Tech and Restaurants
Throughout the course of our lives, we have all seen technology seep into every aspect of our daily routines. For me personally, watching the evolution of technology in the restaurant industry has been a point that has always piqued my interest. Before redirecting my career towards technology I worked in kitchens, when I first began working in restaurants, kitchens often repelled at the notion of introducing the newest technology. From a chef’s perspective technology had always been associated with corporate fast food. Tech in fast food takes the majority of the responsibility in making sure that a consistent food product, this ensures any human error will minimize the impact on the final product. The opposite can be said for all of the restaurants that I’ve worked, where human technic and the ability to be attentive with all of your senses is crucial. At times the technology being used to cook the food is our most ancient and fundamental, our ability to harness and use fire. Over the years I have seen some adoption of new technologies in kitchen equipment but always alongside what has always been the norm and almost never as a full-blown replacement.
Although restaurants a generally hesitant, one of the places where technology has taken a strong foothold is in the POS(Point of Sales) systems. These systems handle many tasks, such as keeping track of sales, sending order tickets to the kitchen, putting counts on menu items so they are not oversold, and more depending on the system.
The Past
In the beginning, POS systems were a proprietary mess. If a restaurant needed a more technologically advanced POS system to handle a growing business they would have to lease hardware from the company that would quickly grow outdated and use their software that was often unintuitive and buggy. The number of times in my life that I’ve watched a front of the house manager agonize over a bug or personally had seemingly random and strange tickets begin to endlessly print out in the kitchen is vast. These kinds of problems made it so chefs and managers had to become experts on knowing all the workarounds of dealing with odd and unexpected bugs, this was far from ideal considering how packed the schedule of mangers and chefs can be.
The Present
The current market for point of sale systems provides many more options and flexibility. Companies like Toast and Lightspeed offer solutions for almost every aspect of the day to day of working in a restaurant. These solutions extend much further than their predecessors by allowing flexibility, and by providing helpful tools for both the front and back of the house. The affordability of tablets has in some places eliminated the need for a central POS station, now servers and managers can place orders to the kitchen as they receive them from the guest. Tablets and monitors have also allowed some kitchens to eliminate physical tickets all together, relying on a touch screen interface to manage incoming orders in a much more efficient and clear manner than could have ever been possible with a traditional POS. These technologies used to their full potential could free up the chef during a busy rush away from the tedious and often stressful task of expediting tickets and towards ensuring that every plate of food is meeting its full potential.
The Future
Even though there have been great strides in restaurant technology, there is still the problem of these technologies being fully embraced. The knowledge of running a kitchen is in my experience passed down, and the ability to take and respect this tradition while also remaining adaptable to new technologies is unavoidable for our modern era. With more tech-savvy generations beginning to take the helm in restaurants and the price of admission ever falling it's only a matter of time until restaurants are streamed lined by technology.