Brandon Barton [00:00:00]:

It's part of a multi channel ordering strategy for brands. There are some people that are going to like and prefer walking up to a kiosk. Let me give you an example. We have kiosks at Krispy Kreme in Times Square. One of the most used features at that Krispy Kreme on our kiosk is switching languages. So you go up to a kiosk in a country that you don't know how to speak English and you don't want to read in that language, go ahead and switch it to Spanish. Go ahead and switch it to a different language, because guess what? Digital menus can do that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:32]:

Welcome to Wisking it all with your host, Angelo Esposito, Co founder of Wisk.AI, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome to another episode of Wisking it all. We're here today with Brandon Barton, the CEO of Bite. Brandon, thank you for being here with us.

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Brandon Barton [00:01:02]:

Angelo, thank you so much for having me on. Pretty fun.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:04]:

Yeah, I'm excited. Excited to chat about your story, how you got, you know, the idea for Bite, what kind of problem you guys are solving. So we'll get into all that. How you're employee number four at Resy. Right. So, like, super interesting stuff, but maybe to just kick things off, little intro. Can you just explain what is Bite?

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Brandon Barton [00:01:22]:

Yeah, sure. So, Bite is the leader of self service software for restaurants. Okay. When you walk into a restaurant nowadays, sometimes. Sometimes you'll see a big touchscreen that allows you to order and gets that order into the kitchen, you know, allows you to skip the line. Less wait time, less kind of pressure to get your order in with people waiting behind you. We do a lot of those for some major brands, like Krispy Kreme to Bluestone Lane to togos out west. We're pretty fortunate and we.

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Brandon Barton [00:01:54]:

Our philosophy as a company is to make sure that we are going to enhance and elevate hospitality everywhere. The idea is that if you can add something to the guest experience, it has to be something that's going to also elevate the hospitality side of it, not just be something that's a plug in. So we really take a guest centric perspective when building out our product of.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:18]:

That, and we'll definitely get deeper into it. I want to know the details on Bite and get some examples and wins. You guys have seen and all that good stuff, but I always liked it.

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Brandon Barton [00:02:28]:

That's fun. It's boring. Let's get into the other stuff.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:30]:

Yeah, no, that'll be good. But I always like to understand how people got to where they were. Right. So it's always interesting to understand people's backgrounds and what motivated them. So your background, super interesting. Like I said, I know you're the. You were the fourth employee at Resy. I know you were, you know, experienced at Union hospitality, a union square hospitality group and patina group, etc.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:51]:

Etc. So maybe just hearing it from you, I'd love to understand a. What got you into the hospitality space in general, and then from there, where the idea behind bite first kind of was born.

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Brandon Barton [00:03:04]:

Yeah, I mean. I mean, getting into the hospitality industry was a bit of a, you know, perhaps a happy accident. I mean, I grew up humbly, you know, from. From humble means in Brooklyn. And as a kid, I wanted to make money and that, you know, when you're young, young, you do that by hustling, shoveling, you know, shoveling snow in the winter and selling Christmas trees and doing all the stuff. Okay. All the stuff that we did to just make a little extra scratch. And when you get of age, you know, you can go and work as a busboy.

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Brandon Barton [00:03:37]:

So I worked as a. As a busser at a restaurant called Skinflinch, which is still in Bay Ridge. It's incredible. It was the first time I was introduced, the idea that an english muffin could be the burger bun. So really great burgers. And I worked at busboy, waiter, barback, everything there. I was fortunate enough to go off to get into and then go to Cornell, but I actually went as an engineer, and I was aware that the hospitality program existed, but I didn't think that that was, like, my path. After about a half a semester of engineering, I ran to the hospitality program, because engineering was very hard, and it wasn't coding, it was civil engineering.

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Brandon Barton [00:04:20]:

But I was out. That was not my path. But I was fortunate to land in the best hotel school in the entire world at Cornell. Long story short, after that, I got into operations, and then I just understood that the scalability of my own world was limited in operations. And you're always focused on what's going on within the four walls of the restaurant. And the truth of the matter is, I wanted my scope to be bigger than that. And so one fateful day, the CEO of Avero had lunch at Tabla. We started talking, and, you know, I had, you know, an interview a week later and a job a week after that, and was going to work for some company dealing with tech stuff and I didn't know if I liked it.

