Why does Yum want to own the tech stack - with guest host Cijoy Olickal

Carl welcomes guest host Cijoy Olickal, a restaurant tech expert, to break down key industry trends.

🔹 2025 Restaurant Industry Outlook – $1.5T in sales, shifting consumer habits, tech’s impact on profitability, and labor challenges. Articles One, Two, and Three
🔹 Yum! Brands' Tech Strategy – Is building a proprietary tech stack the right move for a global franchise? Articles One and Two
🔹 Wonder’s Expansion – Mark Lore’s meal kit & marketplace strategy—how does it compare to DoorDash and Uber Eats? Articles One, Two, and Three
🔹 CPK’s Vending Machines – Can automated pizza machines change the game for restaurant growth? Article One
🔹 DoorDash’s Power Shift – With advertising revenue booming, is DoorDash now a marketing giant first, a delivery service second? Articles One, Two, and

Chapters

• 0:00 TDR 2-17-25
• 1:58 Q1 - State of the Industry Update
• 7:39 Question 2 - Why does Yum want to own the tech stack?
• 13:37 Question 3 - Wonder's channel expansion with Meal Kits
• 20:39 Q4 - CPK accessing new revenue through vending machines

Transcript

TDR 2-17-25

[00:00:00]       

Carl: Good morning, and good morning 

 For those of you that didn't hear my last podcast because Meredith as many of you have heard has left

the Digital Restaurant left my side here on the show to take on a fantastic new role up at Starbucks in Seattle.

And so, as is the way in public life, like you and I know, Cijioy all too well sometimes there are constraints when it comes to doing things like podcasts, but that does give us the great opportunity of being able to bring on some guest hosts. And my good friend here, see joy has agreed to be the first of our guest hosts on the visual restaurant.

CJ, [00:01:00] you and I have known each other for a few years. Obviously you've got a rich history in the restaurant and the technology industry. I know from what you told me before, you're a bit of a tinkerer when it comes to taking apart machines and systems. We'll see how good you are at taking apart the news today as we talk about the latest in restaurants and tech.

But, for yourself, tell us about your background in a nutshell and what you're doing today. 

Cijoy: Yes, absolutely. As a tinkerer, I think my mom still reminds me I never put anything back together until Probably in my thirties, but I was like, Hey, I just wanted to understand how things work.

That's why I took it apart. I guess it's also fruitful for my employers that I did put things back together or reassemble things in new ways. But I've like you mentioned, I've been in the interning role and then high technology for quite a while. but the last 12 years I've been with the restaurant industry, applying all those things I learned about transformation, change management, culture change.

And how that ties together with technology and data. So it's been a fun ride and looking forward to this conversation. 

Q1 - State of the Industry Update

Cijoy: So let's talk about the state of the industry [00:02:00] there and the industry report came out what's the key highlights you found there?

Carl: First of all, the industry is projected to reach one and a half trillion dollars in sales. Isn't that crazy? That's a 4 percent increase on, on what was recorded in 2024. Notably. 80 percent of operators anticipate that their sales are going to be higher than or on par with their 2024 figures.

So, in comparison to the level of dread, I think it's fair to say it existed out there a few years back. That's actually a pretty positive number. One of the things that really drew my attention was the fact that it revealed this dual focus in consumer dining habits. When it comes to on premise, a significant majority of fine dining and casual dining, 90 percent and 87 percent respectively, the operators in that space emphasize the importance of increasing on site patronage for their success in 2025, but also the fact that they're trying to enhance.

The in person dining experience. And I think that is something which, you and I've talked about it in the past in the sense of on [00:03:00] premise and the experiential aspect of it is still super important. And sometimes technology doesn't have to play a role. Take that over to off premise or take out on delivery services, of course, continue to play a really important role, but a particularly with the younger demographics.

Notably, 67 percent of Gen Z and 64 percent of millennials consider it essential. And, 82 percent of consumers, including about just shy of 90 percent of millennials, express that they would order it more frequently if their bad budgets were to allow for it. And, of course, inflation has been certainly a theme over these last couple of years.

When it comes to technology only 28 percent report that tech investments have improved profitability, so I found that really interesting. Now, 69 percent acknowledge that technology has enhanced the operational efficiency and productivity.

