Welcome to Chopping it Up. I'm your host, Mike Hanlon, the senior Restaurant and food Service Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Our research and that of bi's five hundred analysts around the globe can be found exclusively on the Bloomberg terminal. Today, we're joined by Brandon Barton, the CEO of Bite, the leading provider of intelligent KIOSK solutions for fast, casual and quick service restaurants. Thanks for doing this, Brandon.
Mike, thank you so much. Really appreciate having me on.
Yeah, you got it, man. I know you've been traveling a lot lately. Where you were at home this week? You on the road? What have you been up to?
I'm mat this, this is the office, I'm at home. It's nice to be on the road. Next week home, the week after that, on the road next week after that.
Life will the startup CEO?
You know? Yeah, yeah, I know. A last time we spoke at Prosper he said you were busy. It's cool man, I know you're a big wine guy. You have anything you're looking forward to drinking this weekend?
Well, not even this weekend.
You know, I've tried to make a little you know thing happen at every time I go to these events in the conferences, I didn't do it a prosper because I wasn't not there for a long enough amount of time. But I like to bring big bottles of wine and introduce people to you know, old wines and what they taste like. So there's a nineteen eighty one shob that
I'm bringing to fs Tech next week. But other than that, no, just you know, at home, just drink the casual stuff, cheap stuff, just you know, dinner wine, table wine.
Okay, cool. Talk to me a little bit about your career journey prior to bite.
Yeah, thank you for asking.
So I have spent my entire career in restaurants, if you really want to go back to it starts when I was fourteen years old and you know, needed to make make some money to you know, get the new Jordans and whatnot. So I was busing tables at this amazing little burger restaurant in Bay Ridge called Skinflints. But you know, I had not exactly realized that, let's say, being a restaurant tour was a career path for me until I was fortunate enough to go to Cornell.
But I didn't go to the hotel school.
Figured out that there was the best hotel school in the world there and immediately transferred in. So my passion for a restaurant goes way back. But after college, I worked in a couple of amazing restaurant groups, including Union Square Hospitality Group, where you know, I didn't get an MBA, but I got an MBA in hospitality from Danny and the amazing crew that's there, Randy Gurrudy, Terry Coglin, Wilkodera, those folks who were coming up at the same time
as I was. But then I made the switch over to tech. You know, there was always a part of me that wanted to make a big, scalable impact on the business. And you know, after working in a couple of different restaurant tech startups, I found myself as the fourth employee at Rezi and so we set out with an incredible aspiration to beat up Open Table. Open Table was charging restaurants a dollar per guest to come in,
and we didn't think that that was right. The busiest restaurants were being charged way more proportionally than they should be than the value they were given to Open Table. You know, by signing up all these people to Open Table's platform, and I'm very proud of the work that we did at Rezi to really be a contender.
If not.
Now it's a two horse race, if you will, as Resi's announced their acquisition of Talk, so we acquired Reserve, which was a competitor at the time. So now it's you know, Resie and Open Table still fighting that battle. But needless to say, I've had a ton of years in restaurants and restaurant technology, more than i'd probably like to admit.
On the air, bay Ridge man, that you got your start in bay Ridge as some great restaurants there. In the mid two thousands, I spent a lot of money at the Pearl Room and one on one's you know, it's funny, Mike, you'll you'll relate here. Everyone gets gaga about this espresso martini thing, and let me tell you the Pearl Room was serving espresso martinis back then.
Yeah, and you know, for what it's worth, you know, I don't know if this is a New York scene, but it certainly was a Brooklyn Third Avenue scene that you and I both probably have shared drinks in the same room. And it's fun there's a night life there. It's its own little thing. And some of the funny things that I think, you know, we look at today and say that's like like an espresso martini or like
the obsession with bagels and everything. It's like, yeah, this might have came out of you know, Italian American culture in Bay Ridge, you know, twenty years ago.
So yeah, yeah, for sure, great spot. So how long have you been at Bite and what attracted you to the role.