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Brandon Barton [00:05:09]:

I spent eight years there, and then that got, you know, I learned everything about restaurant technology and SaaS starting there.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:16]:

That's amazing. And then I know from there, I know you. That's really, really cool because, yeah, I know they're on the sales analytics side or are, you know, quite, quite big, to put it lightly. But from there, I know you were also at Resy, but what's interesting is, you know, it's one thing working at a company, but being such an early employee, I think, oh, yeah, I'm not misquoting you. Employee number four. And, you know, Resy was obviously got pretty big and got acquired by. Was it again, was it American Express?

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Brandon Barton [00:05:44]:

American Express. American Express. Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:46]:

But, yeah. So I'd love to understand what that looked like because, you know, going to a company that has that foundation versus, you know, wearing many hats, like, what did that look like?

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Brandon Barton [00:05:54]:

Yeah, I mean, I'm super grateful to the team at Resy for giving me a shot to run sales and operation for the, you know, the three and a half years that I was there. You know, I started, there was three engineers, two founders and myself. And Gary V. Was around, too. As a founder, you know, it was a. It was. It was a fun time, and. And it was great because I had taken a lot of what I had learned at Avero and been able to piece together the strategy of what needed to happen at Resy.

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Brandon Barton [00:06:27]:

And so it was definitely trying it for the first time as being that level of a leader, but yet knowing, having a lot of confidence in what we were doing. And, yeah, I mean, we could talk for hours about all the trials, tribulations, turns that we made there to make it work. But if you remember, the biggest thing was clearly we were going up against Opentable, which at the time would recently been purchased for, I believe, $2.6 billion by, I guess, Expedia or. Yeah, whoever owns them. Now, that's slipping my mind. I'm forgetting. Yeah, yeah. Slipping my mind at the moment, but at the same time.

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Brandon Barton [00:07:15]:

So they were just purchased. Open table was just purchased, but the same time, there was a crop of priceline. Sorry. There you go. Expedia being their competition by Priceline. Yes. And at the same time, there was a reserve and table eight, I think it was the name of one, and I know the chef and a bunch of other competitors in this, like, pay for access space type of thing. So it was just like hyper competition at all times.

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Brandon Barton [00:07:46]:

And the one thing I'll say about Resy that just one anecdote and we could go into more if you want. But 1st, 15 months of Resy, I made a phone call to every restaurant that got reservations from Resy to ensure that the guests were in the proper book with the proper name and everything. So every single day at starting at 04:00 eastern, thereabouts to, I don't know, let's just say 08:00 eastern, because that was when the west coast folks would have gotten their information about who was coming. I was just offline. Did not matter what was going on. I could be, you know, with my parents. I could be with my girlfriend at the time who turned into my wife. Didn't matter.

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Brandon Barton [00:08:31]:

It was 04:00 hits. I'm going into a hole somewhere and I'm calling 150 restaurants at the time.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:37]:

Were you calling because, like, the idea was to make sure the reservations that were made to the platform were actually on the books of the restaurant?

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Brandon Barton [00:08:44]:

Like, yeah, there was. I mean, there's the handoff. We were not at the, at the beginning of the rest of Resy. We were not the reservation book of record. Right. Everyone still had opentable and we were offering two to three great guests that would come that night and great parties, I should say. Right. And so you got to make sure that it's in the book.

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Brandon Barton [00:09:05]:

So when the guest walks up and they say, hey, it's Angelo. I'm here for my party of four. And they're like, who are you? I booked this on Resy. What's Resy? I mean, that happened, right? And so, you know, and kind of, you know, if you want to just like, tie the thread, you work for Union Square hospitality group. The reality is that all you do is care about guests. You care about your team and you care about guests, and that doesn't go away. And so bring that over to Resy, and it's like, wait a minute. There's somebody who could show up tonight who doesn't have a reservation is going to be embarrassed in front of the date that they're on or the business center that they're on.

