In recent months, restaurant technology providers have been looking for ways to join restaurants’ disparate needs into a single, unified solution. Even with all the advances in the space, Olo, with its ambitious goal to power all restaurant orders, contends that it is not worried about the competition.
Last month, Fiserv announced the acquisition of restaurant marketing and commerce platform BentoBox, with plans to integrate the company’s technology into Clover from Fiserv’s restaurant solutions. And ChowNow announced its “Order Better Network,” which makes ordering available across an expansive suite of digital marketplaces and social networks.
“There’s certainly a lot of activity with regard to restaurant technology and deals in the restaurant technology space. Primarily, that activity has been in the SMB segment,” Olo’s Founder and CEO Noah Glass told analysts on a call discussing the company’s third-quarter financial results. “We are focused on the emerging enterprise space, which we define again as the five- to 100-unit restaurant brands that have the ambition of scale to be the next great enterprises of tomorrow … We’re starting to really prove ourselves as the best partner for the QSR segment to come online and go digital.”
While BentoBox does center much of its messaging on small restaurants, both Olo and BentoBox offer tools for fast-casual brands, and BentoBox advertises solutions for multi-unit restaurants. With Fiserv’s resources at its disposal, it seems likely that the company may become more aggressive in its pursuit of larger brands, given that quick-service restaurant (QSR) chains provide the greatest sales opportunity for digital ordering.
In fact, research from PYMNTS’ Restaurant Readiness Index, created in collaboration with Paytronix, finds that 70% of chain QSRs’ sales are generated through digital channels (pickup, third-party marketplaces, mobile order-ahead and online delivery), compared to just 57% of orders for restaurants overall, and just 49% of orders for independent table-service restaurants.
Read more: QSRs’ Lagging Loyalty-Reward Investment Hurts Innovation and Sales
ResTech providers are now racing not only to enable digital off-premise ordering, but also to provide restaurants with the tools that will bring both the convenience and the data-collecting capabilities of eCommerce channels into on-premise dining. Olo is continuing with its efforts to provide in-restaurant ordering tools such as in-app self-service, QR codes on the table and digital kiosks.
“As guests increasingly return to on-premise dining … our platform will harness data from all customer interactions, including non-digital orders, enabling brands to further build direct relationships with their customers,” said Glass.
Findings from the Index show that leading restaurant brands are far more likely than their lagging counterparts to employ digital ordering technologies in restaurants. Nearly one-third of top-performing restaurants offer kiosk ordering, compared to just 14% of bottom performers, and 28% of top performers offer the ability to pay with QR codes, compared to 12% of bottom performers.
Additionally, Glass offered a brief update on the progress of the company’s Olo Pay feature, which he has previously said will likely be ready to go live in 2023. The company hired Tor Opedal, who was previously vice president of U.S. market development at Mastercard, as its vice president and general manager of payments.
“We’re encouraged by what we’re seeing with the brands and the locations that are live on Olo Pay in our pilot, heartened by the excitement from the broader restaurant brand base,” Glass said.
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