About a decade ago, touch screen menus revolutionized the hospitality industry, but they were just the beginning of innovation that encompasses service, quality and greater convenience for hotel and resort food outlets and the ways guests experience them. Recently introduced technologies in the F&B space are recharging the way hotel and resort restaurants can operate more efficiently and sustainably.
Although QR code and IoT technology is a standard for doing business in cold chain monitoring and food retail, they promise to revolutionize and personalize hotel food service and make operations more efficient.
Sensible Sensors, Etc.
According to Katie Riddle, global retail strategy lead at Verizon Business, many of the tech products and services emerging in hotel and resort food service are already well-established in cold chain monitoring and the grocery space. They are logical solutions for hospitality, as they can improve customer service and efficiency. Although QR codes and other scan technologies came into favor during the pandemic as safe alternatives to paper menus and payments, their popularity and widespread acceptance continue to expand.
To improve efficiency and safety at the back of the house, automated internet of things (IoT) devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies can connect and exchange data with compatible devices and systems. Some connect to a dashboard that indicates the temperature of what’s being served. Others can alert restaurant staff to temperature deviations of foodstuffs should there be a freezer failure or other emergency, or alert them to an area of the restaurant that may need cleaning or special maintenance. They also make the jobs of front-of-house servers and staff more customer-focused.
“Putting devices in the hands of restaurant employees to keep tabs on their customers’ data from anywhere provides peace of mind for them and customers who may be nervous about having their credit cards taken to a register elsewhere,” said Riddle, adding that those devices from POS and restaurant management systems like Toast, bespoke to food services, and Zebra, are particularly helpful in resort settings where food is brought from a kitchen to the customer in an outdoor dining area, poolside or for room service.
“These gadgets help move employees’ time away from lower-value tasks like food prep and tracking food inventory to higher-value tasks like perfecting the dishes before they’re served or interacting with customers,” she continued. “There are great restaurant robotics companies out there, like Miso Robotics, producer of Flippy, which flips burgers and ensures the customers’ preferred meat temperatures. Some robots deliver food to the customers at their table and others pick up used dishes to be washed. While many of these are not ‘bleeding edge,’ (new, experimental technologies released to the public early), they’re still ‘leading edge’ and free servers up to engage with customers.”
There is an argument in the luxury segment that the presence of robotics and gadgets may compromise a five-star hotel’s “white glove service” value proposition that differentiates them from competitors. Riddle argues, however, that with improved efficiency and the ability to keep better tabs on what’s going on behind the scenes, management and employees are freed up to give guests more personalized attention. as the technology can be positioned discreetly or completely out of view.
Profitability and Efficiency
Greg Griffie, senior vice president at Davidson Restaurant Group, follows this logic in terms of the tech implemented across the company's restaurants and hotels. He also affirmed that staying on top of new kitchen, sustainability and blockchain technologies keeps operations profitable, sustainable and enjoyable for guests and employees while maintaining its modern image.
“We leverage tools for efficiency, cost savings and waste reduction to consistently maintain our outlets’ profit and sustainability,” Griffie said. “Our IoT technology include smart kitchen appliances that optimize cooking processes and provide sensors for real-time inventory tracking and maintenance alerts. Blockchain technology delivers us supply chain transparency and traceability for food safety. Our kitchen crew uses Rational Ovens, Merry Chef, and TurboChef products and energy-efficient Unox convection ovens. For waste reduction, we use [the] LFC Biodigestor and ORCA. The mobile ordering and payment apps we have in place include Beachy and WiQ.”
A collaborative relationship between management and staff needs to be in place well before new kitchen gadgets and digital marketing technologies can be implemented, according to Nitiya Sin, hospitality director at Hive Hospitality and director of operations Jhonatan Cano. With a hotel restaurant presence that includes chef Ryan Ratino’s MAASS at the Four Seasons Fort Lauderdale and the upcoming Ôde by Jônt at the SLS Hotel Beverly Hills, every member of the team must be properly trained and retrained to ensure guests’ high standards are met.
“Embracing new technologies allows us to be consistently ahead of the curve, and utilizing the most up-to-date tools gives our team an edge to be more efficient,” Cano said. He noted that implementation of AI is intended to enable the front- and back-of-the-house personnel to deliver a more personalized guest experience.
“We strive to create personalization into the guest experience in many ways. We may design a unique menu reprint or build a bespoke art/graphic project based on our guest interactions. This often means a creative project may begin and end in the span of one meal (approximately 1.5 hours, maybe less). The ‘magic’ button from Canva allows us to edit the image quickly and with less need for graphic technical and artistic skill, something that is also important, but time-consuming. In the context of Hive, we are using it to delight the guests with surprises that go beyond the traditional birthday candle,” he explained.
Technology Everyone Can Count On
In payroll management, TipHaus was devised in 2018 specifically for the hospitality industry with software solutions that help managers calculate and manage tip distributions to their staff more efficiently. After testing, it entered the market in 2019.
“You're looking for one total compensation package that protects your hotel and food service staff, first and foremost,” said COO and co-founder Kirk Grogan. “You need to keep that legal liability down because class action lawsuits for tip violations are everywhere and ramping up among servers. While it’s important to have those managers on the floor engaging with guests, employees should have access to a mobile apps to track their tips and keep that transparency, morale and work ethic high.”
Rather than typing payroll information into a program like Excel manually and juggle different files, TipHaus is a compact solution that not only makes information more accessible to staff and management, but also benefits customers who have assurance their tips are going to their servers in the restaurants and others including bartenders, housekeeping, concierge, and valet. The software is also adaptable to different hotel and resort genres, and there is a customer advisory board of hotel decision makers providing the company feedback on what aspects of the software work best and what can be improved. Strengthening communication between management and employees is of utmost importance. Employees in some cases can be issued QR codes that allow customers to tip them directly.