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Brandon Barton [00:09:40]:

They entrusted us with that information to try to get that reservation for them. And they're going to show up and not have it. No way. No. I'll call 500 restaurants for, you know, seven days a week. That's no problem.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:53]:

That's crazy. And then. So, so let me ask you this. So I'm sure, obviously you learned a lot. I can only imagine the startup environment, obviously whisk, you know, I started myself, so I can only imagine how much you've learned over the years. What was the kind of catalyst to then start, you know, bite? Like, what was the idea behind was the problem? You saw that. You're like, I want to solve this.

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Brandon Barton [00:10:15]:

Yeah. Yeah. And so it's funny because you're saying certain words, and I'm going to twist them a little bit. Yeah. Please join Bite. I'm going to.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:22]:

Okay. Okay.

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Brandon Barton [00:10:23]:

So Bite was founded by two incredible folks, Stas and Jeff. They're both co founders of the company, in the company still work alongside me to make everything happen. And they had initially started the company as, like, an iPad menu, iPad wine list type of company. Okay. Okay. They were. They were in the midst of a pivot to self service kiosk to kiosk ordering on an iPad. Right.

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Brandon Barton [00:10:51]:

If you can recall, this is around the time where Shake Shack had just opened up aster Place. The aster place. Shake shack. And they, in this Astro play, shake Shack, they had eight kiosks or something like that. It was like there was no. Every order went through the kiosk. Also, by the way, probably ten years prior to that, McDonald's had already had kiosks up and running and in some of their stores. And this is, you know, so I said to myself, if McDonald's needs this technology and shake Shack needs this technology, and they both built it themselves.

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Brandon Barton [00:11:27]:

They both went ahead and built this in house. I said, this is going to be important. I confirm that. With the Shake Shack team, obviously having the relationship with them from Union Square, the Union Square days, I confirmed that that was an important thing for them. And so I sat down with these two founders who said, we want to hire you as a sales consultant. And about 15 minutes into the conversation, I was like, number one, like, you want me as a consultant 60 hours a week? That doesn't make any sense. Like, this is. This is a full time job.

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Brandon Barton [00:11:56]:

Okay, number two, I'm all in. Right? I don't want to just. I don't want to consult because I think there's a big, big company here. And then, you know, cheers to Jeff, who was acting as a CEO. Was a CEO initially, I don't know, something like, six months later, as the news of Resy's acquisition came about, it was clear that it would be a decent move to have us switch seats. From a strategy perspective, Jeff is doing incredible things in the company, and he really gets to play the founder role. There's not anybody who you'd meet in the industry who doesn't love Jeff Hahn. He's the best and meanwhile I can get into the weeds on sales, sales ops, a little bit of product when I get dangerous and try to make this thing hum.

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Brandon Barton [00:12:51]:

And it's been really an incredible group effort.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:55]:

That's awesome. Thanks for that clarification. I didn't realize that, but that's really cool. And so from when you joined like, to now, what were some things that you or challenges you saw? Right? Because I think, you know, obviously there's other, I think now there's other digital solutions. I think COVID probably accelerated some of those, at least what I've seen, you know, some of that. So I'd love to hear from you, like, what does that look like? How do you think about that when it comes to, you know, different solutions being out there? Who is Bite perfect for and like, what's your, you know, differentiation?

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Brandon Barton [00:13:28]:

Yeah, for sure. I would. For our space of kiosk, COVID was a decelerator because you remember when you wore plastic gloves to go grocery shopping and put a gas mask on to go to the house. So people were scared of touching stuff for a while, which was interesting. And then of course, the rise and then rapid fall of the mighty QR code, which we, by the way, have our own QR code product as well. And my marketing and product team hate when I actually give my opinion here, which is I personally as a guest, don't like using a QR code to order food because I think a 3.5 inch screen is not big enough to navigate a menu for the first time. You've never in your life seen a three. Yeah, well, you've never seen a restaurant, in a full service restaurant hand you a menu the size of a phone.

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Brandon Barton [00:14:23]:

That's purposeful.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:24]:

Okay.

