This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio.
I've been spending a lot of time on the road this summer, tapping.
Into plane streains and automobi.
Drive through fast food. Do not judge me, but our next guest really understands the space big time. What are your I have a happy meal. Don't judge me. We got a happy meal, chicken McNugget, a little bit a fry, and I get a water.
Do you get a toy?
Sometimes?
Yeah?
Wow, You're just you. You and my four and a half year old would really get along because he likes to have well. Our next guest understands the space big time, and really the overall mobile restaurant space. It's been a while, but it's great to have back with us. Christopher Sefkin, head of technology at Zeni. It's a subsidiary of the publicly traded Global Payments Xenial. It's a thirty two billion market cap company that's up about twenty five percent year
to date. Chris joins us on a zoom from Charlotte, North Carolina. Chris, how are you good?
How are you doing pretty well? Yeah?
Doing doing pretty well thanks, Okay. So we had on our plane call this morning, we got into a little debate about how people order and the lack of people who are around when you go into a restaurant, and it kind of feels like, I'll be honest, it feels like in this day and age, a lot of the work that people used to get paid to do, like
taking orders, now falls on us the consumer. Yeah, I think there's definitely been a shift, and I think what our customers and restaurants have done has really taken an all of the above approach, like you can, you can still talk to a person if you need to, But I think what they've really done is redeployed the folks that are working in those restaurants more towards the production of the food and getting you what you ask for, and allowed the technology to take the ordering experience so
that you can, you know, do more customizations and have more you know, specific things that you might want. And we find that customers really take advantage of those capabilities when they have say a Kiosk or a mobile app or another ordering mechanism other than just walking up to a person where you feel time pressure to figure out the menu and you may not understand everything that's coming on a sandwich, so that that is something that you
would expect to feel. But I think from an actual restaurant employment perspective, you'll see that that that labor hasn't left the building, but perhaps moved around a bit.
So how's it all evolving? Right, We're all getting used to jumping up to a kiosk or mobile ordering. Where does it go from here?
Yeah, it's a good question.
I think we see a lot of folks testing out the voice spot, voice AI and the drive through, so I think you're going to see some more of that.
You're going to see I think a good bit more.
Of that as as generative AI, you know, gets better at being able to have those conversations with customers. I think you're going to see an additional move towards those kiosk experiences. We've seen a lot more adoption recently. It's not a new technology, has been around for a long time, but we've seen a lot of a lot more folks
adopting it. I think also you're going to see more sophisticated sort of drive through and pick up environments where you know a lot of folks are testing out more lane, four lane drive throughs, drive throughs that have specific mobile ordering pickup points, things that help.
Caught Tim's attention. There, nanny just perked up.
Chris, I gotta tell you. I mean, Chris, you can't. I don't know if you can play favorites here, just do me a favorite, play favorites. But does anyone do it as well as Chick fil A?
I can't play favorites, But I mean they definitely are folks that all of our customers watch and everybody keeps you abreast of whatever they're doing. And so you know, I know they're building a new restaurant concept. I think I saw that in the news. I think a lot of folks are watching. Like I said, that's four lane. How do we do four lane drive throughs?
Really? Well? I see that happening in quite a few instances.
Well, is that like what Chipotle's doing in terms of you have a drive through I think specifically for mobile ordering, and then there's people who come up and who are actually doing the order there. I mean, this is what we're talking about. This is where we're moving towards.
Yeah, I think what's happening is a lot of folks are experimenting with new ways to do this. I mean, when you deal with cars and you're working with drive throughs, you're limited to the real estate of the actual space that you're working on. And so some of these restaurants you see with an elevated second floor try to take advantage of the fact that there's only so much ground
floor that cars can move on. And then you know, like I said, you've got a lot of folks that are are kind of experimenting and trying to figure out, well, how do I maximize that through But either of a real estate they currently have that's already out there, or when they build new buildings or redesign and re upfit places, you know, what's going to be the most efficient way to move cars through and take advantage of that pre
order technology? So, do we have one drive through lane that's dedicated to a mobile pickup then other lanes that are more traditional, you know, sort of like the toll booth concept where you go easy pass versus you know, a regular lane.
Kind of thing.