Yeah, I mean, look, I've been at Bite essentially since the beginning. I after my time at Rezi, I met the two co founders of Bite, Sas and Jeff and and they were working on this you know, audacious project
to put kiosks into restaurants. It was after a little bit of a pivot, and they came to me knowing that I knew how to do go to market for restaurant companies and I had the restaurant experience, and said, we'd love to you know, we'd love to have you consult And so I had breakfast with them at my Aleino. Back then, I was like a four or five day week breakfast at my Aleno, you know, meeting with people type of schedule. And so I met with them and after this breakfast, I said, this is a big deal.
And I went ahead and called my friends at Chickshak at the time, who were using Kiosk in their astplace location, and I said, Hey, is is this like a fad or is this is this something that's going to change the industry? And everyone said the latter. So I joined up with the co founders. A few months later. They made me CEO of the company, and Jeff, myself and Thoughs have been really been running the company since together.
So it's been.
Since twenty eighteen, so we've been on the journey for a while.
Yeah, it's it's been interesting, you know, because Jack in the Box tried to roll these out a long time ago, and then they actually removed them from the restaurants. You know, it's interesting how much consumer behavior has changed over the last handful of years.
Right, Yeah, I mean clearly, things like the pandemic had accelerated things now. Not in the beginning, of course, when we were all afraid to touch a you know, a shopping cart, never mind a kiosk, right, but you know, the adoption of technology by consumers has skyrocked it in every category. So This is not age restricted to gen z likes.
No, no, no, no.
Everybody knows how to order online, which means you know how to order off a Kiosk. And in a lot of cases, and I'm not saying nessay a lot of people. I'm saying a lot of cases, meaning there are times when somebody wants to go order from a cashier, and there are times when you might have your hands full or be listening to your favorite podcast like this one and not want to talk to anybody and not want to interrupt that to have to go into line and order.
And so there's just a lot of scenarios in which Kiosk becomes the ideal scenario. And I think the prevalent idea for the industry at this point is to meet guess where they are. So you see a lot of innovation in drive through. You see a lot of amazing order ahead and voice AI and all this other stuff
coming out, and Kiosk is a part of that. You know, it's not just going to be this one channel of walk in order but order ahead sometimes sometimes with the Kiosk, and we're part of that unifying the guest experience into a solid hospitality experience.
I'd imagine you've gain a lot of inquiries from restaurant chains with significant exposure to California.
Totally true, and you'd have to think that part of that is the increase in minimum wage two twenty dollars an hour any attack. Look Throughout my career, the through line has been how do I help restaurants create more ebitdah like, how do I help them become more profitable by using and leveraging technology? And that's purely based on my love for restaurants.
I want to see.
I was part of one of the most amazing restaurants in New York called Tabla. It had an amazing, you know, incredible eleven year twelve year run and then closed and the number of the number of things that we tried to do to make a three hundred and fifty seat Indian restaurants survive in New York at the time, it really spurred this idea of how do we make sure that we can preserve restaurants the way that they are
and have people who operate well stay open. And you can see, you know, there's been a slew of bankruptcies lately, and you might point, you know, there might be a through line here on the folks that were not early enough to adopt new technologies, order ahead, move on to the third parties and not innovate as part of these these folks that are essentially you know, not surviving, and so long story short, you know, we strive to kind
of make the profitability of the restaurant better. In Californi, there's increased pressure on the P and L because of labor, and so if we can enable their staff to do more by just keeping the staff the way they are. There's a misnomer that there's people getting fired because of chaosis.
This is just not true. It's really about supplementing what they can do so they may be able to get the drinks faster if they're not taking the order, which is a really transactional part of the hospitality experience.
Yeah, for sure, you're freeing them up for more high value jobs, right than just taking that.
Order exactly, and not even just high value.
