The annual National Restaurant Association Show is in Chicago this month. Anything a restaurateur will need is on display, from ovens to urinals.
Technology is playing more of a role in the operations of restaurants and will be highlighted at the show. At the start of the pandemic, some restaurants quickly shifted to online ordering, and it took off.
Every successful restaurant is dependent upon their customers, but catering to today’s customers is more challenging. With the tap of a phone screen, we can order Friday night pizza straight to our door and reserve a restaurant table for next week’s date night. Today, successful restaurants must enable every option for their guests to order and enjoy their meals whenever and wherever they prefer. Every consumer has slightly different wants and needs.
People are dining in more, living in the moment (despite increased inflation) and catching up on experiences they missed during the lockdown days of the pandemic. The National Restaurant Association reported earlier this year that 84% of consumers believe their leisure time is better spent at a restaurant than cooking at home. For others, the reward is all about convenience and speed. Online ordering is still growing in popularity, and the two most filtered attributes on delivery apps are time and price.
Technology has increased opportunities for kiosks, robotics, AI and machine learning. It’s all in the name of meeting customers where they are and making business as efficient and profitable as possible. McDonald’s, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, registered 127 million downloads worldwide of their app last year. That is more than the number of downloads for Uber, Pay Pal or Amazon Prime.
New cloud solutions enable restaurants to transition from traditional point of sale (cash registers) to new digital transaction platform solutions. They can capture and track guests’ engagements, identify popular menu items and pinpoint guests’ behaviors to ensure effective marketing. This cloud-based solution provides customers with a choice in how and when they pay, ensuring predictable payment processing costs that support a healthier bottom line for the restaurant. I have included a few new products that are making their way to restaurants.
Last week, I spoke with Jamie Schroetlin, vice president of product management for Springfield BUNN Corporation. I asked her what was new at BUNN and learned about cold brew and iced coffee, and the difference between the two. As the weather turns warmer, many consumers make a switch from hot coffee to cold brew and iced coffee. Jamie explained iced coffee is coffee that is brewed hot and served over ice.
Cold brew is a little more complex in its preparation. The main distinction is that cold brew is brewed with cold water instead of hot water. Cold brew requires a higher ratio of grounds to water compared to drip coffee. Traditionally cold brew coffee is made from ground coffee beans in a container and left to brew from 10 to 24 hours in a refrigerated environment. The new BUNN equipment prepares a batch in 20 minutes. Their new brewers can make hot coffee, iced coffee, hot tea, iced tea, bubble tea and cold brew. This equipment is only for commercial installations, and you will see them often at convenience stores. To help address the challenge of labor turnover, there are ID touchscreens that provide visual displays on the equipment operating settings, and can via WIFI indicate when servicing is needed.
COVID-19 brought restaurants kiosks for self-ordering Vispero™ is a leader for assistive technology products for the blind and the low-vision community. It was selected to assist McDonald’s in providing customers with an accessible kiosk experience. Their “JAWS” kiosk allows blind and low-vision users the ability to interact with a self-service kiosk by inserting headphones into the headphone jack located on the navigation pad. It is used to interact with the kiosk, reading the content as they move through the menu options.
One of the winners of this year’s National Restaurant Association Technology Award was the new Alto Shaam Converge Multi-Cook Oven. A Combi Oven can roast, steam, sous vide, smoke, braise, bake and oven-fry foods all in one unit. Combi Ovens save on space by replacing multiple units on a restaurant’s cookline. Convection, or the circulation of dry heat, can be used to bake bread or roast meats. The steam function delicately poaches fish, steams rice or cooks vegetables so they have the perfect texture. Our students have the opportunity to learn on the two Combi Ovens we have in the Lincoln Land Community College culinary labs.
The new Alta Shaam Converge® Multi-Cook Oven has three independent ovens with no flavor transfer, do not require a vent and have a self-cleaning design. This unit has programmable menus that allow the chef to use stored or manually input recipes and cook modes. The chef can control the temperature, fan speed, humidity level and cook time in each individual oven chamber and select any humidity level from 0–100% in each chamber. Food items are cooked to precise internal temperatures with removable food probes in each chamber. There are labor savings as the need for employees to watch and rotate pans and to manage the stovetop, oven or grill is eliminated.
I am seeing more references to AI technology for restaurants and will feature it in a future article. My thanks to Desiree Logsdon and Jamie at BUNN for their assistance with this article.
I often refer to Julia Child’s classic cookbooks and fondly remember her quote, “The only time to eat diet food is while you are waiting for the steak to cook.”
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Lincoln Land Community College offers credit programs in Culinary Arts, Hospitality Management and Baking/Pastry, and non-credit cooking and food classes through LLCC Community Education.
Cooking or food questions? Email epicuriosity101@llcc.edu.