So is this a a function of technology not working to improve profitability or is it a function of just not having the reporting lens and kind of find [00:04:00] scalpel to really say actually by doing this we've been out to improve profitability here so you know that's certainly a slight improvement from 2024 where a similar percentage viewed technology as advantageous 

but I think the shift is focusing towards using technology for efficiency versus direct profit increases. But lastly, I'll say Labor market. Not much change. I mean, the industry is expected to add another 200, 000 jobs, bringing total employment to 15.

9 million. It's still the second largest private employer out there. So that's pretty huge for the industry in terms of its role of what it does across society. Recruitment. Still a big challenge. 77 percent of operators say they're reporting difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff, basically.

I mean, has there ever been a state of the industry report that doesn't talk about that as a problem? So that continues. And , around some of the things about specific segments, it looks like full service restaurants are about [00:05:00] 4.1 percent below February 2020 employment figures.

So we still haven't got back to the same level. of employment in those particular areas where we actually have surpassed it in quick serve and fast casual. I saw Joe Guscowski's article about seven different themes that came up. When he looked into the report more deeply from a technology perspective, he said things like 33 percent of adults want less technology in full service restaurants.

27 percent want less in quick service restaurants and also if you flip that on its head implies that the majority want more right And similarly, there's an age gap thing, right? Millennials 48 percent want more tech in full service while 40 percent of gen z prefer more tech in qsr. So there's certainly a lens there now.

I joke about that last bit. I think just shy 40 percent say that Technology levels are about right as to where they are right now. The other thing, loyalty was talked about in the report. 48 percent of loyalty program users say they're less likely to try new restaurants if they don't have a way to [00:06:00] earn rewards.

78 percent of diners are more likely to visit a restaurant when they can earn loyalty points, even if it's less convenient to them to get to the restaurant. And then on the theme of automation, 47 percent of operators expect automation to become more common, but 14 percent added that technology has replaced a human job in the last year, but 69 percent of operators believe that technology is really assisting staff versus replacing them.

So, you're in an AI company these days. What's your take? Is technology and AI replacing folks? 

Cijoy: I think, we've seen these history cycles repeat over and over again, right? The the printing press came out. It didn't reduce the number of books. It actually made it. So I mean, fast forward, every technology cycle that comes through, there's always the initial doom and gloom of job loss, but it's usually transition.

It's like, there's some activity or workload that's shifted to a machine, but then people move on to something else. Because there's now you can elevate up to some other higher value thing. And it will probably play out that way here as [00:07:00] well, too. You and I have been through a couple of cycles.

I'm not trying to say we're old, but we've seen a couple of these cycles in our life where there were cycles of doom and gloom, but, but in the end, more people came about from it. It's in the nineties when I was implementing ERPs the fear there was having an ERP meant you have less bookkeepers in some organizations.

That was true. But then. Profits went up. Other, other things happened. People took on different roles. People became users of these systems and they're changes in their career, but in the end, I don't think unemployment, a wave of unemployment happened from the, because of the improvement of technology in the corporate America.

Mhm.

Question 2 - Why does Yum want to own the tech stack?

Carl: I'm fascinated to hear you're taking this obviously yum has been in the news quite a bit recently, Joe there. Their CTO has been talking about their desire to take the tech stack in house and have more proprietary motions in that area.

What's your take on this? Do you think Yammer are thinking about this the right way? Are they heading in the right direction? 

Cijoy: To me experiences shape beliefs, right? And they [00:08:00] experience difficulty in being beholden to third party technology companies. In one of the articles, the CEO says they've experienced a lot of friction.

Because of that, trying to get everyone to be organized and aligned with their goals. You can imagine what it takes to get 10, 20 different technology companies to align their roadmap to your needs and the time it takes to get there. And internally, there was a need to replace some of their older internal solutions, right?

Which may have looks a bit out of date from a code perspective or the people that were around to maintain it, they've moved on. So there's an internal imperative that they've got to replace these internal solutions, something more modern and unified. And you take those two forces together.

You've come up against the classic choice of do you build, do you buy or do you borrow? And from what we're seeing that they're publishing outward, it looks like they chose to go all in on the build, right? And that's a bold, brave step. Obviously this is not an overnight success story. They've said this is a 10 year effort to get this done.

And they quote in the article, this [00:09:00] all is intended to work harmoniously. That's a really key objective because that's what they were trying to escape. The disharmony of trying to Align incentives and external organizations and the ups and downs of relying on a vendor that may be here today and may not be here tomorrow.