There's very few pure play cashiers in the entire restaurant industry. That is always a fraction of their job. Okay, and so if we could take that fraction away, can the dining room be cleaner, can the bathrooms be cleaner, can the food come out quicker? And so we see our restaurants have increased revenue, not just because we are efficient and great at presenting them the guests with items that
they want to order. We'll talk about our AI that does that, but also because food production can go quicker and the line can be smaller. There's all these other benefits that don't get factored in. But we're happy about all the brands that we work with in California. It certainly is a place. But now Washington, Oregon, New York, other places that are considering raising the minimum wage will see the same effects.
Yeah, for sure. Congrats on the Portillo's deal.
Thank you.
I've read that they're testing that they're kios in California.
Right, Yeah, they are, well, not just in California, downtown Chicago to some of their busiest stores. That test is going really well, and probably by the time we're talking about this is even more news to come of that. And you know, talk about an environment where you're putting Kiosk to the test. Those restaurants, I believe their average
store volume is nine million dollars. That's so on the far end of what an average unit volume for a restaurant brand like that is uh, you know, we have tons and tons of volume that are being done and the guests are adopting it. It just this is the this is the thing that's different than five years ago
or six years ago. If you put Kiosk in your restaurant and do it smart and in the right way and have the right hospitality that you're teaching your your team that goes along with that, guests are very willing to adopt Kiosk as part of their ordering process.
Yeah, we had uh, we had mic Osamlu the CEO on the pod. I guess it was last year. I'm a fan, super sharp, sharp guy. Great conversation. What kind of average check increases are your Kiosk customers getting from the technology and how much of the improvement is more consistent up selling versus maybe just giving customers more time to browse the menu.
Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's hard to parse the division of those things. We have been, you know, using AI before it was cool to say you are
and even from the beginning. One of the reasons that I joined Bite was because Sauce our Cto was so incredible at this and he was able to create an algorithm using you know, some of the most advanced kind of machine learning technologies to learn how people like to order, and then you know, offer items to guests that may or may not know those items exist and might go along with the meal that they're having. And so we typically will see a twenty percent increase in average check.
Sometimes it's way bigger than that. Sometimes, you know, in certain scenarios where there's not tons of things to upsell, that might be more in the ten to fifteen percent range. And the idea of upselling, we as consumers know that as somebody asking you to buy something, but it's very different.
On a kiosk, it's just presenting a bunch of options, and so there is this light touch to it where it's just a guest opting in to the idea of buying something or adding double meat or I didn't know that you could put extra chi on this for fifty cents, where those are not questions that you would get when you're ordering with somebody. Imagine if every time you ordered a burger, like you want double cheese, you want double meat,
do you want you know sidur fries? Would you like to know upsize that This is not a hospitality experience, whereas using a digital experience you could put a lot of options to people they opt their way into them. But our intelligence is showing guests things that they are highly likely to want to order. And that's based off
of our data that we have with the restaurant. But not only that data, but we use the data from the entire you know, eight years of doing this, and we can draw conclusions about what, I don't know, what trends there might be in certain regions, or if it's cold not to sell ice cream, you know, which seems pretty simple to do, but yet at the same time it's very effective for guests increase in average.
Check Okay, cool, I guess kind of on that same vein. Are any of your customers using the data in their loyalty programs or face recognition to provide customers in even more personalized Kiosk experience?
Oh? Absolutely so.
We do have facial recognition. It was also something that wowed me back at that breakfast. Facial recognition is opt in by a guest and it's opt in by the brand. Every brand doesn't necessarily have to use that, and the facial recognition is great because sometimes the idea of let's say type your phone number in for loyalty, or scan this thing so that we can recognize who Mike is on this next order, that sometimes feels.
Like a lot to do.
And imagine you could just walk up to a screen and it knows that's you, and it says your last order, you know, was this exact bowl with this add on and not this one and take this out and put this in. It's a lovely way to have a very light touch loyalty, right, and recognize somebody and then give them personalized recommendations. So one of the things the algorithm will do is understand if you like things that are spicy, will suggest more things that are spicy to you.
