Скачать или смотреть RTN Town Hall: Restaurants Get Real about Digital Solutions: What Hurts, What Helps & How To Win

RTN Town Hall: Where Restaurants and Tech Meet.
No Slides, Just Solutions

Hot Head Burritos, BurgerFi, and Cluster Truck didn't just share war stories—they handed out the blueprints. They revealed exactly how they're cutting through the chaos of too many tech platforms, turning digital sales into actual profit, and achieving the kind of operational excellence that truly scales.

Our tech partners from The Howard Company and PAR Technology then laid down the law: success hinges on building an integrated technical foundation that's ready for tomorrow's digital shakeup.

Operator Blueprints: From Pain Points to Profit

The restaurant executives provided concrete examples of how they're securing wins in a competitive digital market:

Hot Head Burritos: The Profitability Pivot 🌯 Director Peter Wiley addressed the fragmentation of marketing spend and the enduring staffing challenge. Crucially, he detailed a successful strategy for increasing third-party delivery volume and profitability: reducing the price markup to near parity with in-store pricing. His team also leveraged online catering ordering to drive a massive 300-400% growth in ancillary revenue.

BurgerFi: A Framework for Control 🍔 VP Steve Lieber outlined the strategic framework for digital maturity: adoption, integration, and optimization. Integration is key for aggregating varied orders smoothly into the POS, while optimization focuses on tight operations (e.g., fast execution) that ensure high visibility on delivery platforms.

Cluster Truck: The Digital-First Benchmark 🚚 CEO Janet Monroe showcased a highly profitable, delivery-first model built on proprietary software that seamlessly coordinates the entire order-to-delivery process. The system prioritizes cooking order based on time to completion, ensuring everything arrives at the expo station simultaneously. Monroe stressed that for digitally native brands, building human connection and trust through community engagement and excellent service is vital.

The Tech Mandate: Integration and Consistency

Technology experts emphasized that the greatest challenge—and opportunity—lies in building a coherent technical ecosystem:

Foundation First: Preparing for AI Diane Le from PAR Technology delivered a powerful message: get your core foundation right now. She argued that integration is superior to innovation when it comes to long-term scale, as a fragmented stack prevents rapid adoption of new tools. This consistency is critical for preparing for the looming AI wave, which requires clean, uniform data to function effectively.

Strategic Rollout and Standards Paul Schwantes of The Howard Company advised employing a "crawl, walk, run" approach, piloting new technologies in low-risk environments to ensure success before a full rollout. The discussion repeatedly underscored the importance of industry-wide consistency to solve a major operational pain point: ensuring orders arriving from various channels (third-party, web, kiosk) appear in a unified, consistent format in the back-of-house, reducing error and training friction. This need is the exact problem that RTN Standards are designed to solve, providing the necessary collective framework for seamless interoperability.

The Restaurant Technology Network (RTN) is dedicated to helping restaurant leaders solve these exact challenges through peer collaboration. If you are interested in joining our community to access these essential insights and connect directly with industry decision-makers, please contact us today.

Tammy Hanson, Membership Experience Manager
tammy@restauranttechnologynetwork.com

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