Those can all cause massive disruption when you have this many locations that you're dealing with. So congratulations to the team over there. They got their autonomy and it looks like they're making really good progress on getting the transition off of the old platforms up to the new ones.

Obviously the corporate versus franchisee, getting the franchisees to transition through and showing what's in it for them. and helping them get there. That's a challenge in and of itself beyond just creating the technology. But where I'd like to, maybe you and I could keep a bookmark for this next year, right, going beyond this moment in time, we should check back and see now that they've shifted from all these external warring tribes of external vendors, to you've now created internal warring tribes.

Who have all got product owners [00:10:00] engineers, et cetera, all have an imperative to try to make improvements. And how are you going to keep all of them working together? So really, to me, is what happens when these teams fall out of harmony? Because that's really just naturally it happens over time.

When you get a sprawling organization, you were trying to eliminate friction with your external vendors. But now have you just recreated that friction internally and internalize that friction? So it'll be interesting to see how they manage through that will be a great conversation. Case study for anyone is choosing to go down this path and large software engineering organizations such as, the Microsoft, the Meta's of the world, they've all gone through this.

And so let's see what lessons are learned inside of a non technology company, so to speak, that's trying to own a significant portion of their own technology portfolio. 

Carl: It's such a well made point, you know It's not just the cost of putting something in place. It's also the cost of keeping it up to date and relevant, right?

So the whatever business case has been pulled together. It's actually the maintenance part of it which of course is yes why some folks sometimes don't like the idea of building their own [00:11:00] proprietary platforms and I think your point around the franchise base is also fascinating, right? I mean having you know been in a franchise organization myself you have yes that top 10% that You know, shouting that you're saying we 

we want to be a forward thinking, technology orientated brand. But you also perhaps have the other 20 percent on the other side, which either, the business is struggling. They don't have necessarily the funds to be able to deploy technology in the way that perhaps the brand wants. Or perhaps they're struggling with those labor issues I was talking about, right?

So in terms of the actual deployment and utilization of the technology, actually making it practical in a setting which is labor constrained sometimes can be difficult too. So there's all those different forces. Maybe that 10 year model is going to help them be able to deploy change at the appropriate place.

Cijoy: Like you said, on the surface, building something may seem very cost effective versus paying external parties and, perpetual license fee. The unsexy, but plannable hard costs are in maintenance and continuous improvement. Like you said, the truly hidden cost is really, to me, is cultural and [00:12:00] organizational.

It's again, if you've. Been doing this for a couple decades. You start to recognize that the hard part is the people. It's not the technology. It's not the maintenance and development. Those are quite ungodly expensive, sometimes even pretty significant to how much you've spent initially. But That part is where things get really interesting because you've now created a bunch of experts in various aspects of restaurant technology.

They're probably going to get recruited. I've seen this in other industries. They're probably going to get recruited or incentivized to either leave for upstart tech companies or maybe someone to make an entrepreneurial start their own. So you have essentially developed and seeded a whole batch of individuals that may go off and do things.

It's almost like the PayPal mafia situation all over again, right? This is something that only some of the young brands of size and sophistication and truly go out and go do, but my point of view for anyone who doesn't have that level of financial capability, focus on [00:13:00] what's uniquely yours and gives you competitive advantage.

It's too hard to not overemphasize that point, but no one else really has that really that self actualization level of funding that YUM has here. And, even with constraints, as you can see if we even talk about DeepSeek versus OpenAI, they had a constraint, regardless of that constraint, they're able to come out and get very close to where a well funded, organized, highly focused organization is at.

So even with those constraints, you can still be extremely innovative and still successful at growing your business. And that's what, this type of takeaway is for our listeners here. I 

Mhm.

Question 3 - Wonder's channel expansion with Meal Kits

Cijoy: So what's the latest with Wonder and their channel expansion? It's interesting to see Wonder go into this direction. 

Carl: Yeah, I mean everyone seems to be interested and curious and wondering about wonder right mark.

Glory, of course is the the guy behind this former diapers. com ceo and I think he's certainly taken a unique approach to disrupting the food industry. They of course started with this kind of mobile kitchen [00:14:00] model. I think they ultimately spent out the way 80 million, according to one report on these mobile kind of vans, which were going to cook and deliver in that regard.