Right.
That might be, you know, instead of just the regular prize, maybe it's the spiced curly fries I don't know, that go along with something.
And therefore we.
Are moving more towards that personalization. I think the next step here is not just to understand your behavior as a guest on a Kiosk, but your behavior as a guest in the entire ecosystem for that restaurant. So that means if I could pull your order from the app last time and say do you want to reorder this? It might not be what you want to do at that moment because you were ordering for you and your family versus ordering for just yourself, But that becomes the
next step in this idea of personalization. You have one account with this and regardless of the digital channel that you go through, you'll have access to that order history. And this is why you hear many brands, I'm sure as you listen into earnings calls as I do, talking about one hundred percent digital because they want to have this holistic view of the guests and make sure to service them the best way they can in each one of these channels.
Yeah, it's really interesting what percentage of people are opting in and how are restaurant chains kind of motivating them to do so.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think it varies. You know, it's above fifty percent. You know, the opt in is again, it's light. It's not an idea of having to let's say, use a clear machine at the airport where it's like put your irises in the exact spot. Okay, you know, we have a fairly high accuracy, and I think the motivation is for your the customers that are our frequent customers. I remember the first restaurant that we launched in New York.
I would sit it was a couple of blocks away from our office, and I would sit there and watch, and we had some people that would come in and clearly they were like busy at work, they had a half hour to get lunch. They'd come in and with a couple of taps on a screen, they'd have their order done. Whereas if it's the first time you're experiencing the brand, you might want to, as you said, take your time browse the menu.
I have.
We've had some fun with Dig. Tracy Kim, the CEO there, she's actually and uh And it was just on on my podcast a Simmer talking about how some guests are using this to better navigate a menu because a menu board doesn't have a full description of it and if it did, it would be overwhelming. Right, So what is in the health bowl or the Caesar salad bowl or you know, in their case, like the roast chicken plate.
You can look much deeper into it on a person, you know, a screen that's personalized to you.
So, yeah, Digs great, they have great chicken thighs. I'm I frequent it when I'm up at our seven thirty one lev.
I think it's one of the best values, especially if you are factoring in your health. They have such an incredible healthy menu, So if you're looking at to you know, for a healthy lunch, option digs the spot.
Yeah, they do a great job. What's the forty five percent role?
Le?
So I listened to one of your podcasts you were on with Rev. Ciancio, and I think it was something about about customers walking by, you know, I you know, because some places the line is too long, right. We see that in a you know, I see that, you know, in drive throughs.
You know.
McDonald's some years ago was talking about how they have five more than five cars in the line, people will just drive past. And ye know, Chick fil A has a lot higher to like demand and people are more willing to wait, so it might be twenty five cars, right, And so that is impacting restaurants, especially in the city. Right, if people see long lines, they might go elsewhere, right.
It impacts restaurants everywhere. Yeah, so I think the status forty five percent of guests that see a line are going to are gonna, you know, walk out the door right, a lot of more than three people, right, And so you know, thank you for bringing that up. Even in places that are you know, pay less, like at Chipotle, where you're going to walk through an experience, they always will have a line. But when that line gets long enough,
there's something that we call que rejection. And so the idea is that you know, same thing, whether it's within your car or not. You're seeing a line and you're saying, no, I'm not going here, that's gonna take too long.
Now. By the way, the Chipotle line, the Sweet Green line.
They're fast. That it's not that these lines are slow, but the perception of it is that it is. And so if you can offset some of those orders to a kios that's sitting on the side, you know, easily accessible by the guests, people are way more willing to wait for their food than they are to wait to order their food, because then it seems like you're waiting twice, you know, Like I said before, I mean, I'm a
very digital focused person. So I'd love to get my order in and then check my app and see what the score of the game was last night. Check Fantasy you know, see the Giants lose again and and then you know my salads ready perfect?
