Delivering the Digital Restaurant

Book excerpt: 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.