The food industry is growing dramatically as more and more people prefer eating in restaurants or food joints today. Rapid urbanization, more women joining the workforce, and higher disposable income are some factors that fuel the growth of the restaurant industry.
Whatever the reason, restaurant owners are under constant pressure. They are endlessly battling to meet the evolving needs of the customers. Besides, restaurant owners want to accustom more guests, provide faster delivery, maintain guest satisfaction, and scale up their business.
Amidst all the challenges, restaurant owners often feel overwhelmed due to emerging new restaurants in the locality and the frequent staff turnover. There comes the need for restaurant automation.
Before moving onto restaurant automation in detail, let us learn about a popular restaurant with a robotic kitchen. A restaurant in downtown Boston named Spyce introduces itself as the world’s first restaurant with a robotic kitchen to cook complex meals.
Guests will begin ordering a meal from a digital kiosk, and they can watch the robot in action. The robot auto-prepares, mixes, and serves the food. The robotic chefs produce delicious food consistently, and the human interaction is minimal.
However, it doesn’t mean you need to have a robotic kitchen. You can automate various other tasks in your restaurants and enjoy benefits like improved quality, cost cuttings and gain a competitive edge over others. Thus, your managers can spend less time training new team members and entertain your guests efficiently.
How Does Restaurant Automation Work?
A restaurant can leverage technology to automate monotonous and repetitive administrative tasks. You can automate any of your restaurant processes like online orders, employee training, scheduling orders, inventory tracking, automatic billing, and more. Thus, automation allows you to streamline your business operations and lets your team concentrate on other valuable services like attending to the guests.
However, as many fear, restaurant automation will not replace humans at any cost. Hospitality will always be a people business. It is just that you can automate the tedious and time-consuming process while your staff can focus on serving the guests and ensuring an excellent dining experience.
Ways to Implement Restaurant Automation
Here are some restaurant tasks that you can automate. Automating them will help you work efficiently and increase your profitability.
1) Automate Table Reservations
Maintaining table reservations during peak hours and on weekends can be hectic for any restaurant. None of the guests prefer to wait and expect prompt service. While your employees have more guests to attend, keeping up the table reservations is an extra load. Plus, mistakes may happen, and guests may get dissatisfied with the service. An automated table reservation system will allow you to streamline your booking process and serve your guests precisely.
2) Ordering Kiosks
If you run a fast food joint, ordering kiosks will allow your customers to tap in their order, pay with their credit card and then pick it up at the counter. It enables a seamless process from ordering to check out. Thus, you can serve more customers at a given time, encouraging customers to enjoy your service timely.
3) Inventory Management
An inventory management system integrated with the POS software allows you to manage the raw materials and other kitchen stocks. Yes, the IMS comes in handy to analyze your kitchen requirements and manage the shelf life of the products. It even predicts how long your current stock will last and allows you to set reminders to restore them. That way, you will neither run out of stock nor suffer material wastage.
You can track all the raw materials as the system generates detailed reports. It will even allow you to assign roles and permissions to access the inventory to avoid pilferage. Nevertheless, IMS is one such restaurant automation that highly benefited the industry and is bound to grow in the coming years.
4) Analytics
Managing all sales data and transactions is crucial when running and managing a restaurant. You may need to track and review them periodically. Also, you will need to maintain records to analyze, predict trends and derive better sales strategies. Analytics will help you do that precisely.
Plus, analyzing customer data is also crucial as you can understand your customer preferences better and come with better deals and offers. Again, analytics will generate reports based on the customer’s ordering nature. As a restaurant owner, you can use the data to offer relevant services.
5) Automated Cooking Process
Robotics has been a success in many other industries, and it is relatively new in the restaurant industry. But, since robots are predictable, efficient, and hygienic, they can revolutionize the food industry as well. You can automate the repetitive and standardized cooking tasks that don’t replace the human touch but rather assure consistency.
Moreover, using an automated cooking process will reduce food contamination and eliminate food safety concerns. When most employees are overloaded with monotonous tasks in the restaurant industry, automating them will free your employees and boost their morale.
6) Accounting and Reporting
Accounting software allows you to handle your restaurant’s finances effectively. An accounting and reporting software analyzes the numbers and sends you a sales report.
The report gives you transactions in an easy-to-understand graph. Hence, you can get clear insights into your restaurant’s performance. That way, you can handle your finances hassle-free without maintaining spreadsheets manually.
7) Loyalty Programs
As you all business owners know, retaining old customers comes at a lower cost than acquiring a new customer. Loyal customers tend to visit your restaurant often and are more likely to refer it to their friends/family as well. Hence, restaurants or any businesses for that matter run loyalty programs to retain their customers.
In the traditional method, restaurants accumulate points with each payment. That is a tedious process again. However, when you automate your loyalty programs, the points are added to customer’s profiles automatically as they place an order.
Plus, you can run customized loyalty programs for customers depending on their past ordering habits. Everyone prefers personalized services. Aren’t they? Thus, automation can help you massively in customer retention.
How Automation Changes the Way of Restaurant Business?
In contrast to the general opinion, automation or robotics in the restaurant industry will not replace humans. Instead, it frees humans from repetitive mundane tasks and allows them to focus on highly skilled and valuable services. Now, let us see how automation can add value to the restaurant industry. Here are some benefits you can enjoy with restaurant automation:
1) Provide Excellent Customer Services
Automation systems execute any given task within a fraction of the time and are completely error-free. Be it online ordering, table reservation, or online payment, all it takes a few seconds to accomplish. That, in turn, reduces wait times for customers and ensures precise orders. Thus, your restaurant can provide excellent service to your guests regardless of the crowd on a busy day.
2) Streamlined Food Delivery Services
Restaurant owners can outsource their food delivery to third-party food delivery apps or develop their own app to handle the food delivery process. Thus, they need not worry about the details of the customers or their addresses. The apps take care of that and deliver the food on time. So, again your team can focus on attending the guests in your restaurant.
3) Happy Employees
Your staff often tends to overwork at restaurants, especially during peak hours or weekends. It will be challenging if you have many guests at once and not enough employees to attend them. Automation can free your employees by handling all the mundane tasks. Hence, they can entertain the guests and provide them a better dining experience at your restaurant.
4) Increased Profitability
Restaurant automation systems will allow you to cut down wait times, enabling you to serve more customers. Furthermore, they will also help you to handle your inventory effectively. All of these add up to your bottom line and provide you with increased profits.
5) Reduced Operation Costs
A single robot can indulge in multiple tasks like keeping the kitchen and dining area clean, taking orders, and serving customers. Hence, you can reduce the operating costs significantly as one robot can carry out multiple tasks efficiently. Robots are highly beneficial for restaurants that operate for long hours.
Final Thoughts
The food industry is one such industry that will continue to grow no matter what. However, with one new restaurant budding in every corner, it is a highly competitive market. Thus, you need to match the current trends and innovate your services to gain a competitive edge over others.
Restaurant automation is trending across the world. As we have seen in this blog, restaurant automation frees up your employees and enables enhanced customer services. That way, happy employees and happy customers bring increased profits to your restaurant business.
Also, you can choose to automate any business process. It can be anything like taking online orders, table reservations, food delivery, customer support, loyalty programs, and more. As a restaurant owner, you can decide depending on your business needs, employees and customers.
Once you have decided the business processes to automate, all you need is to partner with a reputed and reliable app development company. Cypherox Technologies is a leading app development company that has delivered robust mobile apps for multiple business industries. Our technical team has extensive experience in developing apps for the food industry. Feel free to reach us for any queries and concerns regarding restaurant automation services. Our experts will guide you and help you in automating your restaurant services.