And now they're more on centralized kitchens. And of course, with the blue apron acquisition in 2023 they're also in the meal kit space. And so in many ways, this move to get it into meal kits, Doesn't just position them as a food delivery service, but almost like a complete at home dining solution.

Certainly their aspiration is to be known as a super app for mealtime. And really, I think Wonder's core model is focusing on high quality restaurant meals delivered fresh, essentially a restaurant alternative without the physical storefront. 

And these culinary centers, there's about, depending on which report, somewhere between 37 and 40. They support up to 27 concepts under one roof. Now, these units are also just doing final prep C joy, right? So they don't need all the huge kind of kitchen setup because they're typically being managed through rapid cook ovens.

So. With the additional meal kits, Wonder's now competing [00:15:00] on multiple levels. They're against restaurants with these ready to eat meals. They're against meal kit services like HelloFresh with these cook at home kits. And they're also against the grocery stores by offering fresh, curated meal experiences.

The difference, I think, really around what Blue Apron are doing, of course, they're operating their kind of national subscription service still. But in the area of the north, northeast, the tri state area, they are offering their Wonder app users the ability to be able to have a meal kit sent to them within three days.

And so it's almost like a if you want to plan ahead and cook at home later Then we can give you that offer as well. So it's providing an alternative, option if you will. Now the thing i've heard is that the cost of delivery of something like that is still something shy of ten dollars Even though they're not increasing the prices There's still a price right when you're trying to make a decision as to whether I want the ingredients for a meal versus the cost of going to the grocery store and find it myself.

It'll be interesting to see where that kind of lands. The thing is this company is really moving places, right? If you take those, let's [00:16:00] say 40 locations, 27 concepts, that's about a thousand or so offerings for all intents and purposes that they say their locations compete with Carver or Chipotle AUVs and.

If you were to look at the way in which they, at least from what I read, the company reported something like 470 million in revenue last year from an unofficial source. 400 million, I think, comes from something like Blue Apron because that's what they did the year before. So if you take those numbers and you disregard the B2B aspect that probably works out around $1.

8 - $2 million per location, which is still, pretty good, I'd say. Especially when you consider this isn't a standard restaurant, right? You're talking about largely off premise. , presumably they have lower operating costs because you don't need that front of house labor. Yes, they're probably going to have higher capital expenditure that amortizes slowly, which of course is a good thing.

But the challenge for all ghost kitchen models, I know speaking from first hand experience, is how to get the revenue. So this idea of being able to find additional channels and to have multiple choice. I think is really powerful. So you've got [00:17:00] the meal kit piece of it, but then you've also got the Grubhub side, right?

With the marketplace representation. 

And I think this is where the Grubhub thing is interesting for me because they acquired Grubhub last month officially for 650 million and like Blue Apron, they bought them at a valuation, some 90 percent lower than the peak valuation. So they know when to buy, that's for sure. 

So I've had loads of people say, well, why are they doing it? Well, on one hand, it comes back to the theme we talked about at the top, right? They're optimizing their labor and their delivery utilization. Delivery drivers and kitchen staff are only needed when orders come in, but maybe now. Those same folks can be utilized for the meal kit subscriptions or the production of those meal kits, right?

What about the actual delivery network itself? Perhaps that can become more efficient because as you expand your reach, you now can actually deliver the wonder meals by utilizing this wider delivery infrastructure. And then there's this other piece around it around the customer acquisition and the retention strategy, because how many times are you going to go to a marketplace in order?

Relative to the other occasions that you might be [00:18:00] interested. And I think that's of course what DoorDash and Uber Eats are doing with reaching out to all these other retailers. But the main thing that I think they're going to get from this is the data again. Suddenly you're going to have all the access to the Grubhub customers and what they're purchasing, where they're purchasing, when they're purchasing it.

So as they try to assess which of their 27 to 30 concepts or the other 30 that might follow, they can curate their offering more effectively. So it's going to be interesting to see whether they do indeed become a super app, a true competitor to the DoorDash and Uber Eats of this world. But what's your take?

Are you excited about seeing where they're taking things? 

Cijoy: It your breakdown just calls out some things that are really clever about what they're doing. So the traditional virtual kitchen stuff, it's still everything's cooked on premise. You have all the district, you know, the production and distribution issues with that.

