Streamlining Restaurant Service, Inventory & Loyalty

In today’s dining landscape, providing safe and quick options is a necessity. It is critical that drive-thru and curbside pick-up are optimized to ensure efficiencies and a high level of customer service. Today’s technology provides operators with an opportunity to quickly implement impactful solutions like digital loyalty, line-busting, food/guest safety, inventory visibility and prescriptive analytics. Purpose-built technology ensures associates can take orders on the fly, enhance service and increase the total number of customers served during peak hours to maximize profits and enhance the overall guest experience.

Manual methods of capturing restaurant inventory is time consuming and less accurate. Restaurant operators work with razor-thin margins and therefore need to minimize food waste, spoilage, theft and over-production which may not be easily accomplished. Technologies such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) enable restaurant operators to collect inventory data in minutes versus hours with a higher degree of accuracy and can reduce the labor associated with cycle counting, while improving visibility to on-hand inventory. RFID inlays can be encoded with GS1 standardized source data, making restaurant owners more responsive to recalls that impact their inventory and ensure food safety. RFID tags can also be placed in extreme cold environments so that frozen, refrigerated, and dry goods can all be captured.

Guest loyalty will have an increased focus within the restaurant segment. As business returns to normal, cautious customers will need to be encouraged to visit restaurants again, especially for a dine-in experience. Loyalty programs not only incent customers for repeat visits, they provide restaurants with valuable insights into their guests preferences, locations, and annual spend. Restaurants who focus on both capturing new customers data, while keeping their regular customers coming back for more will come out on top. Lastly, restaurants who offer customer loyalty applications will recover back faster leveraging digital coupons, offers and the ability to order online.

Food safety is paramount to the restaurant industry and is top of mind for most brands. With the use of technology, operators now have a quicker and more efficient ways to implement food safety solutions in their restaurants. From inventory visibility and traceability, to clear and consistent prepped good labeling, these programs insure the freshest and safest customer experience possible. Applications can now easily print food and container labels replacing the hand-written labels of the past. Many restaurants are moving from traditional pen and paper-based solutions to a more automated process that can track food temperatures, create temperature logs and send out reports.