Hello! Restaurant news had a bit of a post-Labor Day lull this week, but don’t fear - I’ve still cooked up some TASTY industry morsels for you.

3 Numbers

14,900

Number of restaurant jobs added in August. The industry is now just 32,400 positions short of its pre-pandemic peak.  

300

Number of mobile pickup lanes Chick-fil-A will add by the end of the year. The company said the move could help speed up drive-thru service times, which in 2022 were the highest in the industry.

50,000

Number of Tesla Cybertruck-inspired spoons to be produced by McDonald’s in China. Elon Musk called the brushed-metal spoons “fake news” when the report first leaked on X, but they’re actually very real. (Can’t believe Musk isn’t on top of this — he’s got nothing else going on.)

Kiosks are poised for a takeover

Kiosks are a technology whose promise has always seemed greater than the reality. Clunky order flows, confusing interfaces, limited options for customization — as a customer, you’ve undoubtedly had a frustrating experience or three.

But the technology has quietly undergone a period of rapid maturation in recent years, which is contributing to a dramatic increase in customer acceptance. Like many others, I recently had my own “Oh, kiosks are good now” moment: at a busy Shake Shack, I lined up behind 20 people waiting to place an order at one of the location’s two POS terminals. After a few minutes, an employee walked from behind the counter and gesticulated wildly at the two unused kiosks standing to the side. I walked over and began tapping in my order — and for maybe the first time, I found an order flow that made sense, and a payment system that was basically frictionless. I permanently became a kiosk guy.

In the early 2010s, Panera became the first major chain to roll out kiosks on a broad scale, followed a few years later by McDonald’s. The investment was undoubtedly more successful for Panera — the chain invested heavily in remodeling its restaurants to place sleek, tablet-based kiosks front and center, and its tech-savvy user base quickly adapted to the new ordering flow. McDonald’s, however, had a more difficult go of it, receiving blowback from its franchisees who complained of a low ROI on their kiosk investments.

Over the next few years, independents and large chains generally ran from kiosk booths at trade shows, yet the combination of improving tech, lower investment costs, and a post-pandemic labor crisis has caused big operators to reconsider the kiosk. Now large-scale rollouts seem to be accelerating:

• Burger King introduced kiosks 5 years ago to little customer enthusiasm. Now, they’re testing them again in company restaurants, and on a recent earnings call CEO Josh Kobza highlighted the kiosks’ markedly improved customer reception. 

• El Pollo Loco now has kiosks in 11 locations, where up to 80% of dine-in customers use the devices.

• Yum Brands has repeatedly cited kiosks as a key sales driver at its Habit Burger locations — 60% of the brand’s units now have them. But an even bigger stamp of approval can be found in the company’s Taco Bell units: every U.S. location now has at least one kiosk.

By the end of the decade, will QSRs even give customers the option to order from a human being at a counter? Maybe not. Kiosks always remember to suggestive sell, and when I became a kiosk convert at a Shake Shack, that made their number crunchers happy — the kiosk is the company’s most profitable sales channel. Other brands have reported similar results.

Customer acceptance + more profitable restaurants = a holy grail for the technology. We could be careening towards a human-less ordering future.

Name That Chain!

You get three hints to guess this week’s mystery chain:

• This chain was founded by a former minor-league baseball player.

• Bill Murray and Eminem both worked there (although not at the same time).

• In 1993 they began selling spaghetti that was packaged in a bucket. The product lasted one year.

WHAT IS THIS MYSTERY CHAIN? (The answer lies at the bottom of the email.)

Quick Hits

• Sneakers and double cheeseburgers, a match made in heaven… LA’s hottest new budget dining destination is a Sketchers store — yes, the place where you normally buy shoes. Customers are lining up in their fresh new Slip-Ins to order Costco-cheap hot dogs, double cheeseburgers, and fried chicken sandwiches.

• Toast has a new CEO… Toast company co-founder Aman Narang is replacing Chris Comparato, who served as CEO for 8 years and helped oversee the company’s 2021 IPO, along with the more recent customer surcharge snafu.

• Fresh new loyalty program… Subway is replacing its “MyWay” loyalty program with a tiered, points-per-dollar rewards program called “MVP Rewards.” The new program bases its tier program on annual spend and — in line with many other recent updates to restaurants’ loyalty programs — introduces points challenges.

• Another off-premise design debuts… Whataburger has opened its first dining-room-less “digital kitchen” in Austin. Customers can order their Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit either on their phone or at a kiosk, then pick up the item in exterior lockers or by swinging through a mobile pickup lane. The chain posted a first look at the space on TikTok.

• Sounds … savory? Israel-based company SavorEat has made the first US deployment of its plant-based 3D printing robot, with the University of Denver receiving the first unit. The robot prints veggie burgers that can be customized to the customer’s preferences (including size and cooking style). No word yet on whether anyone is working on making the dehydrated pizza from Back to the Future II a reality.

• Dave & Buster’s reports sales issues… Your favorite place to find yourself in a Skee-Ball death match (just me?) reported a mixed second quarter. Same-store-sales dropped 6.3% while traffic dropped 39%, according to data by Gravy Analytics. Net income was positive, however, at $29.1 million, and the chain is not the only eatertainment concept struggling with traffic declines — Gravy Analytics data also reported traffic decreases at TopGolf and Bowlero of 30% and 56%, respectively.

• CloudKitchens cuts staff, sites… The FT reported this week that Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s ghost kitchen startup CloudKitchens has laid off staff, closed locations, and reigned in its real estate spending in an effort to shave expenses. The report also said that its buildings are only 50% full, which would be in line with other reports that paint a picture of high restaurant turnover at the facilities.

#Content Recs

• The Art of the Restauranteur is a well-written celebration of high-level restauranteurs, featuring artwork worthy of making space on the coffee table.

• What did you do on your lunch break yesterday? I watched 19 minutes of a McNugget training video from 1983. It’s included in this (delightful) roundup of fast food training videos of yesteryear. (One takeaway: puppets really had a moment in the 1980s.)

• The WSJ did a deep dive on third-party delivery companies’ efforts to persuade restaurant chains to rethink the price premiums they’re placing on the apps.

• The 10 chains that added the most locations last year is worth reading just to see how many stores Crumbl Cookies added. (Okay, it’s 363. Which is 113% growth.)

See ya next week.

Trivia answer: Little Caesars. Despite their failed spaghetti bucket experiment, the company continues to thrive — it’s the country’s third-largest pizza chain.