The Future of Restaurant Menus in a Post-Pandemic World
• Intro • Cost Reduction & Increasing Profitability • Efficiency • Targeted Marketing & Customer Engagement • Habits • Hesitance Towards New Tech • Keeping up with Latest Trends • Contactless Payments • Automated Inventory Management Software & Ordering Technology • Restaurant CRMs • Digital Menu Platforms • The Solution
Over the past two years, restaurants have undergone a surge in tech adoption. Operators have had to keep up with an influx of diners eager to eat indoors again, and aiding them in supporting the rush of new diners are software platforms, ranging from food delivery apps to digital menu experiences.
Restaurant tech has become a key differentiator for businesses - managers are looking for innovative ways to stay competitive all while streamlining operations, improving the dining experience, and boosting profits.
The average restaurant profit margin usually falls between 3-5%. Menu optimization can boost ticket sizes for restaurants by up to 40%, so opening up new channels for diners to order at their convenience can increase these profits.
The pandemic sadly brought about the closure of many restaurants, but for the ones that survived and are back in full swing, several challenges remain. Hiring, training, and retaining staff, managing inventory, and dealing with rising costs have all impacted restaurants’ ability to survive in this post-pandemic world. Operators have realized that in order to stay afloat and maintain feasible profit margins, they must explore new technology solutions.
“After we survived the pandemic challenges, I realized that for the next phase of our business, we needed to work “smarter” and not “harder”, and we needed to find a better and more efficient QR Code experience if we wanted to survive.” Mersea Restaurant - San Francisco, USA.
For 2023, these are going to be restaurants’ top priorities:
Cost Reduction & Increasing Profitability
A proven way for restaurants to cut costs is by removing high-cost low-profit items from the menu - essentially items that don’t sell well, but cost a lot to make. By trimming down menus and focusing on top selling dishes, chefs can get a better understanding of what kinds of dishes perform well, and come up with new creative combinations.
Operators are taking a best-guess approach. They don’t know if they should continue offering ingredients like freshly caught fish from Japan or organically sourced cherry tomatoes, and if customers would even notice the difference if they didn’t.
In addition to cutting costs, simplifying menus also helps operators forge stronger relationships with their suppliers, allowing them to negotiate better prices for bulk orders of ingredients. Running seasonal menus is another way to streamline ingredient inventory - only featuring dishes with in-season, fresh ingredients can help dramatically cut costs while maintaining a premium dining experience.
Efficiency
For restaurant owners, understanding how to optimize their front and back-of-house operations for efficiency is critical. On the front-of-house side, discovering how to best optimize waiters’ time can help unlock many benefits - waiters can spend more time upselling, engaging with guests, and overall facilitating a better and more curated dining experience. Technology is a key driver to help waiters better streamline their jobs.
Targeted Marketing & Customer Engagement
Restaurants can better understand their diners’ individual food preferences through creating and maintaining profiles. Noting favorite dishes, allergies, and average spend can help restaurants identify their VIP customers, and allow them to create amazing experiences.
Loyalty programs can also offer diners an opportunity to indicate to restaurants what their favorite dishes are, essentially allowing restaurants to easily curate their menus for each guest. Restaurants can offer their loyalty program members exclusive private dining experiences, and can build strong relationships with them that translate into return business. Tying all of this together are targeted marketing campaigns. Critically, these campaigns cannot be spam-esque - they must be offers and content tailored to individual guests’ preferences, which are gathered through effective front-of-house technology.
Loyalty programs and curated targeted marketing campaigns can be powerful tools to help restaurants offer amazing experiences to diners.
Barriers to Automation
Habits
Why fix things that aren’t broken? Restaurant owners are keen to go back to the “way things were”. As diners associate QR codes with the panic prevalent through the early COVID days, restaurant operators are faced with tough choices regarding the placement of technology in the dining room. The hasty return to paper menus, however, overlooks massive opportunities for innovation in front-of-house tech, a ripe area for modernization.
Hesitance Towards New Tech
The restaurant landscape is fast evolving in the advent of the pandemic, and many restaurants are making sweeping improvements to their in-house technology. Restaurants must stay apprised of the latest tech and its potential to improve profits and operations in order to stay competitive. Resistance, sometimes unfounded, to new technology can impact a restaurant’s ability to keep up with competition.
