GRAPEVINE, Texas -- Foodservice comes in many shapes and size: from convenience stores to restaurants and universities to hospitals. While each has common goals and challenges, the way they approach them can vary. Here's a rundown of what four foodservice leaders said they expect from the future of foodservice technology.
Each participant was the winner of a FARE 2016 Leaders in Foodservice Award during the conference in Grapevine, Texas.
For Courtney Williams, prepared foods manager for Sheetz, Altoona, Pa., the technology she was most interested in using was predictive analysis, especially as it assesses weather, community activities and other related events. She said this year, the convenience-store chain endured 23 straight days of rain, which had an impact on outdoor community events such as baseball games. She was also hoping to develop better strategies to act upon that information, including home delivery and the addition of drive-thru windows.
Rafi Taherian, associate vice president for Yale Hospitality, New Haven, Conn., was concerned about integration and all of the technologies “under the hood” that work behind consumer-facing applications. “We’re talking about sourcing, nutritional information, transactions, data mining, our point-of-sale and management systems, many of them are not integrated.”
For Frank Tucker, chief people officer at Taco Bell Corp., Irvine, Calif., his focus was feedback from social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. He was concerned about identifying customer concerns and acting to solve those issues.
Finally, Ian Baines, president and CEO of Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, Irving, Texas, said the complexity of creating food from scratch places daily burdens on managers and their employees. “One of the low hanging fruits for us is to put tools in the hands of our managers, helping them do more things remotely,” Baines said. “We want to improve the quality of life for our managers.”
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