Yeah, all right, good stuff. What's the impact of kios on on employee turnover and satisfaction?
Yeah?
I mean, look, I think we'd love to have a lot more hard data on this, but generally speaking, if you're a tip ticking res tips go up, right we are we're offering an experience that can make sure to prompt a guest for tipping if they want to do that, and you could set percentages on whatever you want. Doesn't have to be a twenty percent tip, but the overall tips go up. I also think that it takes a
lot of pressure off their job responsibilities. I think you would know when you're trying to juggle two or three balls at the same time, like taking an order, putting the order together, getting drinks, and doing all those things at once. You could take one of those things away and just cut it down to two, you're going to be better and more efficient at it. So we have seen, and this might perhaps be counterintuitive, but we've seen a lot of staffs embrace the idea of Kiosk ordering so
that they can actually execute on their job better. And look, people don't get into the restaurant industry for just a job. A lot of people want to do this because they feel making others happy is part of that bonus. It's not just the wage that I can, but I want to make have an impact on other people's lives, right, And so I think it allows Kioskodering allows that person
to do more of the personal interaction. Again counterintuitive, take the transaction part out of it and give somebody take an extra few seconds to hand somebody their order and say, Mike, thanks so much for coming in today. And I guarantee you those hospitality employees feel the impact of the smile that Mike gives back to them before they leave, and they and Mike might say have a great day, yeah.
One hundred percent. Man. I think that's part of the issue that we're seeing with Starbucks, is right, that was the cafe where the barista knew your name right when you walked in, and they've they've gotten away from that, right, It's kind of become soulless, transactional, and I think it's really impacted their sales. So it's really important to be able to free up your employees to provide hospitality, no matter what the concept.
Is yeah, And I think that's kind of the point.
With Starbucks is that the the the increased variations on their menu have made it ever so much more difficult to be a barista. And so never mind that you now have to be a barista in a cashier or barisa and a you know, you know, the person that's handing you all your food fulfillment. Right, So I totally agree with that.
I think.
Look, I think I probably am one who thinks that Brian is going to do great things there in his new role. So you know, he's already come out with a little statement on how he's going to change the environment to be that third place again. And happy to uh to receive a call from them if they want to do some stuff with bite.
Nice nice plug. I I yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what what he can accomplish at Starbucks. That's going to be. That's gonna be a fun one to track, for sure. I'd imagine the technology is helping sun Chains ease the issue of late night staffing.
Late night and midday okay, right, so Midge, you know shift changes even you know, even the idea that a restaurant is drive through heavy. So we have some restaurants that we work with that are over seventy percent drive through and again, multiple balls in the air. Can we
take one away? So, if you have the majority of your staff and the majority of your revenue coming through drive through, and everyone's focused on this one or two windows out the side of the restaurant, how can you have your eyes in the back of your head to be in both places at once? And so how great is it to be able to have your focus on that seventy percent revenue channel and then the other thirty
percent coming in the store? You hot, you know that you have to deliver on that that handoff that hospitality experience when you're giving people what they've ordered or even making sure that the dining room's clear. So I think that applies to late night when you might be shorter staffed. I think it applies to, you know, the shoulder periods as well. We've had a restaurant brand who actually has
quite an older clientele. You know, if you were to compare them to the Chipotles and and maybe the Sweet Greens of the world, and they found that that the Kiosk always being able to be there to take an order and not having somebody wait, while there's shifting things happening in the kitchen and people are trying to do
multiple things at the same time. Really added to that, let's say two to five pm time period where people are coming in and just want to get something and you know, have a very quick and easy experience.
Yeah, and that's a home run. You're leveraging the box in a slow time, right, and so you're leveraging your fixed costs. It's it's helpful, for sure. Sure. I've read in one of the case studies on your website that bite help to lower food cost So does that mean food costs are going down as a percentage of sales due to the higher AUVs and average checks and the up selling higher margin menu items or is there something more to it than that.