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Brandon Barton [00:14:25]:

Because it would never be able to properly allow you to browse.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:30]:

Okay.

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Brandon Barton [00:14:30]:

It's annoying to have to click so many times.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:33]:

Anyway, sorry, sorry, Tina, I prefer the menu too. I'm with you. Like, there are certain places where you can get away with it. If it's a small menu fast, fine. But in general, it's like, just give me the menu. I like to see everything. I like to have that experience.

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Brandon Barton [00:14:47]:

But, but in our ICP, the people who we really want to meet and talk to, which is quick service and fast casual restaurants, typically you probably have like five stores at a minimum to really want to think about your guest experience in the way that we do it. Okay, so five stores to 5000. Okay. So it's a pretty, pretty wide swath, but if you're in those restaurants, you don't get a menu you don't get handed a menu. So what's the best next step? You have a beautiful 22 inch, 32 inch screen that you can walk up to in order. And the reality is that it is now being seen. And there's all sorts of surveys and stuff that are saying that guests prefer this experience. And why do they prefer it? There was a nation's restaurant news survey of, like, 60% of guests would prefer to use a kiosk.

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Brandon Barton [00:15:45]:

Why do they prefer it? You can take your time. There's no pressure. You can order and then get back to doing whatever you want to do rather than waiting on a line. From a cost perspective, you can have many kiosks where you might only have the ability to have two cashiers open or three cashiers open or one cashier open, even worse. So just offers an opportunity to be able to kind of do your thing and then get back to whatever you're doing, listening to your podcast, watching a YouTube video, or texting your friends. And then as it relates to the difference between, let's say, this and other ordering channels, you know, I mentioned the QR code. We've had restaurants that have run with QR codes and kiosks at the same time. The data's in.

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Brandon Barton [00:16:27]:

People prefer kiosk over QR codes. It makes sense when you think about it, because when you pull out your own phone, I promise you, most of you, if you just grab your phone, look at it right now, it has a notification for something. Okay? And so that's just a distraction. It's just in the way of. Oh, my God, I forgot to, you know, forgot to check in on this person. Oh, let me check this text message. What's this snap about? And what happened in this news from Apple? Okay. Oh, man.

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Brandon Barton [00:16:54]:

I forgot I was supposed to be ordering. Right. And so it does become inefficient, rather than walking up to something that has a single purpose to do that. But in general, and I get asked this question quite a bit, like, well, do you think it's going to go away or whatever? It's part of a multichannel ordering strategy for brands. There are some people that are going to like and prefer walking up to a kiosk. Let me give you an example. We have kiosks at Krispy Kreme in Times Square. One of the most used features at that Krispy Kreme on our kiosk is switching languages.

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Brandon Barton [00:17:29]:

So you go up to a kiosk in a country that you don't know how to speak English, and you don't want to read in that language, go ahead and switch it to Spanish. Go ahead and switch it to a different language. Because guess what? Digital menus can do that. You can't ask the cashier to find somebody who's Mandarin in the restaurant. Okay.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:44]:

Right.

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Brandon Barton [00:17:45]:

So there's always going to be this use case similar to how restaurants have a drive through. And that is, you know, does somebody who orders in a drive thru always order in a drive thru? No, I used to order in a drive thru on my way into work sometimes to pick up a coffee on the way. And then sometimes I'd want to sit in the restaurant and pop open a laptop and work. I mean, there's just different use cases, and it's just one of many. And then sometimes it's okay if you know what you want in advance and you order ahead and, you know, you don't want to stand in the sweet green line and you order ahead so that you don't. You could just pick it up off that beautiful shelf so all of these channels will be active, and you just got to meet the guests where they are.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:27]:

That makes sense. That makes sense. Meet the guests where they are. I love that. And what would you say is the main pushback that, like, someone might give?

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Brandon Barton [00:18:34]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:34]:

So for some restaurants. Right. Like, assuming they're the right fit, like, what's the typical pushback that you guys might get?