Now, if you've gone to a tiered approach where you have. Production and then final execution at a at a delivery center, then you've got all the the benefits of food safety and scale and everything that come with running that model. And now you've got distribution where, [00:19:00] again, if these things are meal kits and if they're it's intended to be very easy to cook.

Now, the training time on on your kitchen staff is probably gone lower than than appear. Selling similar food, and you also have a massive amount of variety. It's like, if you look at what happens with the brand, when you try to feed a family, there's always going to be some person that doesn't like anything from that building.

And thus that that building is no longer in consideration. I had this in my seafood experience, right? It's like one person can object and no one's buying seafood for dinner that night. But this is, you have enough variety that you can, you can hit such a broad demographic and put it all into one vehicle.

And for delivery, like you said, that delivery driver, that's a fractional cost. If you say 10 to delivery for a family, if you're going out to eat, that's probably lower than a tip. If you were going to go out to eat and now you've got something that is probably very consistent because of its supply chain process.[00:20:00] 

There's a ton of variety, so you probably will not get bored of what you're ordering. And like you said, I have more chances to win with a customer, I can distribute things, not just food supply, a meal, but I can also deliver third party things that I may not carry in my building. Now I'm starting to build a customer profile about what, what people spend.

And that customer profile can lead to all kinds of other things that they may eventually go do with it. So, yeah there's obviously the hard things that they sell, but there's also all the data mining that comes along with getting this much insight into your customers or the geographies that you're serving.

Mhm.

Q4 - CPK accessing new revenue through vending machines

Carl: Talking of folks trying to get into new channels and exploring the ways to grow their revenue, CPK has been in the news. What's been happening here? 

Cijoy: So, first of all, who doesn't love CPK, right? From the, from the article, they've have about 200 units globally. They expect to have significant growth in its unit count and boost brand recognition through various channels, including non traditional vending machines and [00:21:00] consumer packaged goods.

 And they also have 12 airport locations. Let's talk about the tech here, just the vending machine play. A vending machine, as is a very low cost way to get your food in non traditional places into people's hands, versus building, obviously, a full blown location, right? It's much easier, in theory.

Again, that's if you're using someone else's R& D efforts to get the machine up and running. If you're Machines from scratch. There might be some more engineering capital costs to recoup over time, but let's say that it's significantly less expensive to pop a vending machine up anywhere you go, maybe a college campus, airport locations that you're not already in sports arenas, et cetera.

So you have an opportunity there to go and get your name out there. You get a lot of the hard benefits from sales, but I really think the benefits with the vending machine are probably going to be more in brand recognition to guess. And that's one level to me. The bigger level is potential franchisees.

They've stated earlier, they want to grow a franchisee footprint. If a [00:22:00] franchisee, obviously they're the people with pockets are going to be flying around and if you start seeing these things in large airports and you're running into it often. Now you're getting enough people to see it, to see your brand out there.

Maybe you can try your food there. That's going to also signal kind of a modern and fresh take on getting your brand out there. So that looks like a, it's a brand that's got some foresight and doing something about it. And for any growth oriented entrepreneur or group, they're going to say this is something that we want to be involved in.

It's going to pique their interest. It's going to put a brand halo on them, and that's going to help cpk go and sell to potential franchisees. They're going to put more of these dots on the map for them. With only 200 locations. I used to live next to one before I moved all of 30 miles away. And now the closest one for me is inside of DFW airport.

So on the occasions when I fly, it's the only time I see their brand. And if I do run into a pizza vending machine, I'm definitely going to give it a try. And I've heard good things from people inside that it's [00:23:00] delicious and looking forward to seeing it in execution. To me, the takeaway here is this is a really clever way.

So uplift and an established piece of technology, something that's already well understood by a customer. Everyone's seen a vending machine. They know how to use it, but now this is a vending machine. That's a bit more sophisticated generating a pizza product for you. There's some stage show to the whole thing. So even if it does take a couple of minutes to get the pizza out, there's still attention being drawn to it. Maybe some lights and bells and whistles that go along with that.

So it's a little bit more different and involved. So now you've got this consumer facing tech. That's not just giving you sales at a low entry price point, but you're also getting the brand so kudos to them for trying this out.

Good luck to them. I look forward to trying it out myself. 

