Restaurant

I remember one time years ago on a lunch shift, when it was 11:45 AM, a full 15 minutes after we we were scheduled to open for business as usual, but there was not a single customer in the restaurant. The bartender was ready and the foodservers were standing by in their assigned sections. The hostess was primed with menus in hand and the kitchen was prepped and ready for another busy lunch. We always opened with a small line of hungry customers outside. Our doors always open precisely at 11:30 AM. But, this was weird. Not a single customer was in the restaurant, a full 15 minutes into our lunch shift. I was the manager/owner at the time and I was in the kitchen completing a line check when a server casually said “what’s the deal? No customers”. I immediately came out, went to the front door and there, standing in line were about 50 people. A couple of them were looking in the windows seemingly asking the same question, WTF? Yep, the doors were locked. The lunch was fine, after we managed the crazy rush seating 50 people all at once. But, this was a big business lesson that has never left me. You can’t sell food to customers if the doors are locked.

Orderscape is a visionary voice technology startup with a big vision to disrupt and redefine how consumers order food using mobile devices. Talk, order, eat is a mantra around here because that’s all it is. Say what you want into a microphone and then pick up your meal or have it delivered. Simple, efficient and hands free. Elegant frankly, because it’s so natural for humans to just use our voice. But the technology is crazy complex to develop. It’s taken 2 years and while we’re ready to go, but we’re dealing with locked doors on the restaurant side of the marketplace.

Yes, we’re “early”. I’ve heard that hundreds of times over the past 2 years from investors and operators and even some technology vendors. RestTech experts are wowed by our vision and compliment us on our technology. Many of these restaurant technology vendors are anxious to work with us because they know voice is here today and will be a big, big deal. Research companies know this too. Capgemini polled thousands of voice assistant users and discovered 56% of them wanted to order food from restaurants now, today, if they could. But they can’t, not yet. They could with Orderscape’s Universal Menu platform, however. Narvar Consumer Reports said, 60.5M people in the U.S. today are already using digital assistants like Alexa to conduct searches and place orders. Demand is here. Orderscape is here. So are we just early? Or, are the doors just locked?

• Research predicts over 50% of mobile search will be voice enabled by 2020. To be discovered menus must be voice-enabled.
• Foodservice is an $800B industry with 1M restaurants in 2018, so lets create some menu supply to meet the demand for ordering using voice
• 53.8M consumers spent $20B buying restaurant food online in 2017. This is projected to grow to $40B by 2022, so this is going to get bigger and more important to restaurants
• 52% of consumers prefer to use a voice assistant over a website. Sounds like consumers are waiting in line to buy food from restaurants that aren’t voice ready
• Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, among other giants, are spending billion of dollars developing and marketing voice assistants for home, office and mobile access, so the more devices the more customers