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Brandon Barton [00:18:39]:

Yeah, I mean, I think right now people are trying to figure out how to make kiosk work for them. Okay. And so it's not as simple as just saying, I'm gonna plop this thing in and it's going to work. And when you think about the analogy of a drive through, you know, you can really start to figure that there's a lot of angles that you need to think about as to how to make it work. You certainly couldn't just put a drive thru in, put the technology in and say, team, go, but there's training for that team on how that's going to go, how the, the transactions are gonna go. There needs to be training for your counter staff or your cashiers, so to speak, on when should they be saying, hey, kiosks are open, go ahead and order versus when should they be paying attention to guests and also directing people to cashiers? Or maybe there's a line of five people and you say, hey, folks, if anyone wanted to use the kiosk, go ahead and do it. This stuff helps to incorporate this into the guest experience, if necessary. Also, where you put the kiosk matters, put the drive thru on the back of the restaurant and see if anyone sees it and gets into it? No, of course not.

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Brandon Barton [00:19:50]:

And so if you don't put the kiosk in the right place, you're going to fail at it. So I think, talking about pushback, I think there's some things that people need to think about and work through and how this is going to work. For my concept right now, we've never met a brand that has not found the return on investment from our product. And I would bet that other kiosk companies can say the same thing. If you were to ask me to bet, I think in the next few years, you're going to see kiosks at every single fast, casual, and quick service restaurant. And I'm not the only one saying that. The leaders of restaurant Brands International are saying that. The leaders of inspire brands are saying that.

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Brandon Barton [00:20:30]:

You're seeing restaurants trying to get to what they're calling 100% digital ordering. And there's so many benefits to this, including being able to maybe tell Angelo the special that he might like because of the things he's ordered in the past.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:46]:

That's really interesting. And I'm curious to see, like, where do you see the evolution of digital ordering? Right. So, like, you touch on a bit of, like, you know, the client experience, but I love to see, like, you know, as more restaurants are adopting this and it's becoming more common, and there's a clear RoI, which is awesome for restauranteurs, where do you see, like, the evolution, you know, the digital ring 2.0, let's say, or kiosk?

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Brandon Barton [00:21:08]:

Yeah, I mean, look, right now we're in a space where we're getting analog orders. Digital. The next phase is to make that digital order personal. Okay? And so, you know, if we know it's you through a number of different ways, Bite has the ability to use facial recognition, for example. So I don't even need to know it's Angelo, but maybe I can know it's you and what you've ordered last time based off of your biometrics. Okay. I can make suggestions to you that you might like. Okay.

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Brandon Barton [00:21:38]:

I might be able to tell you. Here's the thing you ordered last time. It's one of the greatest features that we have. It's not just what you ordered last time, but it's what you ordered along with the exact modifiers that you ordered it with. So I love kava, and I like my bowl a certain way. I love double the feta. I love double the tahini. Okay.

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Brandon Barton [00:21:57]:

And I'm okay to pay for it, that's fine. But every time I got to tell the person the same thing. What if I could just go in and one click my way into the thing I had in the past? It's personalization. That's impressive. And once you reach personalization, then you can get into a different level of loyalty. You can start to offer people things that are attractive to the way that they order with you. You can start to understand the times that they are going to want to be communicated to and not want to be communicated to. And if we ever crack the world of crypto and NFT loyalty, all this other stuff, that kind of is fun and interesting.

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Brandon Barton [00:22:36]:

The only real way to do that is to receive that as a restaurant, I should say, is going to be through a digital channel. You're going to need to tell the machine that I have this NFT, and therefore I get to get a extra ice cream or whatever. It's not going to be by telling an employee who's going to bring out a book of all the. The NFTs that could be possible here and the different varieties and the gold versus the silver versus the platinum versus the.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:06]:

That's funny. And let me ask this any, because I love the idea of, like, being able to know exactly what I ordered, and it doesn't matter who I am, so it's not necessarily, like, my personal info of Angelo's age, but just like, it knows it's me. Any pushback on that side on the facial recognition? Like.

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Brandon Barton [00:23:25]:

Like, yeah, so not. Not really. We. We allow brands to opt in or opt out if they want to use it. Like, some brands might. You know, they may say, hey, this isn't for us. And that's cool. That's fine.

