Hospitality Hangout | Expert Strategies & Industry Trends from Hospitality Insiders

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “ The Finance Guy” were on the road and live at CES Las Vegas, where they chat with Michael Wolf, founder, chief executive officer, and editor in chief at The Spoon, Picnic’s founder and chief executive officer, Clayton Wood, Steven Sperry, co-founder and chief executive officer at Minnow and Ritukar Vijay, founder and chief executive officer at Ottonomy, Inc., about the show and food-technology being highlighted at CES. Wolf stops by to discuss The Spoon getting involved in CES with the focus of food technology. They talk about the three panels, how food and cooking will change the future, the future of meat, and welcome to our food robot future. Wolf says, “I think there's lots of whitespace opportunity with bringing innovation to food.” As far as the future, Wolf says, we will see food becoming a platform and it will be getting bigger and bigger over time. Picnic founder Clayton Wood stops by for his second time on the podcast. Wood talks about Picnic’s food automation system preparing pizza at the show with their partner Sodexo. Wood is a panelist on the welcome to our food robot future panel and addresses automation for restaurants. Wood says there are a lot of new entrants in the space and it is still not well understood but it is not about stealing jobs. The Picnic system and the systems like it allow operators to operate profitability and make working conditions better. Sperry checks in to chat about the show and people’s reaction to the Minnow Pod. He says, we are in the middle of a revolution in the food industry, and the entire food ecosystem is being redesigned from food production to how food is prepared and more. Sperry talks about the opportunity in terms of delivery and robots. “If food is cheaper to have delivered and it’s better quality than you can make yourself, a lot of people are not going to make their own food,” says Sperry. Ottonomy founder Ritukar Vijay stops by to chat about contactless deliveries with autonomous robots, and about being the world’s first to offer autonomous deliveries at airports. They talk about Ottonomy’s partnership with Presto to offer robot-powered curbside pickup. Vijay says the buzz on the floor at CES is that labor shortages are redefining how food tech is happening and this is an exciting time for food technology. To hear more from all of the guests that stopped by to chat with Schatzberg and Frischling at CES Las Vegas, check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout.This syndicated content is brought to you by Branded Strategic Hospitality. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “ The Finance Guy” chat with Rob Carpenter, founder and chief executive officer at Valyant AI about automated order taking for quick service restaurants. Carpenter says, “There's a little bit of a labor crunch out there, one point seven million unfilled positions across the hospitality industry right now. So what we do is stick revolutionary cutting edge technology into your restaurant, greets customers, answers questions, takes the customer's order and then submits it directly into the point-of-sale system. Making the operators and the employees' lives easier and along the way what we see is anywhere between a five percent to twenty percent increase in top line revenue. So if you're doing one to two million a year you can add twenty percent to your top line overnight. While solving the labor problem.”When asked about where the idea of Valyant AI came from, Carpenter says, “so the core initial idea for Valyant which we will eventually get to is the idea of automating customer service in physical locations. So what the very first version of Valyant’s product was effectively a holographic employee. So imagine a transparent OLED display which is effectively a piece of glass merged with a flat screen tv and we render a five and a half foot tall digital person and her name was Holly and she could blink her eyes and lean in and the idea was that she could carry on a conversation with you.” Carpenter talks about there not being holographic employees or automated customer service available in many places because the technology is extremely hard. They pivoted the business saying they would need to solve the problem of conversational AI in order to bring a holographic employee to market. Carpenter says, “we've effectively spent the last four and a half years hyper focused on solving conversational AI and right now it's for restaurants. Eventually we want to roll it to hospitality in general and then we would look to in the future to take it to additional industries beyond that.” To hear Carpenter breakdown how the AI translates for the customer in a drive-thru, and how Valyant AI can help address the labor crisis that hospitality is facing, tune into this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Click here for more recovery and relief information for restaurant, hospitality and food service operators. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “ The Finance Guy” chat with David Rolston, president and chief executive officer at Hatco Corporation about automation and efficiency in foodservice equipment. Rolston has an engineering background and has been with Hatco for twenty seven years. Hatco was the first to recognize the need to sanitize dishware and developed the technology to do so. Hatco, now one hundred percent employee-owned company, designs equipment for foodservice, including warming, holding, and cooling equipment. Shatzberg asks about the company getting into automation and efficiency, Rolston says, “now it's all about labor savings and so these electronic eyes really aren't much of a labor savings but they were meant to be an energy savings device, so that we're basically looking across the surface of a heated surface, see if there's any food there and if there's no food there we turn the heaters down. It's a very simple concept.”Rolston says when asked about Minnow, “We got into lockers before Covid, we were fortunate that we had started focusing on this area prior to Covid hitting because it became a big deal and during that process we started to see ads for Minnow lockers and we thought oh my gosh, there's