across their entire attack surface. This first-of-its-kind approach allows organizations to prioritize security risks wherever they reside - be it in the cloud, data center, or the OT environment - and most importantly, to understand how these risks create attack paths across their infrastructure. 

Users can also view their global exposure, including OT assets, to see how their security posture compares to other companies in their industry and gain additional insights from their OT assets to make better decisions, faster. 

The Tenable One platform now combines the broadest vulnerability coverage spanning IT assets, cloud resources, containers, web apps, identity systems, OT and IoT assets. It builds on the deep threat intel, regulatory compliance and vulnerability expertise and data from Tenable Research, and adds data analytics to prioritize actions and reduce cyber risk, enabling: 

● Comprehensive visibility beyond the IT environment to the modern attack surface 

● Risk intelligence to mitigate operational risks 

● Actionable planning and decision making across enterprise and critical infrastructure environments 

“On a daily basis we witness threat actors finding creative ways to disrupt businesses through non-traditional paths. Risk doesn’t end at IT. For those that rely on physical computing technology, OT and IoT often power their most business-critical activities. Any disruption is extremely damaging and often results in an inability to function,” explained Amir Hirsh, SVP and general manager of OT Security, Tenable. “We understand that OT environments require a different approach from IT and we’ve designed our security solution so teams no longer have to choose between cybersecurity or productivity. They can have both.” 

The threat to OT systems from nation-state actors was recently driven home in a U.S. Congressional hearing in which top leaders from the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI, the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) and the National Security Agency (NSA) testified that U.S. electricity systems, water utilities, military organizations and other critical services are actively being targeted by Chinese hacking campaigns. Subsequently, an international advisory confirmed that Volt Typhoon - a People’s Republic of China-sponsored threat actor - has pre-positioned itself on U.S. IT networks to enable lateral movement to OT assets and to disrupt functions. 

The Tenable One for OT/IoT license includes not only Tenable One, but a companion license of Tenable OT Security and Tenable Security Center.