Well, typically the things that are additive to the main part of a meal are lower food costs. Your French fries are cheaper than the burg The soda is way cheaper than the French fries. And so if we can help to remind people that they forgot to put a drink in their cart, or they forgot to you know, add that extra side, or maybe it's a dessert, these are lower costs. Lower food cost items, and therefore you know, food cost is going to go down as a total
percentage of sales. Also, as you mentioned, all the variable costs go down as sales go up. That's that's how that works, right, you know, So you know, the the cost of labor so to speak, is going to go down as sales go up if you're not adding more labor to do that. Now, food cost doesn't exactly act the same way. But but if we're adding the sales on these higher margin items, it's going to bring down the food costs in a you know, significant way.
Yeah, that's great. Talk to me about the secret menu at Shacks che Big Chicken.
Let me can I just start by saying, Shaquille O'Neil is He is exactly who you think Key is in terms of how kind and generous and amazing he is. I spent nearly an hour with him at the Big Chicken conference in Las Vegas. Shout out to Josh and Josh and all and Sam and all the team out there for getting that to happen. And and you know, we set off on this project to try to bring Shack's personality into a Kiosk experience, and so We didn't just say hey, let's just do this in a small way,
in the big Chicken way with the capital big. We did it in a big way. We actually have changed our entire user experience to be able to do this not just for them, but to do this for many other brands. So before we were saying, hey, this is a great way to get the transaction done, but now, how do we add a hospitality experience? How do we add fun to that transaction to make guests want to come use the kiosk? And there was no better path
or you know, initial place to do this. And with Shaquille O'Neil probably the most memorable you know, celebrity that I know, Okay, and so we have instances of Shack throughout the entire you know, chicken menu, flapping chicken wings and doing all this. But the kicker and the best part in my mind, was we had a little area where if you click it, and you figure out that you can click this area, you get into Shack's secret menu. And it's not just Shack, it's the entire O'Neal family.
So his mother has an item's there that she wants or done Lucille's way, his daughter. He has menu items that are done her way, and so it's really about appealing to multi generational but also putting a little fun. I mean McDonald's, you know, did some good stuff here when they had the Travis Scott menu, for example, and they you didn't have to change what you have in your kitchen, but how do you do a shacksway?
You know?
And I think that's really cool. So there's so much more that is going to come out of that. I hope that some of our restaurants will embrace us and maybe even look to local celebrities or influencers and say, you know, you see this on old school menus. This is the way Brandon has his martini, So we're going to put it on the menu. That's honoring the people
and the regulars around you. I would love to see people say this is this is just a salad for us here and it's double chicken caesar kale, and that's exactly the way Sally does it every Tuesday, and now we have it on the menu for her.
Yeah, that's very cool. I'm not really sure. I'm a huge fan of Shaq and the Inside the NBA show, so I haven't heard any updates about what's going to happen with it. But now that like TNT lost that contract, I'm kind of like heartbroken.
Me too, me too.
I think it's I don't know, it's fairly improbable to me that they're going to keep Shaq and Chuck off at the NBA TV circuit in some way.
I hope the idea.
Of having Shaq and Chuck still involved with, you know, commenting on basketball is going to be there. Maybe they'll go the Peyton and Eli way and you could just tune into T and T and have them sitting there watching a game.
That'd be cool. Also, where do I got to touch on the menu? Because I noticed there's a big chicken on my way home from work, so I'm going to have to get one of those up. It's in Bridgewater, New Jersey. So where do I have to touch the menu?
Yeah?
Sure, sure to find that menu.
If you look at it long enough, it'll say, you know, like something like a shosh you know, don't touch here, but chat On the bottom left hand side of it. Shack is sitting there and telling you know, if you hit Shack kind of like a little whack a mole if you hit shack at the menu will come up.
Okay, very cool. I got to check that out. All right. What do you think of McDonald's move to test these kiosks that accept cash.
I love it.
