Partner @DigitalFoodLab | Insight and strategy consulting on disruptive agrifood innovation | Investor & board member #FoodTech
🍲 🖥️ What's the future for restaurant? Restaurants don’t get the same attention as other areas of the food value chain when considering innovation, but actually a lot of things are happening. These restaurant trends are all answers to the three challenges that restaurants are already facing challenges such as sustainability, lack of qualified labour, or providing healthier foods. If we look in depth at the different categories of players setting up the future of the restaurant, we identify three main challenges: 1️⃣ Creating better relationships with customers 📱 Booking a table and restaurant discovery: the “ancestor” of FoodTech with startups such as TheFork, a Tripadvisor company and OpenTable. New players have recently been trying to reinvent the customer experience with new apps and services. 💻 Online ordering services are helping restaurants manage their online presence and also create their own takeaway and online delivery services. 💳 Pay-at-table startups emerged in the post-COVID world as an obvious solution to the lack of workers and our desire to limit interactions. However, their success is quite limited compared to the investments that went into their development. 2️⃣ Digitising the restaurant 🏧 Payment services, HR management, and restaurant management startups operate along blurry lines. While there are specialists in each category, these mostly mature players are now becoming one-stop shops offering all the features a restaurant needs. 🛵 Online order management: as the number of restaurant delivery platforms increased, so did the number of tablets in restaurants. Startups such as Deliverect appeared to manage orders from all sources. 3️⃣ Creating the kitchen of the future 👫 Managing relationships with suppliers: companies created around the COVID pandemic are trying to streamline this supplier-buyer problem; either by creating new, digital-first suppliers, or by setting up a unified communication channel between a restaurant and all of its suppliers (Choco), or by digitising suppliers one by one. 🍎 Foodwaste management: startups address this challenge with multiple solutions. One of the most elegant is the development of smart bins such as Winnow, which tell a restaurant what has been thrown away, which can, in turn, lead to better supply and inventory management. 🤖 Robotics: The first wave of restaurant robots mostly failed (too complicated, too expensive) and a new generation of players is appearing. They have developed modular kitchen solutions designed for canteens or cloud kitchens and can cook a wide range of products (often rice and pasta bowls). 👉 All the links and information here: https://lnkd.in/eDEmj5Mb #restaurant #foodservice #foodtech #startup