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Brandon Barton [00:23:37]:

This isn't. The idea is, like, the camera's not on until you ask it to be. So. So it's really opt in by the guest. Okay. You know, it doesn't happen without you knowing it's happening. And, you know, I think what's. What's fun about it is biometrics are back on the upswing.

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Brandon Barton [00:23:57]:

I see this in airports now where it's not just clear which is the one we all know. But Delta has this face scanning software on your boarding. I've seen it. I don't even know what it does, but it tells you who you are.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:12]:

And it's not only Delta. I've seen a few other airlines do it, too, and it's kind of unclear what it is, but. Yeah.

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Brandon Barton [00:24:17]:

Well, clearly, in the entire environment, once you pass security. They have your picture and know who you are. Okay, so what I'm just saying is it normalizes the idea that certain entities can have this and do good by it. And I'm going to get through the boarding line quicker. And so is that something that we want? You know, you want to opt into having a restaurant know this so that you can order your smoothie the exact same way the five days a week you get your smoothie right after your workout? You know, I would love to live in a world where the person behind the counter knows me, knows my order like I'm a regular at a fine dining restaurant, but that just doesn't happen. I think that that world, it doesn't exist, and I don't think it ever will, you know? And I think that in a fine dining restaurant, it will. That's beautiful. That's why we had Rezi, that's why we had nostalgia.

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Brandon Barton [00:25:11]:

At Resy, we took all the guest information. It was shared across restaurants. Right. You could put a profile in and say who you are and tell every restaurant about it. We democratize the dining experience in bite, where we're trying to personalize it and give you hospitality that was not achievable before. That's interesting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:33]:

And for our listeners, we have a lot of restaurant operators listening in on this. What does the process just look like at a very high level, someone might be listening to this and say, you know what? It's something I've been thinking about. It's been on my radar. This sounds interesting. How can they learn about Bite and what's the typical customer journey look like?

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Brandon Barton [00:25:50]:

Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously we have a website go to that reach out to us, because everything's really specific. If you sat through the podcast this long, you heard me say how specific it can be, and I would hate for you to try it, not do it well, and then think kiosk isn't for you, because I promise you, there's a way to execute on it well and talk to our team. We're happy to be consultative in that we're not a company. That's some hard sell on what it is. And Resy was like this, too. We were teaching people a new way to think about something, and that takes a little bit of trust, so we're more than happy to have an open conversation about it. The other thing that you can do just to just perhaps if you're sitting there saying, is this the right thing for me? I invite you to go listen to some of the publicly traded restaurant companies phone calls. Go listen to Shake Shack's earnings call and hear Katie Fogarty, CFO, talk about kiosk is the most profitable channel that they have over the 400 units that they have recently.

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Brandon Barton [00:26:59]:

I forget who it was specifically, but was saying that firehouse subs wants to get kiosk everywhere. Their fiduciary responsibility is to make money for their company and to do so in a responsible way that they care about their guests. I promise you they're not lying. I didn't pay them to show it works. You just got to figure it out, you know? And you can always reach out to me as well. I'm on LinkedIn, and I pretty much answer everybody who would reach out there.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:27]:

So I love that. I love that. And then any. I'm sure there is many, but like any kind of anecdotes or success stories you can share that come top of mind. Like a client that implemented and maybe like a clear win, they got.

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Brandon Barton [00:27:39]:

I don't know if I'll go into any. Any specific client.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:43]:

You don't have to say that name. Just more like a win for sure.

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Brandon Barton [00:27:46]:

You know, there's one client who actually, while the pandemic was devastating to their, you know, to the inside of their restaurant business, and they had the restaurant shut down, they said, what can we do to reimagine the in store experience while this is happening? Let's use this as a opportunity. They were able to put kiosk in, and when they reopened, they reopened with a little bit less staff because, of course, the idea of how many people were coming back into stores was a question mark, so they had to be throttling on that. And they found that the kiosk orders were about 50% to 60% higher than a guest ordering at a cashier. And so this was a coffee and breakfast related spot. Okay. And what they found was that there was just a way higher attachment rate to all the food items. And so they weren't. Maybe they were just known for being a coffee spot, or maybe it was the idea that a beautiful avocado toast was visual, you know, and you could see it and go, yeah, I actually want one of those right now.