I mean, you know, you talk about you were talking a little bit about the news cycles on kiosk and this that it was like stop and go for Jack and other places. Also, the commentary around McDonald's kiosk program has been wrapped up in a bunch of noise like there, you know, total digital transformation being I don't know, six figures for franchisees and the franchisees revolting and some people took that a revolting on kiosk and guess what they were not. And so it's just a signal to me.
McDonald's is certainly the leader in so many categories. Innovation is one of them as well, And it's just a signal to me that they see more and more use cases and more and more guests that want to come and use the kiosk, and they're maintaining their value proposition while also increasing the hospitality by saying you can now you know, do a cash transaction here. You know, we're partnered with a great company glory to be able to do that as well in certain cases. And look, I
think cash transactions are declining. I think that's not a controversial thing to say, but in certain scenarios, in certain states and certain locations, you want to be able to take cash because you want to have a hospitality experience for everybody. Okay, you don't want to exclude people from that because they, you know, didn't use a credit card
or just we're using cash today. So I love it, and I think it underscores the idea that kiosk are going to be in every QSR and fast casual restaurant in the next few years.
Yeah, I agree. Ten years later, Chili's brought back xiosks. Right, why did he work last time? Was it just were they just too early? And what do you think about them bringing that technology back?
Well, you know, you know my non professional opinion here, I guess, or you know, not fully educated on what the Chili's team has in mind. I think the idea of having something to assist their service staff to provide better service by allowing guests to order the second round of drinks at the table makes sense.
You know.
Going back to the comment abound around some of the brands that have not innovated, having struggles and bankruptcy and things like that. This is Chili's way to perhaps try to move into innovation cycle. I will say frankly that that whole let's say family dining, casual dining category, you know,
as well as I is getting smushed. I mean, more people want to go to Kava and sit down and not have table service, then they might want to go to a more casual and then they'll save the table service for a higher end experience, maybe something like a Hillstone. And so the category is getting crushed, and that means the margins are getting hurt and they have to figure
out something. So I applaud Chilis for doing it. I will say, you know, the majority of my background, you know, has been in fine dining and has been at my hospitality background has been in table service. I think that that's probably the highest level where you want to see, you know, tablet assisted ordering. That that's where it stops to me. If I, you know, I don't think Hillstone, you know, if we go up a level should adopt something like this, I think you will start to degrade
the relationship between server and guests. Which is a part of the full service experience, and so you know, for what it's worth. You know that that's something that we've even tried with with higher end like fast casuals or even i should say casual dining, and it's not the best. It's not the best experience for guests. And if we do anything at Bite, we care about the guest experience more than anything.
Yep, yeah, for sure. Yeah, Chili's has done a great job. And it also eliminates another pain point, which is like paying the check. You know sometimes you know, if you got young kids, they tear it into a pumpkin after a certain amount of time at the table or whatever it is, and you have to get out of there. So I think it makes sense for a chain that's catering more to families.
The paying the check thing is interesting because everyone there was there's always been a ton of companies in the restaurant technology space that's like, you can pay your check faster. And yes, I understand that that is a pain point that the guest feels, and that's great, But the thing that the promise of it always has been and you'll turn that table faster. Okay, Well, if you don't have another guest to go fill that table immediately, and it's going to just sit empty for the time the guests,
those initial guests would have been paying the check. You're actually not generating more revenue through table turns. It's a big misnomer that I think, especially as you get to maybe some of the smaller table service restaurants concepts. You know, unless you're filling nine point thirty turning your what are you turning your tables to to what? To an empty dining room? So but I do I do you know, I know that there's pain in getting a check and getting it paid.
So heard, Yeah, all right. We touched on this a little bit, the voice AI. Right, So McDonald's recently ended their trial after some well publicized issues. On the other hand, Taco Bell is ramping up their trial this year. So what have been the issues with voice AI And when will this really be a viable technology that everybody's going to start adopting.