Carl: Yeah, Dawn over there, the CMO is doing some really good things, just bringing new fresh perspective. And of course their grocery strategy also is a great way to leverage their brand. But have you ever ordered a pizza at an airport?

I did recently, CJ. I was bringing something back for my wife. And I thought, you [00:24:00] know what? Um, I've eaten something here. So I'll get her an additional pizza. But of course, and it makes sense. It's a very transportable dish to take onto a plane, right? But her pizza, I wasn't going to hold onto that for the two and a half hour flight.

So I put it above. The problem with the pizza boxes, it can slide. And so for the rest of the flight, I was looking up going, someone's going to get some pepperoni landed on their head. Well, it's not mine, but anyway, that didn't happen. Just be careful where you store your pizza folks. 

Cijoy: Yeah. Usually in your belly is a good place.

Mhm.

Cijoy: So DoorDash, this is interesting, right? DoorDash just came on the scene just a handful of years ago. McDonald's has been around, uh, you know, forever and DoorDash results versus McDonald's, it's like, it's, it's impressive to see how big it is. What do you think it means for the industry as a whole?

Carl: Many restaurant chains are fending off economic pressures shifting consumer habits Even the food safety issues that mcdonald's had to deal with in the fourth quarter But doordash have delivered some pretty strong growth.

So let's start with some of the numbers [00:25:00] Revenue growth that they surge 25% Year over year reaching something like 2. 9 billion dollars in q4 So that's around 10. 7 year older growth. They processed something like 685 million orders, which is up 19 percent year on year, but as an overall year, they still operated at a 38 million loss.

But Q4, much like Q3, the company did turn on operating profit, maybe proving therefore that Q3 wasn't a flash in the pan, so to speak. When you look at that number of what they did turn an operating profit on, it's just 4 percent of revenue still, right? 

Now, over the last five years, their operating losses have been something like 3. 25 billion. 

 And there was something particularly missing for me, Sue Joy, in the results this year relative to 2023. Let me tell you, let me take you into a time machine back to the results of 2023, where they reported total revenues.

of 8. 7 billion. And then they broke up that revenue. They said something like 59. 8 percent of that revenue came from marketplace fees. They said that 26 percent of [00:26:00] it came from delivery fees, the fees that you charge customers with the delivery services. And then the residual, something like 13. 8% came from advertising, marketing, revenue, and additional services.

This year they didn't. So I don't know about you, but my guess is that advertising ramped up massively and is now a significant portion of their revenues. And perhaps we're not seeing it so much because actually because of the propensity of these marketplaces to be so competitive and for restaurants now that realize they just have to stand out.

They must invest into marketing as well as pay the commission fees. So you take that and then you compare it to someone like McDonald's. They saw a 0. 1 percent improvement in global lifelike sales. It was actually down 1. 4 percent here in the U. S. And that's significant, right? They're a 130 billion revenue company.

 In spite of all the things that have been happening, inflation, the challenges attributed to the industry, convenience is still king, right?

Consumers have said they want food to come to [00:27:00] them, even in a year of rising costs. I think it still proves that digital first is a winning strategy. You know, McDonald's and other chains have definitely invested into tech, especially into their loyalty program. But DoorDash has built itself as a ground up, fully digital first company.

That's why it doesn't have the same complexities of physical locations, labor intense operations or even the food supply chain issues with the E. coli issue they had to deal with. So there's that. And then you've got the fact that restaurants are still dependent on delivery. You know, they, they might not like it.

And certainly the relationship with many of these delivery platforms has been rocky at times, certainly with the complaints about high fees and the profit dilution. But the numbers don't lie, you know, delivery is definitely a permanent fixture now. And so restaurants are still having to move and manipulate their overall business model to be able to accommodate it.

So, I'm intrigued to see whether we're going to see continued strength from DoorDash . I'd love to see what their advertising revenues are, because I think they're as much a advertising company now as they are a food delivery company. 

Cijoy: Yeah, absolutely. I think one, one, let's just say it's, [00:28:00] it's unfair to compare the two, right?

Because one is a true manufacturer, so to speak, and the other is just nothing more than a, uh, a marketing platform in some sense of marketing, you know, logistics company, if you will. What, what is interesting to me is that we have a strong push to return to office, and that means people are getting less time at home.