“We want to make sure the hospitality staff knows that they have incentive to go above and beyond in customer satisfaction,” Grogan continued, pointing out that employee turnover can go down by as much as 30 percent thanks to better financial security as a result of this system. “When they do, they not only have a probability of receiving tips for excellent service, but also being sure they can have what they earned in their pocket. Bringing all forms of employee compensation and tips into one platform not only makes these financial issues easier to manage, but also provides that transparency the management and staff appreciate in making accounting and payroll easier.”
U.K.-based Bookingtek, which has a Las Vegas headquarters serving North America, taps into the embrace of contactless orders and payments that accelerated during the pandemic but has since gone mainstream in standalone and hotel restaurants. CEO and founder Matthew Stubbs wanted the app and software to help bring back personalized interaction and fun that was lost when servers and customers were not in contact with one another.
“We experimented with animating the ordering process in different ways and enhancing the customized ordering process, which can be a bit drawn out and boring with long lists of items to scroll through,” Stubbs said. “Our product team brainstormed ideas for enhancing our app, yet we didn’t want to just make it good. As we are a “B2B2C” business, we wanted to make it brilliant for business customers (including hotel restaurants) and consumer users.”
The most popular idea coming out of those meetings was what Stubbs calls the ‘sumo holds’ (a.k.a. substitutions, modifications and holds), making customer customization visual as well as easy with conversation-starting animations such as an exploding hamburger and a mojito cocktail. From there, the founder and his team then started thinking about how to make it just as much fun for the restaurant owner and management as well as affordable. After months of creative thinking, the team found a way to deliver the app at no cost to restaurants. Out of this came a range of products that includes group booking, restaurant floor management, direct restaurant reservation, and most recently, a customer-facing restaurant order/pay mobile app.
Food (Service) for Thought
For the past decade, LobsterOrder.com has helped restaurateurs “wrangle seafood freshness” with a deep dive into food service tech that founder Matt Bellerose said provides a unique perspective on how hotel management can leverage innovation to improve operations and guest satisfaction.
“AI and machine learning are revolutionizing hotel food service, and by implementing AI-driven chatbots, hotels have seen a 30 percent reduction in customer service response times,” says Bellrose. “This improves guest satisfaction and frees up staff to focus on more complex tasks. At LobsterOrder.com, we've witnessed firsthand how IoT sensors can transform inventory management. One of our hotel partners saw a 25 percent reduction in food waste after implementing real-time inventory tracking. The system alerts staff when supplies run low, ensuring fresh ingredients are always on hand. Hotels that have adopted mobile ordering technologies, meanwhile, report a 20 percent increase in food and beverage sales, as guests appreciate the convenience of ordering from anywhere on the property.”
Co-founder and CTO Arsalan Vossough designed VinoVoss.com to amplify the abilities of sommeliers and servers to excite and enlighten their customers, stressed that the push toward AI-influenced service stems from evolving guest expectations. This idea correlates with Katie Riddle’s proposition that technology can enhance customer service at luxury hotels and resorts.
“Today's luxury travelers crave not only exclusivity but also personalized, convenient interactions blending human insight and technological ingenuity,” explained Vossough. “Successfully integrating AI necessitates striking a delicate balance between technology and the personal touch synonymous with luxury service. In this context, AI emerges as a seamlessly transformative force redefining luxury hospitality. This shift extends beyond efficiency improvements to represent a fundamental reimagining of personalized service and the luxury experience.”
Vossough points out the technology helps the sommelier or server recommend wines tailored to individual preferences and selected menu items. With inventory management, it can monitor wine stock levels, track aging and suggest optimal consumption periods for a wide array of wines. It also can facilitate predictive analysis of future consumption patterns, optimize inventory purchases, and adapt for group dynamics in catering to the diverse preferences of multiple guests at one table.
While Smoodi, a self-service smoothie maker, is arriving at its first hospitality client, Boston’s The ‘Quin House (with a similar business model to Soho House and other “social club” hospitality), founder/CEO Pascal Kriesche sees great potential for expansion into hotels catering to business and family clientele and those with “grab + go” food outlets. Smoodi allows guests to select frozen pods with a fruit/vegetable combination. The pods contain real fruit, are free or nearly free of artificial ingredients and sugar and have a shelf life of two years.
“If you think about a traditional smoothie bar, it can be estimated that there’s about 40 to 50 percent food waste on the fresh produce at the end of the week,” Kriesche said. “Sustainability is part of the picture, as we can use very ripe fruit that would never make it to supermarket shelves...yet is the perfect ingredient to make delicious smoothies. This is among the many food areas where we can fight food waste upstream and downstream.”
Whether these innovations are behind the scenes or in front of the house, all were conceived with the intention to enable hotel management teams to consistently be up-to-the-minute with their food operations. This leads to being better able to live up to the modern and discerning traveler’s expectations.
Fun Facts
- Verizon Business + Incisive reports that according to the 2023 Connected Retail Experience Study, retailers anticipate a significant increase in automation and expect up to 70 percent of routine tasks will be partially or fully automated by 2025.
- TipHaus software and solutions for bartender and waitstaff tip distribution can be found in more than 3,000+ locations and used by more than 100,000 employees across the U.S.
- LobsterOrder.com’s Matt Bellrose observes that energy-efficient kitchen equipment can slash a hotel's energy costs by up to 40 percent. One luxury hotel his firm works with installed smart refrigeration systems that optimized cooling cycles based on usage patterns, resulting in a 15 percent drop in energy consumption.
- Based on bookingtek.com’s client feedback, there was a 70 percent reduction in the cost of handling enquiries, booking and payments after introducing its automated, online booking and payment solutions.
This article was originally published in the September edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.