First Bite Nation's Restaurant News

The most popular technology tool on display at the 2024 National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago was mostly invisible. What do the robotic arms, POS systems, back of house analytics tools, and more booth gadgets have in common? Most of them are powered by and supported by data. Data — whether it’s collected by machine learning or AI — has proven to be the universal currency of restaurant technology in 2024 and beyond.
Operators are waking up to the significance of data collection and optimization in operational decision-making, from employee scheduling and inventory management, to marketing data about customers. This was especially evident at the Restaurant Show, where almost every booth at the tech pavilion went into detail about the data their software (and sometimes hardware) provides.

The restaurant industry has a labor shortage problem. That is certainly not breaking news. Employee engagement is at an 11-year low. That might surprise some folks.
Gusto founder/CEO Nate Hybl said this conversation about employees is long overdue.
The bigger companies are already focusing more on the employee proposition, but smaller brands need to make people development a part of their budget, Hybl added. He suggested taking 1-2% off the topline to invest in people.
Hybl said acknowledging and understanding the Gen Z mindset of work/life balance and diversity and inclusion are more important than they’ve ever been, in fact, he added that the pandemic changed the employee mindset and gave more leverage to hourly workers.

There have been many iterations of eatertainment over the years. It began with stalwart chains like Chuck E. Cheese and Dave & Buster’s, places to play arcade games and win tokens that would lead to prizes.
Over the past 10 years, that idea has been flipped. Eatertainment had moved onto larger-scale games like bowling and pool. Chains like Punch Bowl Social, founded in 2012, were also focused on offering upscale food and drink in a hipper environment.
Following the struggles of Punch Bowl Social, which filed for bankruptcy in December 2020, a new class of eatertainment venues have arrived. For the most part, they are concepts based on sports ranging from golf to pickleball to bowling. They’re just as focused on elevated food and drink offerings as their predecessors, but the concepts focus on just one or two larger-scale games rather than several.
With the focus on just one game, these eatertainment concepts have been able to drill into what makes each brand special. For most of them, it’s technology that elevates gameplay.

Restaurant value used to be a much simpler calculation: Discount-driven customers would seek out dollar meals at quick-service restaurants, call for pizza delivery on Friday nights (sans delivery fees), and then splurge on full-service meals on rarer occasions. But in 2024, with dollar menus all but extinct, and newer variables like convenience pricing, service fees, shrinkflation, and dynamic pricing in the mix, the consumer value equation has never been more complex.
Or has it? Customers may have more options than ever before, from ordering almost any food they want from the comfort of their own home to choosing to dine out “the old-fashioned way” (and every “channel” in between), but spending habits have not changed as much as we might think they have. According to data from Technomic, customers are roughly as price-conscious now as they were just before the pandemic. In a survey, half of customers said that they picked restaurants with lower prices in Q1 2020, while 52% of customers said they do so in Q1 2024, and the exact same percentage of customers (68%) said they pay close attention to menu prices in both Q1 2020 and Q1 2024.

Red Lobster abruptly closed some 87 restaurants on Monday as the chain faces apparent cash-flow issues and loss of confidence from its largest owner. USA Today compiled a list of all of the shuttered restaurants listed on the chain’s web site. The closed locations are in 28 states, with the largest number, 16, in its home state of Florida, including three in Orlando.
Auction site Tagex has listed 48 closed Red Lobster locations and has put all of their contents up for sale in an auction scheduled to end on Tuesday. They’re “Winner Takes All” auctions, meaning buyers are bidding on the total contents of each restaurant.
Thai Union, which has long been a large minority shareholder in Red Lobster, said in January it would sell its stake in the company and has reportedly been looking for buyers ever since.

Since we’re officially more than halfway through Q1 earnings reports, it’s fair game to derive some of the winners from the start of 2024. Unquestionably among them is Chipotle, which experienced a 7% increase in same-store sales driven in large part by a 5.4% increase in traffic.
To understand the secret of Chipotle’s momentum of late, it’s important to understand its sharpened focus on throughput. Indeed, the word “throughput” was mentioned 33 times during the company’s earnings call April 24. Unsurprisingly, several brands, from Cheesecake Factory to Starbucks to Portillo’s, have noted a more intentional prioritization of throughput, because why wouldn’t they want to emulate Chipotle’s recent success? That said, they all have some catching up to do to get on the same playing field as Chipotle.