Delivering The Digital Restaurant

The omnichannel disruption that upended retail has finally come to the restaurant industry. Restaurateurs must shift how they think, behave, and invest to survive and thrive. Today's consumers are well-conditioned in their expectations: they want the same tech-savvy, on-demand, and frictionless interactions with restaurants that they get in every other vertical. If you think your 1,000-unit restaurant chain is too big to fail, remember that 1,000-unit Sears closed nearly all of its stores after it filed for bankruptcy in February 2019. If you think your local family independent restaurant is too beloved to fail, remember the Amazon effect changed the face of main street and traditional retailing. Delivering the Digital Restaurant explores the massive disruption facing American restaurants through first-hand accounts of food industry veterans and start-up entrepreneurs innovating the future of food. Combining sociological observations, rich industry data, and insider knowledge, Delivering paints a picture of how food is evolving and how you as a leader, owner, or operator can successfully innovate and meet the new consumer demands to capitalize on the opportunities ahead. Those who understand this digital disruption will be better positioned to embrace the innovation that consumers are demanding. Those who resist will surely be left behind.

The duo that explained the digital revolution in restaurants now brings your restaurant a how-to guide. The digital restaurant revolution is well underway. Restaurants that survived the pandemic now have the opportunity to step back and consider how to best serve digital demand. The best-selling, award-winning book - Delivering the Digital Restaurant: Your Roadmap to the Future of Food sets out why restaurateurs worldwide must treat digitization and the off-premise channel seriously. Combining interviews with technology and restaurant leaders, the authors articulated why this growth channel was critical for restaurants to survive. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic separated digital leaders from all others. Those who invested in digital guest relationships and the operations that enable them leaped ahead - with 2022 revenues well in excess of 2019. Those who didn't treat it seriously perished and never re-opened. A great many restaurants fell somewhere in the middle - they added digital elements out of necessity, but did not update their restaurant operations to match their new capabilities. Or perhaps they tacked on several different digital approaches but did not integrate them. The story of the first book was incomplete. Delivering the Digital Restaurant: The Path to Digital Maturity completes the story through a journey toward digital maturity. With the pandemic increasingly in the rearview mirror, now is the time for restaurants to find their current place on the path and then follow it toward a more prosperous future. This playbook charts the way. Knowing where you are now enables you to determine where you can ultimately be. This new book outlines how to evolve and grow stronger in off-premise channels. Combining advice from leading experts across operations, marketing, technology, and entrepreneurship, The Path to Digital Maturity shapes the journey you can take to grow your restaurant to new heights. Follow the path to digital maturity with tips on: How to maximize third-party marketplace sales How to drive first-party direct-ordering conversion How to get the most out of the data digital ordering creates How to expand your restaurant's capacity, then make the most of that capacity How to use ghost kitchens and virtual brands to drive capital-light expansion How to disrupt the very idea of a restaurant with software, automation and digital guest relationships For restaurant technology leaders, this book also puts into perspective how restaurants use the technology they've been given and what more must be done to unlock its true power. Full digital maturity will require a new form of technology: software that is more holistic and can better integrate with the operations they support. Restaurants will need technology companies to change their approach to truly evolve.

A searing expose of the restaurant industry, and a path to a better, safer, happier meal. In the years before the pandemic, the restaurant business was booming. Americans spent more than half of their annual food budgets dining out. In a generation, chefs had gone from behind-the-scenes laborers to TV stars. The arrival of Uber Eats, DoorDash, and other meal delivery apps was overtaking home cooking. Beneath all that growth lurked serious problems. Many of the best restaurants in the world employed unpaid cooks. Meal delivery apps were putting restaurants out of business. And all that dining out meant dramatically less healthy diets. The industry may have been booming, but it also desperately needed to change. Then, along came COVID-19. From the farm to the street-side patio, from the sweaty kitchen to the swarm of delivery vehicles buzzing about our cities, everything about the restaurant business is changing, for better or worse. The Next Supper tells this story and offers clear and essential advice for what and how to eat to ensure the well-being of cooks and waitstaff, not to mention our bodies and the environment. The Next Supper reminds us that breaking bread is an essential human activity and charts a path to preserving the joy of eating out in a turbulent era.