another competitor from outside the industry and you know, just one more person we got to deal with as far as competition.” “We realized there was tremendous synergy here because they had great depth in both industrial design and the software that was going with this system.” Rolston shares that Hatco is manufacturing Minnow lockers. In terms of robotics, Rolston says, “you know you can have an actuating lever that pushes a burger off a conveyor or onto another conveyor and these days I think more about automation than I do robotics and to me automation is a broader category that includes software and I see software adoption tremendously throughout our business and restaurants. When you think about something as simple as POS adoption I mean, what restaurant doesn't have a POS these days whereas you go way back they didn't have that and the savings that has brought us is tremendous. So I think software adoption is a no-brainer for restaurants and for manufacturers.”To hear Rolston’s insights on the hospitality industry's adoption of technology, tune into this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Click here for more recovery and relief information for restaurant, hospitality and food service operators. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “ The Finance Guy” were on the road at the Restaurant Leadership Conference in Arizona. Schatzberg and Frischling chat with Steve Heeley, chief executive officer at Pokéworks, Dirk Izzo, president and general manager at NCR Hospitality, Sterling Douglass, co-founder and chief executive officer at Chowly,Inc., and Alan Hickey, co-founder of VROMO. Heeley from Pokéworks stops by and talks about being back in person at the Restaurant Leadership Conference. He talks about technology innovation and technology consolidation. Pokéworks started in 2015 in New York City, the company started franchising in year two and has eight company stores, seventy franchised locations and is in twenty states plus Mexico. Fresh seafood sales have increased by sixty percent and Heeley says that Pokéworks has felt that momentum. He says, “I think people are eating more plant-based, more clean proteins, and you know seafood particularly, raw seafood is very clean protein and people are more conscious of their health but they also want to know where their food comes from.” Izzo has been running the restaurant business for the last two years at NCR Hospitality. He chats with Frischling and Schatzberg about servicing over one hundred thousand restaurants as well as NCR’s Aloha restaurant POS system and their cloud-based solution product Silver. Izzo talks about being back at RLC, what’s new in the hospitality space for NCR, and where the restaurant industry will be in two years. Chowly’s co-founder and CEO, Sterling Douglass stops by to talk about what’s new. Douglass says, “it’s whatever is new that’s helping restaurants adopt new technology, so you know we talked a lot about virtual restaurants at our last show, our partnerships with C3 helping restaurants get more brands and more concepts generating more dollars in their unutilized kitchen space.” Adding, “That's been awesome for us the last couple of months. We've been able to launch tons of new restaurants on this, and it's really helped a lot of these restaurants increase that monthly revenue five, ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars a month which has been great.”Hickey, CCO and co-founder of VROMO, a software built to optimize delivery operations, talks about the conference and the adoption of technology. He also chats about what's new at VROMO saying, the big news is that VROMO has been working on building an ecosystem and an infrastructure that’s going to support restaurants and they will be putting their software into restaurant delivery companies. To hear more from all of the guests that stopped by Hospitality Hangout at the Restaurant Leadership Conference check out this episode. Click here for more recovery and relief information for restaurant, hospitality and food service operators.This syndicated content is brought to you by Branded Strategic Hospitality. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy'' and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy'' chat with Sam Oches, Editorial Director at Informa's Restaurant & Food Group.Oches, who started out as a reporter but had never worked in the restaurant space, this past May became the Editorial Director at Informa where they cover restaurants, supermarkets, food management, hospitality news, and recently added podcasts. Oches talks about how he ended up in the restaurant space saying, “I'm a drummer, I've been drumming since I was twelve, I was a musician and you know look when I went to college I wanted to be a journalist. I went to Ohio University, it's got a great journalism program and look you know at that age everybody wants to be the next you know, great Rolling Stone’s contributor.” Adding, “I was the luckiest man in the world to find a job at a restaurant trade publication which was QSR and a week after I graduated college, I joined the team.” Oches shares his thoughts on hospitality and says, “I think the best part of my job is the people. I think you know the reason I'm the luckiest man in the world to end up in this industry as you guys well know and this is hospitality. The best part of hospitality is the people and the work you get to do in meeting new people, interesting people and interesting people who have big ideas.” Frischling asks Oches about the current state of the industry and he says, “I think about the state of the industry is its creativity. I said I got into this industry in the great recession and so I watched firsthand as the fast casual industry emerged back then, added this need to adapt to the state of things back in 2008, 2009, and 2010, you know there was an incredible amount of creativity that came in that season which was primarily I think around culinary and menu and it was this idea that fast casual is going to do something a little bit better.” He adds, “because of the pandemic I think what we're seeing is that same sense of creativity. But it's really more oriented around operations and this was obviously by necessity. It was forced innovation that restaurants had to adapt or die and I've been just blown away by the flexibility of the industry of restaurant operators to be able to ride with all the changes that have come in the past eighteen months.” To hear from Oches about technology in the restaurant industry, tune into this episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast on Spotify. Click here for more recovery and relief information for restaurant, hospitality and food service operators.This syndicated content is brought to you by Branded Strategic Hospitality. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “ The Finance Guy” chat with Joel Montaniel, chief executive officer and co-founder of SEVENROOMS about helping operators build their direct and personalized relationship with guests. SEVENROOMS is a guest experience and retention platform that works on helping operators utilize guest data to provide experiences that boost business. Montaniel says, “So many many years ago we tried to figure out why hospitality technology systems didn't have any guest data in them and we really were surprised by that because we were like this is the hospitality industry. It is all about understanding the little things, it is all about making people feel special. How can operators do that when the very ingredient you would need is not available in the systems they're using to run their business?” He adds, “we got our start as a guest data CRM company and that we've now evolved ourselves into a guest experience platform with a mission of helping operators make their guests feel at home.”When Frischling asks Montaniel where he thinks we are in the lifecycle of technology, Montaniel says, “if we take hospitality technology as the starting point I believe we're still in the early innings at the very beginning of this cycle.” He adds, “And I think the cloud has enabled a lot of opportunities, in addition of course the mobile, so it feels like we're still in the very very early days.” Montaniel says when asked about the new functionalities SEVENROOMS added, “as we were building the company we started with this idea of guest data and so how do we help the restaurant capture as much guest data as possible and how do we make it as easy as possible for them to capture it. And actually when we first started we had restaurants that were using our CRM system side by side with their reservation seating system, that's how important it was to them and then what we realized is if we wanted to help the restaurants, how could we actually also build the reservations and the seating so that they could have one system to look at everything together.” SEVENROOMS is giving the operators a personalized picture of their consumer on-premise and off-premise. Montaniel talks about delivery, saying in the United States before the pandemic forty-two percent of consumers had done delivery, now delivery is more than fifty percent and growing. He says, “what's interesting is we thought that when covid was stabilizing that dine-in would pick back up and delivery would slow down a little bit, but actually what you're seeing is both are accelerating so dine-in is up, delivery is up, and so what that means is now a restaurant needs to be able to understand and work across both of those different channels.”To hear more from this episode with SEVENROOMS, tune into this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Click here for more recovery and relief information for restaurant, hospitality and food service operators.This syndicated content is brought to you by Branded Strategic Hospitality. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Massimo Noja De Marco, chief executive officer at Piestro and a founder at Kitchen United about robotics in the food industry. Noja De Marco talks about how he grew up in hospitality, his mother was a chef and his grandfather ran seven hotels making him seventh generation in hospitality. He says, “this is what I live and breathe and I’m having so much fun doing it.” Noja De Marco talks about launching Piestro, a fully automated pizzeria a year ago. He says, “we are doing tremendous progress on getting this machine in the hands of our corporate partners. Right now we are not in the market yet, but we are testing these machines with the private recipes of each one of these pizza brands and things couldn't be better.”Noja De Marco says the company produces a number of robotic solutions and Piestro is one of them and they are creating the machines that will fit the needs of a number of brands. He talks about Kitchen United, saying the original idea came from Jeffreey Kalt and they wanted to find a way to optimize the space for their friend’s restaurants and do it better. He says, “They had all these issues executing in their restaurants especially because all the orders were coming in at lunch and dinner time, crunch time and they would turn down all the platforms so they were leaving a lot of money on the table.” He talks about the first Kitchen United location in Pasadena where they rented out to a bunch of restaurants, some big and some small brands. When Noja De Marco is asked about technology and automation in the food industry, he talks about the challenges in the industry, saying it is one of the toughest industries and so many things can go wrong at any given day. He says, “So if you can take a chunk of those issues and put them away by using technology and automation, I mean who better than you guys know how much technology has helped these operators right?” Noja De Marco says, operators and restaurant brands need to do all they can to get educated on groundbreaking technology, automation, and robotics before they end up running into challenges like the pandemic brought. When asked about robotics and automation, Noja De Marco says, there are a bunch of robots that actually can go to the line and pick up that package and take it outside to the drivers. Some of the drivers don't even have to get out of their cars. He added, “You don't have any more runners running back and forth in the ghost kitchen space, so that's one of the ways, that's one of the solutions but we are bringing co-robotic solutions. It's not a full robotic solution into a kitchen, because we still want one person that can actually oversee.” To hear more about Piestro and the technology, automation and robotics advancing into the foodservice industry, tune into this episode of Hospitality Hangout.This syndicated content is brought to you by Branded Strategic Hospitality. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “ The Finance Guy” take the show to Food On Demand in Las Vegas. Schatzberg and Frischling chat with Michael Beacham, president of Reef, Zack Oates, chief executive officer at Ovation, Tom Kaiser, senior editor at Franchise Times Magazine, and Trish Giordano, chief sales and marketing officer at Earl Enterprises. Beacham talks about how ghost kitchens have grown as a category over the last year and the best ways for operators to get involved. He says that now he is seeing local chefs and regional brands trying to expand. Beacham says, “Reef is a platform in the marketplace of proximity and so we believe the closer that you can get to where people are working, we can deliver goods and services to them quicker, better, cheaper.” Beacham shares his background, the launch of DJ Khaled’s one hundred and fifty restaurants, and Dubai-based cloud kitchen iKcon. Zack Oates stops by to talk about Ovation’s growth since 2020, he says, “we’ve just been exploding, it's been tons of fun and honestly it’s been really incredible to build a value.” You can tune in to hear Oates talk about what's new at Ovation and more. Kaiser from Franchise Times talks about the early stages of ghost kitchen innovation and the growth that is still coming to the category. To hear his thoughts on speakers and panels from the show, as well as what's new with Franchise Times and Food On Demand tune into this episode. Trish Giordano of Earl Enterprises says “the most important thing is technology companies that have come to market and with the industry having so many issues with staffing and supply chain, we as an organization have to figure out how you create efficiencies for your restaurants and how you create efficiencies for your customers.” To catch what Giordano has to say about loyalty, buying distressed companies, ghost kitchens, and MrBeast burger launch listen to the show. To hear more from all of the guests that stopped by Hospitality Hangout, check out this episode. Click here for more recovery and relief information for restaurant, hospitality and food service operators. This syndicated content is brought to you by Branded Strategic Hospitality. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy'' and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy'' chat with Anand Gala, managing partner at Gala Capital Partners to explore what insights a well experienced investor can bring to your business. Gala shares his early introduction at nine years old to the restaurant industry while working for his family's business at Jack In The Box as a franchisee. After college Gala talks about becoming a franchisee of Applebee’s, Del Taco, and Famous Dave’s BBQ and eventually changing over to a full time investor after 2014. Gala, who has almost five hundred restaurants, says that going through a lot of different experiences in his life like starting so early in the business, the dot-com bust, 9/11 and now covid, teaches you to find opportunities and find ways to do a better job. He realized that everybody in the industry was going through the same thing and they needed a good partner and somebody they could trust. When Gala was asked about his super power, he says, “I'm a jack of all trades,” “learning enough across a lot of different disciplines whether operations, finance, HR, real estate development, accounting I’ve essentially done a little bit of everything for a couple of years minimum each time.”Gala says his team can help with finance, site selection and modeling, as well accounting or even automating accounting technology. Gala Capital Partners can also provide support in operations and marketing. Gala adds, “there’s always something all of us can learn about operations and how are you using technology, how are you simplifying things and the same is true with marketing.”To hear what Gala has to say about best in class unit economics and growing a brand, tune into this episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast on Spotify. Click here for more recovery and relief information for restaurant, hospitality and food service operators. This syndicated content is brought to you by Branded Strategic Hospitality. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Kevin Tan, co-founder and chief executive officer at Snackpass to explore a social ordering platform for restaurants and the customer experience. Snackpass is the company Tan co-founded with Jamie Marshall while they were students in college. Tan says, “It’s a social ordering platform for restaurants, you can skip the line and the wait, it’s much more convenient for consumers.” Adding, “we have a social commerce layer where you can get reward points with friends, send gifts to friends, group buy, and see what people are ordering making the experience personalized, social, and fun.” Tan talks about when they got started, they would hand out fliers around campus and immediately got traction with their fellow classmates. He says, “within a few months over eighty percent of the student bodies started using Snackpass and became kind of like a household name.” Adding, “ it became the default way for students to order instead of going and standing at the cash register.” Snackpass started launching multiple campuses and today they are at twenty campuses in multiple states. Tan points out that Snackpass just raised their Series B financing which is going to help expand around cities and beyond the college campus. When asked about delivery and third party, Tan says, delivery will just be an API call and it will be commoditized. He says, “the opportunity for us is definitely on-premise and you know that's a huge chunk of a pie.” To hear how Snackpass came about while Tan was sitting in a dorm room, the experience of going through the Series B round, and how the name Snackpass originated, tune in to this episode of Hospitality Hangout Podcast. Click here for more recovery and relief information for restaurant, hospitality and food service operators.This syndicated content is brought to you by Branded Strategic Hospitality. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com