However, there are very real challenges and barriers to introducing new technologies into the restaurant workspace. They can cause disruptions in already smooth processes, and training and up-skilling staff members on new tech can be costly and time-consuming. All the while, the highest priority is making sure that diners have a smooth and pleasant experience - their reservations honored, orders placed, and payments processed.
Keeping up with Latest Trends
In a survey that was conducted, 1 in 5 respondents said that their restaurants are not investing fast enough in technology. 62% of operators doubt they’ll be able to keep up with the advancements in tech, and 59% worry they’ll be overtaken by restaurants that better keep up with new tech.
As the restaurant landscape has changed over the past few years in the aftermath of the pandemic, it has become clear that technology is the solution to operational problems. Going forward, it is clear that restaurants will only become more reliant on tech. Given that, however, it is important to recognize that each restaurant will have a different relationship with technology. Quick service establishments may want to fully automate the ordering and payment process, while traditional table service and fine dining restaurants may want to maintain the human-touch elements of traditional hospitality, free of screens.
Nevertheless, technology in restaurants is here to stay. Below, we discuss the most popular forms of tech we can expect to see in restaurants going forward.
Restaurant Tech we expect to see more of
Contactless Payments
Contactless payment technologies are gaining popularity quickly - it is estimated that the contactless payment market will triple from $2 trillion to $6 trillion by 2024, worldwide. These solutions allow you to pay directly from your smartphone and smartwatch, are helpful in preventing the spread of germs, and significantly reduce table turnover time.
Automated Inventory Management Software & Ordering Technology
Inventory management tools allow restaurants to track food and beverage stock with accuracy, and take out the guesswork of scheduling reorders. Food wastage currently costs the hospitality industry up to $100 billion annually.
Restaurant CRMs
CRM platforms can help businesses manage key customer relationships. Using these tools, restaurants can better serve their customers and leverage the gathered data. They can apply promotions, run social media campaigns, and boost loyalty program memberships. With guest segmentation and personalized messaging, restaurants can more effectively make diners aware of special events tailored for them. Critically, restaurants also can use such tools to get immediate feedback on the dining experience.
Digital Menu Platforms
Digital menu platforms are a core piece of technology that can help restaurants achieve three key objectives all at once: cutting costs, increasing sales, and providing a seamless dining experience. One such digital menu solution is Nom Menu, founded by Vikas Bhetanabhotla in 2021.
“The restaurant tech ecosystem today is fragmented, and restaurants are missing out on valuable customer data that can drive revenue growth of up to 75%. To solve this, we’ve started by building an immersive digital menu that empowers restaurants to implement visuals, dietary filters, and food/drink pairings to increase item sales 3-5x so far”, says Vikas.
The Solution
Nom Menu takes a different approach from the standard QR code menu. The Nom Menu is a visually immersive interface - it is already an accepted fact that we all eat and drink with our eyes, so why not put beautiful pictures and videos directly on the menu? The menu’s efficient design allows diners to get all the answers they need from the Nom Menu platform itself, while simultaneously promoting and encouraging conversation with the waitstaff. With all the basic questions answered by the menu, waiters can truly shine and share more intricate knowledge with diners, ultimately leading to a more curated dining experience.
Restaurant managers can update the menu in real-time, and effectively use the Nom Menu backend tool as a menu management database. Many current users of Nom Menu actually use the admin tool as an archival tool, storing past menus and pictures of dishes. Operators are able to uncover new insights about their diners’ tastes through Nom Menu, and can customize the menu as such, visually highlighting on the menu dishes that are most popular. Restaurant managers can even customize the colors and design of their menu to conform with brand guidelines. Overall, the entire operational flow of the ordering process is made much smoother by Nom Menu.
The Nom Menu solution can help smoothen the entire ordering flow at restaurants.
Restaurant operators know that digital menus are the future. They provide diners with rich visuals, curated menus, and answers to all their questions. The food ordering experience with digital menus is more seamless than with paper and static PDF menus, and this trend will only continue to grow.
“We all eat with our eyes anyway - putting great pictures on menus just makes sense. ”