This one-stop guide to opening a restaurant from an accountant-turned-restaurateur shows aspiring proprietors how to succeed in the crucial first year and beyond. The majority of restaurants fail, and those that succeed happened upon that mysterious X factor, right? Wrong! Roger Fields--money-guy, restaurant owner, and restaurant consultant--shows how eateries can get past that challenging first year and keep diners coming back for more. The only restaurant start-up guide written by a certified accountant, this book gives readers an edge when making key decisions about funding, location, hiring, menu-making, number-crunching, and turning a profit--complete with sample sales forecasts and operating budgets. This updated edition also includes strategies for capitalizing on the latest food, drink, and technology trends. Opening a restaurant isn't easy, but this realistic dreamer's guide helps set the table for lasting success.

Mobile computing and wireless technology have grown at a phenomenal rate in recent years, and so has artificial intelligence. The most advanced software applications that the world ever witnessed can be realized through a combined aspect of these disciplines, capable of delivering high level support to various industry sectors and to people’s quality of life in general. Currently, many countries are facing challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most impacted industries by the pandemic is that of tourism and hospitality. It is time to explore and leverage the power of mobile and wireless intelligence to assist with the recovery of the tourism and hospitality sector during and after the pandemic, which constitutes a need for relevant research in the field. Mobile Computing and Technology Applications in Tourism and Hospitality presents the latest research and development in mobile and intelligent computing with a focus on tourism and hospitality sectors. The chapters discuss the role of research on innovative technologies and applications for resilience to return the tourism and hospitality industry back to its normal state. This includes research on topics such as sensor-based technology, smart tourism, virtual and augmented reality, mobile travel applications, and more. This book is ideal for managers, executives, museum and cultural heritage specialists, app developers, IT consultants, tourism and hospitality professionals, researchers, academicians, and students.

This open access book is the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 28th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER21@yourplace virtual conference January 19–22, 2021. This book advances the current knowledge base of information and communication technologies and tourism in the areas of social media and sharing economy, technology including AI-driven technologies, research related to destination management and innovations, COVID-19 repercussions, and others. Readers will find a wealth of state-of-the-art insights, ideas, and case studies on how information and communication technologies can be applied in travel and tourism as we encounter new opportunities and challenges in an unpredictable world.

In 2016, Globe and Mail reporter Ann Hui drove across Canada, from Victoria to Fogo Island, to write about small-town Chinese restaurants and the families who run them. It was only after the story was published that she discovered her own family could have been included—her parents had run their own Chinese restaurant, The Legion Cafe, before she was born. This discovery, and the realization that there was so much of her own history she didn’t yet know, set her on a time-sensitive mission: to understand how, after generations living in a poverty-stricken area of Guangdong, China, her family had somehow wound up in Canada. Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurantsweaves together Hui’s own family history—from her grandfather’s decision to leave behind a wife and newborn son for a new life, to her father’s path from cooking in rural China to running some of the largest “Western” kitchens in Vancouver, to the unravelling of a closely guarded family secret—with the stories of dozens of Chinese restaurant owners from coast to coast. Along her trip, she meets a Chinese-restaurant owner/small-town mayor, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in a Thunder Bay curling rink, and the woman who runs a restaurant alone, 365 days a year, on the very remote Fogo Island. Hui also explores the fascinating history behind “chop suey” cuisine, detailing the invention of classics like “ginger beef” and “Newfoundland chow mein,” and other uniquely Canadian fare like the “Chinese pierogies” of Alberta. Hui, who grew up in authenticity-obsessed Vancouver, begins her journey with a somewhat disparaging view of small-town “fake Chinese” food. But by the end, she comes to appreciate the essentially Chinese values that drive these restaurants—perseverance, entrepreneurialism and deep love for family. Using her own family’s story as a touchstone, she explores the importance of these restaurants in the country’s history and makes the case for why chop suey cuisine should be recognized as quintessentially Canadian.