Commentary

Why most restaurant tech sucks

Orderly CEO Bill Jones discusses why technology is hard to adapt within the restaurant industry and the best way to work with technology.

September 14, 2018 by Bill Jones — CEO, Orderly

The idea of using technology in your restaurant isn't new. In fact, there are hundreds, if not thousands of businesses doing it.

It's a huge market, and it's full of restaurateurs that need help becoming more profitable and buying back more hours in their life.

For those restaurateurs that serve multiple roles — operator, chef, manager, etc. — good technology can be the difference between a successful restaurant and one that fails. This is especially true as restaurant owners face unique problems, particularly when it comes to inventory. Below are just few issues and how to sovle them.

Restaurants are uniquely chaotic. Most restaurants have a hard time predicting customer demand. How many will show up? What will they order? How much of it will they order? Owners must perform every day with very tight margins of delivery in a notoriously erratic workforce. They're dealing with suppliers that have the ability to change their ingredient prices at any time without warning. They're dealing with raw ingredients that are often "use it or lose it" within just a few days.

Try to name any other type of companies that deal with such dynamic forces affecting their survival and profitability!

Right now, the foodservice supply chain has all the power. Though we don't want to accuse any company of bad business practices, it is worth pointing out that the dynamics of the food industry have conspired to concentrate a lot of power and control in the suppliers. Farmers produce a crop that has a limited time to reach its market. They have to sell it now. On the other end of the market? Restaurants featuring a Southwest Chicken Salad, and they are going to have hard-won customers sit down and order one. Those restaurants must have all of the ingredients on hand now. In the middle, the food service suppliers can much more predictably spread their risk across the supply and demand of the chain and make micro adjustments in pricing to be sure they maximize their return on their supplies.

The sheer volume and complexity of the data is unmanageable. It already sounds complicated when you think about the 15 ingredients of that Chicken Salad, break down the recipe by ingredient and look up the prices for each ingredient today. And all that just to try and understand your cost for that dish. But then you added a new supplier for your chicken that sells in a different case size than your other supplier, and the chef tweaked the recipe to add avocado and some extra cheese, and there has been a recent price spike in avocados due to heavy rains in California. Now, a process that was already complex now either requires your hyper-vigilance literally every day to maintain or your system is feeding you erroneous business data.

Everyone hates taking inventory. If there is one thing that every restaurant operator is in almost universal agreement about, it is that everyone hates taking inventory, and that it's rare to have confidence in the accuracy of their actual counts.

The first step that many of these restaurant owners take is to look at restaurant tech that can solve this manual process. The problem is that almost ALL tech solutions have been created by people that approach it logically.

Do you know the ingredients today? Yes.
Do you know the prices today? Yes.
Can you know how many you sell today? Yes.
Can you count inventory today? Yes. (well, maybe)

Saying that the formula does work is totally different than saying the formula will work, especially when reality enters the picture. Software is built by seriously smart people, but they're great at writing formulas and features that work in testing, not necessarily in life.
The problem is that these features come up from well-meaning customers that have spent years in the echo-chamber of the lackluster restaurant tech market, where the software engineers have laid down the ground rules for the game. Which means you still have to count all of your ingredients every period. And you still have to you have to tell us if this supplier's chicken is the same as this other supplier's chicken. And of course, you still have to organize your ingredients for counting — and so on and so forth.

Here's the thing — restaurant realities matter. Forget the existing rules from restaurant tech solutions. The reality is in the requests coming from well-meaning customers who are doing their best to adapt the current solutions to their needs and aren't seeing the results they want.

What these restaurant owners need is a done-for-you, data-driven approach. At its core? Intensive data analytics where providers manage customers' ingredients and apply machine learning technology to help them be more profitable with their food spend.

With the right solution, there is no requirement to take full inventory. Restaurateurs deserve better business information to help them save money in purchasing, look for waste and theft and add practical processes to improve their restaurant operations. At the end of the day, restaurant technology doesn't have to suck anymore.

Photo by iStock

Business Strategy and Profitability Technology

About Bill Jones

Bill Jones joined Orderly as CEO in 2016. In his 32-year career in software, Bill has extensive experience in executive, product and marketing leadership roles with start-ups and large software companies. Bill holds a BA in Economics from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Rice University.

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