How technology is dominating the foodservice industry

Restaurants have become innovative and technology driven as more and more people depend on apps and web portals to place orders from a wide range of choices available to them
From asking a friend about a good restaurant to reading the reviews on Zomato and deciding on our own, the food industry has revolutionised over the past few years. It is as if the flood gates have been opened for innovative and technological advancements to rush in. From pamphlets stuck in your house’s gate to digital menus available on your phone; from searching and pondering over for the best deals or discounts to getting the offers in messages and apps, services have become more user-friendly and are in fact just a tap away (on your mobile phone). The involvement of technology has certainly made service more reliable by being available to the customers 24×7.
Standing in a queue was followed by waiting on call, which has further evolved due to cloud telephony and call-center facility. Now customers don’t have to wait at all. Even the restaurants allow their customers to place an order and pay via web or app, and pick it up from the restaurant on the way to their destination.
Customers don’t have to wait in a line at the restaurant to place a pick-up order any more. The food industry has always welcomed such innovative ideas with open doors, and creatively utilised them to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their services. In the past few years, there has been a rush of such apps in the F&B domain, which has led to a rapid increase in the number of orders from web portals and apps.
Besides the ease in ordering, they offer additional and relevant information, which assist the consumer in placing the order.
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However, the major highlight is the availability of information at the relevant time. For instance, you are strolling in a new market with a hungry stomach, and you haven’t heard anything about the restaurants on your left and right. What would you do? Keep on marching for something familiar to appear, or just take a risk and hope it will turn out to be great?
Technology gives you more options and information to make an informed choice. You can check the brands available over the net or on several mobile apps, which won’t only provide you information but offers too, to give delight and respite to your stomach and wallet respectively.
Due to these advancements in providing a high-quality service to consumers, the food service industry has become a great opportunity for the investors to reap benefits from. According to the India Brand Equity Foundation, the Indian food service industry is expected to reach $78 billion by 2018.
It depicts the rapid growth that the food industry is experiencing these days and it’s majorly due to technological innovations, which have found their own place inside the industry. In 2013, Box8 (Poncho then) approached us for an effective marketing solution to mark their digital presence and enhance their business online. On deeper research, we found that there was a dearth of order management solution in the F&B industry.
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We did forward and backward integration to create DONE, a complete platform for order management, CRM and Analytics platform, to cater for the clients’ needs. Management and analytics, the two pillars of any successful business, have been creatively integrated in our platform.
Management helps in optimising the current resources, and analytics to strategise and enhance your business exponentially. With the introduction of live analytics dashboard, finding out which of their outlets is the most preferred, and which dish has become the hot favourite amongst their customers, is now just a tap
away. They can now strategise their business model to reap the benefits accordingly.
The menu has also become an aesthetic piece, which lures the customer and even guides him to the sweet spots. Brands work very intelligently on their menus, utilising the menu engineering techniques to give an artistic effect. We provide them with the same feature online with CMS, where they can improvise with their menu on the fly. Different offers at different times, hiding the unavailable dish, highlighting the dish of the day and so on, depending upon the occasions, time, and availability are some of the notable features.
DONE allows the brand owners multiple avenues i.e call, web, and app to get orders from. The branded websites and apps help in getting the potential business out there and also help in targeting old and new customers in a steady and innovative manner. DONE has grown from handling a single brand to over 30 brands now, in a very short span of time.
We have over 150 outlets across three cities viz., Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru. Some other brands currently benefi tting from our services include Box8, Pizza Corner, Juno’s Pizza, Hangla’s, Naturals Ice-cream, RushHrs, Wok in the Box, Baskin Robbins, 6th Street Yogurt, Torrp it up, Eatsome, Khans, Zaffran, Dumadum Biryani, Kaati Zone, Eatlo, etc.
We are quite happy with the response we have got from the clients. Their increasing revenue on our platform is a testimony of our platform’s efficiency. We are in talks with many investors for M&A and are planning on going global soon. We will very soon provide POS (Point Of Sale), enhanced analytics & CRM too, which could further assist our clients in running a smooth business.