So if they're getting less time at home, does that mean they want to wait less time walking into a restaurant, waiting in, waiting in the to go line to pick something up. And would they rather just use a DoorDash or some other approach like that, that they can order ahead, schedule a delivery that's going to drop on their doorstep.

And. The thing that they've done for, for me is that I have one singular app, , where I can order from multiple places. So my muscle memory, , that my prior orders, everything's already there. I don't have to remember all the modifiers I need for the people around me that I need to order for. So they've made a really easy, compelling approach to ordering, , either for pickup or delivery.

But going [00:29:00] back to the marketing topic, we've seen it with Amazon, uh, from amazon. com. , they have a marketing platform on there that rivals Google in terms of the revenue that they generate, because they're not a.

Just a place for you to list your, your product. But if you want to be seen on a listing, you're going to have to pay the piper, uh, to get up there before your sales can take over. And that's a common practice there. We've seen the same thing in restaurant industry with open table. They went from purely giving you reservations.

Now they're listing you. Now, if you want to be seen, you're going to have to do, some type of advertising to make sure you get up to the top. And same thing with DoorDash, I saw it in my recent roles. If you're not buying the advertising, you're dropping to the second or third page. And if you're too far down the listings, you're probably never going to be seen.

So they own the eyeballs, they own the clicks, and they can, they can turn that into revenue very easily. Yeah, 

Carl: it's it's well said and that's why I always say to folks even the smaller operators out there Always important just to never switch off advertising because you'll [00:30:00] you'll mess around with the algorithms but look enough about , door ash , one of the things that restaurants need to think about is how they can run themselves more officially, so You're doing something these days, which I find incredibly fascinating.

, GM pilots, what is GM pilot and what, and how is it going to help restaurants in the future ? Because at least what you've shared with me, it seems incredibly exciting. 

Cijoy: Thank you. Appreciate it. So with GM pilot, you know, we looking at the industry, we saw this age old problem.

We have the workload and a general manager is getting ever more complicated. The training time to get them up to speed and all the very systems like dealing with because of all the door dashes and everything else that come around. So all those forces are coming in to make the job, the life of a GM even more difficult.

I think it's something like 84 percent of their time is on tasks and not necessarily where we think they should be, which is to work with, work with your team members so that the team members can give a great guest experience and that, you know, GM can come around and touch tables and really work on hospitality.

And if you hire someone that's. Let's say really great [00:31:00] at running numbers in the back of the house. They typically don't look like the same person that wants to be out on the floor. Coaching people and talking to people and you want to hire for hospitality, uh, since there's more and more software systems, they're always going to be more and more sophisticated as they go, which means it's a perpetual training cycle.

And what we looked at is how can we, what do we do here? And our solution was, let's take away tasks away from the GM, uh, starting with labor because labor, you know, labor planning, labor scheduling and monitoring labor, you know, how well you're running labor. are really very difficult, time consuming initiatives.

Despite how good the software has gotten, there still needs to be a very strong, very practiced individual running it. So our point of view is if we can take that away, run into the service on behalf of the restaurant, then we can help drive down, , the cost of labor. 5% Which goes straight to the bottom line.

Customer set stays exactly where it needs to be. Sometimes you can improve. [00:32:00] So we've done things to just take away workload off the GM, but also bring value back to the operators and the investors alike. Now we're also looking into how else can we help top line growth. So helping, uh, you know, coach , the staff to promote certain items and to do rewards and recognition.

We'll be working with multiple partners on that. Both on the front side of, , platforms that are , employee facing as well as things on the back end to do payouts and bonuses and stuff. So you can first phase for us has been to get them to a level of efficiency and now we're a level of increased level of productivity.

So, you know, it's a fun time to be alive in this world. So enjoying what we're doing. 

Carl: That's amazing. Well, congrats on your success. I think, , anyone that wants to, to learn more about,, you or GM pilot, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? 

Cijoy: Just come to gmpilot. com or find us on linkedin. it's i'm happy to say if you type in gmpilot We're now the number one search for it on google. So 

Carl: There you go, [00:33:00] man. He knows his seo. Oh, look cj. It's been a real pleasure. I really appreciate your time with me today , i'm sure our listener base has enjoyed getting your perspective, too Hopefully we can get you back on the show at some point, but Appreciate it.

Enjoy your week and we'll speak again soon. 

Cijoy: Absolutely. Thanks for all take care 

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