It's interesting, I actually come from a town that outlawed drive throughs. I believe it was in the nineteen eighties due to environmental concerns, and I'm wondering if increasingly we're starting to see that idling cars. Yeah, no drive throughs allowed in Sandleance, Obispo, California. Is that something that you see, Chris increasingly happen?
Is that?
Is that conversation happening again?
From my viewpoint the opposite.
Like I said, we've seen a lot more folks looking to try and expand the capability of the drive through versus shrinket. The pandemic closed in interior restaurants, and folks now are looking at ways to build restaurants that maybe don't even have an indoor experience at all and are only servicing drive through or pick up, you know, delivery type orders.
Hey, tell us about stuff like camera based car recognition technology. What exactly is that about? And that makes me a little freaky, but go ahead.
Yeah, that's a good question.
We're working on some pretty cool technology on this front, and rather than being creepy, what we're focused on is really understanding what's happening in the line so that if we get an order to you, like let's say, somebody walks up to your car and takes your order and then hands you the bag of food, you know, we want to understand that how long did that interaction really take and when did that happen, And so if you drive away, before you leave the line, we want to
know what's going on so we can help figure out if these new strategies and things are working. So what we're really focused on there is just your car type in colors. It's a black sedan, a red truck, so on and so forth, and understanding as you move around maybe there's a merge that that happens. We can reorder those events in the kitchen to help the staff members
understand they're getting the right order, the right car. One of the key things that you want to get when you go to one of these places is the order that you ordered.
You know, made the right way.
Yes, Chris, I want to talk to you about this. Okay. I've been to a drive through like one time in the last six months. It was on Saturday, was the Happy Meal. We ordered a six we ordered a six piece, we ordered an apple juice, and we got an order that was that was wrong. And I know these things happen.
I mean, I worked in fast food when I was a teenager, and you know, we're all human I'm wondering though, because people make mistakes, how do you how do you use technology to decrease the number of mistakes.
I mean a great example of that is, you know, that final event that happens in the kitchen is that you know, worker is taking the food out of the out of the restaurant. We're actually putting a picture of the car up that they're delivering to.
So they've got the bag of food.
They yeah, hit the button and now because of the camera tracking, we know, hey, that's the car you're bringing it to. Is one more final like, you know, step and think about it. We're just trying to reduce the number of things a person working in this environment has to think about.
We want to make it easy, you.
Know, as easy as possible, so they can walk in and start working and do their job and you know, produce that experience that that the brand wants to produce every time.
For what it's worth, my kid a one chicken nugget and then fell asleep, so it didn't matter at all that we could get the six piece instead of the four piece.
So hey, Chris, I do wonder how much of this just makes sense because of how the pandemic impacted us in you know, all the food ordering or the mobile ordering and the you know, how that kind of has changed us forever. Is a result of the demand that you're seeing a result of the pan demic specifically, or is it also a tighter labor force and so we need to kind of figure out how to make restaurants work and mobilize or use technology to automate things that were once taken care of by humans.
I think it's both.
We definitely saw a huge behavioral shift in folks moving to the drive through, for example, as opposed to going
inside and doing more delivery. I think we've seen some of the delivery volume drop a little bit compared to you know, coming to the restaurant again, you know, probably for cost concerns, But what we've really seen is that the workforce itself, you know, is looking for jobs that it makes sense, and the tightness in the labor market means that you have to compete not only for the technology that the consumer uses, but you want to compete also for that worker who's going to choose between working
for you or somebody across the street who maybe has a more difficult concept to run. And so we definitely have seen that technology try and enhance the worker experience and automate some of those tests so that workers have more job satisfaction for what they're doing.
Try.
I'm gonna try to get you to pick a favorite one last time. What's what's your favorite? Fest Foed.
I don't know. It's a good question. I think it would be wrong for me to pick a favorite at this point. I don't think that's fair.
I bet you do, but you know, we'll let it slide this time. You can't have a favorite?
Ki, Yeah, I do like a good chicken sandwich.
I gotta say, okay, Chris, listen, thank you so much. Chrisyfkin. He's head of technology at Xenial is, a subsidiary the publicly traded global payments company that's a thirty two billion dollar market cap company, roughly up about twenty five percent year to date. Joining us on Zoom from Charlotte, North Carolina,