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Brandon Barton [00:28:51]:

Right. I have time. That's just throwing an avocado on a piece of bread. I have time for that. And they had 50% to 60% increase in average check for those orders through the kiosk. And so, I mean, it's just a no brainer, right? It's just marketing and showing your menu, merchandising your menu in a totally different way. And maybe somebody purchases more in this digital environment than when you're talking to them. You can only really ask them, do you want fries with that once? Right.

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Brandon Barton [00:29:22]:

Like, you don't on a digital screen, you can have a bunch of other things there that are being, quote unquote, advertised and marketed while somebody's placing the order they want.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:32]:

Right. That makes a ton of sense. And I know another hot topic in the industry is like, you know, the idea of, like, dynamic pricing because of some of these digital platforms, not only kiosks, but even just like, online ordering and one online.

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Brandon Barton [00:29:43]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:44]:

What's your thought when it comes to dynamic pricing restaurants? I'm just curious to get your take.

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Brandon Barton [00:29:47]:

Yeah, sure. I mean, dynamic pricing is interesting. It's early days. It's unclear if it's very hard to be, let's say, one of these kind of like, urban coastal people and say, this works for everybody. I've now traveled around the country to the middle of Kentucky, to Texas, to Wyoming, talking to restaurateurs. And guests are different everywhere. And so do I think that a guest in the middle of the country or in a more rural area is ready for dynamic pricing? No, I don't think they are. Do I think that this could work in certain situations, for sure.

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Brandon Barton [00:30:26]:

And the thing about dynamic pricing that people misconstrue is dynamic pricing means up. It means down too. Right. It does mean kind of the discounting side of things. But I think right now it is in its infancy, and I'm keeping an eye on it. I have more preference to think about revenue management for restaurants. My buddy Mike Lukianoff, who runs extropead 360, he's, to me, he's the smartest mind in restaurant data that there is. Okay.

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Brandon Barton [00:31:00]:

He just thinks about data for restaurants all day long, and he really, he zooms out and says, this is about revenue management. It's not just about figuring out price dynamics, but menu dynamics. And so when you think about that, it's kind of interesting. What are you offering during shoulder periods versus during main periods? Can you offer a bigger menu? Can you? Obviously, there's like the midday discount for the pastries that are going to go bad. Okay, for, fine, that's dynamic pricing. But there's brands that have experimented with a late night menu that doesn't exist until 10:00 p.m. Or 11:00 p.m. This is how you think about revenue management.

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Brandon Barton [00:31:40]:

It's not just about, do I tick this price up or down based off of demand?

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:44]:

Right. That's interesting.

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Brandon Barton [00:31:46]:

Yeah. It's a component, I think, that makes sense.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:49]:

And from your point of view, I'm curious. On the digital kiosk side, one thing that that comes to mind is the idea of, you know, menu engineering, and you kind of lightly touch on it. But, you know, menu engineering is super important. Where to place things, images. But obviously, on a printed menu, it's quite limited. So I'm just curious, like, can you touch on that? Like, how do you guys maybe think about menu engineering? Because you have that, you know, flexibility of it being digital.

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Brandon Barton [00:32:13]:

Well, you nailed it. We think about it a lot. You nailed it because we can move. I can move any kiosks. I can move one kiosks menu to have different, you know, items first and items second versus a different one in the same store.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:27]:

And are you guys measuring this and, like, giving that feedback loop to the restaurants?

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Brandon Barton [00:32:32]:

This is why ordering off of a kiosk is its own discipline. It's its own channel. It's its own. This isn't taking an app and putting it on a bigger screen and saying, great. And this is what everybody gets wrong. This is why I say to your audience, come have a conversation. Because if you just tried to do it the same way you did your app or did your online ordering, you failed before you started. And if you're not thinking about all the things that we know five, six years into it, then you're not giving yourself the best chance to make it work.