I think it's already passed viable yet I don't think it's past scale, okay, And so the viability of this could work in certain environ in certain restaurants, but I don't think it's going to work at scale for another few years. The acceleration of artificial intelligence will help this because we are talking about a very complicated piece of AI. It's not just suggesting items, but it's trying to understand accents, regional accents. I mean, this is you know, not you know,
non English speaking language. You know, guests that are coming and trying to communicate makes.
It very hard.
By the way, in the future, it's going to make it very easy because if you speak Japanese, it will speak Japanese back to you.
How lovely is that? But it's not the case today.
The thing I think most about is some of the stats that have been out about the order accuracy and how many orders can can be put in without an intercept. Okay, and an intercept might be a staff employee, but sometimes maybe what I what I don't like about it is the intercept is coming from a third party. And I know that there's been issues with our people listening into this conversation in California. That's that there's some lawsuit that
was there. And you know, I think restaurants need to be experimenting with this for sure and move at a very deliberate pace with it. Be very diligent about understanding how the guest feels. One of the lovely things about Kiosk is usually somebody's grabbing their order and sitting in a restaurant. You can ask them if you want. If they're driving off, you don't actually know how they felt
about that experience. Sure there's a survey, Sure there's a this, but man, I would be really inspecting how the guest feels and if the guest feels like that was done well and without issue. And by the way, I have there are many customer service experiences now that include this that are outside of restaurants, right, and you're talking to
a bot. You all, we all have been there and been like operator operator operator, right, and so so we don't want that level of frustration ever in the hospitality industry. But I have had some in certain scenarios that have been beautiful and seamless. We were talking about internet problems before. There's a way Optimum reset your internet in five seconds you talked to about it's over and you don't actually
need to talk to anybody on the phone. And so I have a lot of hope for this category, and I think we're in the early inning.
Great excluding Kiosk ordering, what restaurant pain points are AI best suited to solve.
I'll go to something that's probably even a little bit further than voice voice ordering.
But kitchen robotics.
Okay, just by the nature of cooking, it's a repeatable process, there are steps to it. And again at the higher levels of dining, this is not this is we're very far out from that. But at the levels of dining and QSR, you know, cooking French fries seems like something that can be an automated process. I applaud the Sweet Green team for what they've did and alleged they've they've gone out on with you know, with regards to buying
spice and and and putting in the Infinite kitchens. I went to the Infinite Kitchen store and Penn Station area recently just to check out the newest one because it's like, the question was, can we make the footprint an urban footprint for Sweet Green? And it was cool and you know, by the way plug again, they went ahead and adopted Kiosk, and they built something in house because it had to be perfect with the Infinite Kitchen. But they took this this step of automating the back of house in front
of house at the same time. And you know, I've even had a chance to visit Kernel, which is Cevel's new spot in New York. They're doing well. They're not
doing Vegan anymore, which is interesting. But I have a lot of hope that artificial intelligence and machine learning and all the intelligence around cameras and vision of what to grab, when to grab it, when it's cooked, infrared, all of these things add up and yeah, we could we can automate some steps in that hospitality or in the cooking experience. So I have a lot of hope for that category.
Yeah. Well, I know a lot of restauranteurs do too, looking forward for that those investment costs to come down. Yep, all right, great stuff, man, Brandon, thanks for doing this. Where can listeners find out more about bite?
Yeah, I mean get bitte dot com. I mean I if people are listening, want to reach out to me, I'm a Brandon at gatbyte dot com. I love talking to people that have used kios. Want to do any of that, and then look out for I have this wonderful podcast myself with Chris and Hawley of Expedite do a shameless plug there and The podcast is called the simmer Apple Spotify Listen Up. We talked to incredible restauranteurs, the tech CEOs, everything, and maybe we'll have Mi co on too.
Yeah, that'd be awesome. And your podcast experience definitely shown through on this episode. Man, you're great. You're a pro for sure.
I appreciate that. Man. Thank you for saying that.
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