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Brandon Barton [00:33:07]:

Yeah, I mean, we think about which kiosk is busiest in the restaurant, and should that, for the example, Angelo, let's just say that there was a promotional pop up that you wanted to make sure everyone understands the McRib is back. Okay. We'll take McDonald's. The kiosk that's closest to the door, that has the biggest amount of parking spots outside of it, should not have that pop up. And you will increase your throughput by, like, three to five guests an hour. Three to five guests an hour is x profitability over X weeks. And it's like X stores. It's a billion dollars.

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Brandon Barton [00:33:44]:

Okay.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:45]:

Right. That's a lot of money.

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Brandon Barton [00:33:46]:

And it's because you had a pop up, and you took the pop up off of one of the three kiosks you have. So it really. It's not just about, I have one website. It's like, you have six entry points. How do you think about this? What menu items should be where, if I can recognize Angelo and even just put the menu items that he's ordered to the top, and I shave time. How does that impact my profitability? Yeah, there's so much into it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:13]:

Yeah. And super interesting. And for people listening, I just want to reiterate that point because I think a lot of people really think of it exactly like that. It's like, I got my phone here, it's a bigger phone and that's it. But I think you're starting to shed some light. And so for people that have that curiosity, I think like, definitely book a time, see if it makes sense. But there's a lot more than just making this a massive phone and then just kind of wrapping things up. I'd love to know what's next for you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:38]:

For Bite, like, you know, what's on the roadmap. Maybe some of the stuff is private.

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Brandon Barton [00:34:44]:

But yeah, you know, our goals in 2024 are to continue to be the best kiosk for guests. And so we'll go along that path. But in the industry in general, I think what's really interesting to look at is just all the automation. So Bite and kiosk lives, if you will, in this kind of space of automating parts of the experience in a restaurant. I got a chance to check out Colonel in New York, which is Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle's new concept, where he has maybe it's like 200 square foot robot that is cooking food, cleaning dishes type of stuff. It's. Well, not cleaning, I guess getting them into the. Getting them into the.

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Brandon Barton [00:35:31]:

To the. To the bus bin. But it's. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. And it's like two people who actually work inside of it. And so they're being assisted by the robot. And then, you know, out in Naperville, in Chicago, been to the sweet green that's there, that's really even more autonomous than that.

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Brandon Barton [00:35:53]:

Like putting your whole salad together. My friend Eric Hanson is doing crazy things with burgers where it's more of the angle of not trying to be totally autonomous, but cook 16 burgers at a time as efficiently as possible where the person doesn't have to pay attention to it, you know, and his company is really innovating. I think they're based in asian and he's running it over here. So pretty cool stuff.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:21]:

That's awesome. And then last but not least, I was like ending off with just advice from, from fellow entrepreneurs or even just restauranteurs. So any, any advice for people looking to maybe, you know, either start their own thing or get involved in the hospitality taxing.

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Brandon Barton [00:36:35]:

It's so much easier to do it when you learn it on somebody else's dime, that's what I would say. So if you want to open a restaurant, we had a ton of people at UshD who did this. You want to open a restaurant? Go work for the best. Go find the best and go work for them for one year. You can delay what you want to open for one year. You're not going to get paid a lot of money. Okay. Working in restaurants does not afford a lavish lifestyle for most.

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Brandon Barton [00:37:01]:

Okay, go do it and get the education on how to do it right. Go learn. It's so easy to do that and learn from the people who know how to do it right. And then go do it and you will increase your likelihood of success so much more. Go be an account manager for a great tech company, maybe on the bigger side that has a little bit more established in a bite, you know, someplace that you they have systems and processes. That's what happened for me. I got to learn technology, you know, as it relates to restaurants at Avero.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:32]:

Right.

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Brandon Barton [00:37:33]:

And I think that those folks who want to do and go one step into the apprenticeship side first are going to be wildly more successful than if you just try to dive in and figure it all out yourself.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:47]:

That's awesome advice. Well, with that said, once again, Brandon Barton, CEO of Bite. You can check them out @ getBite.com. Dot thank you for joining us on the Wisking it all podcast.

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Brandon Barton [00:37:59]:

Thanks so much for having me, man. A lot of fun.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:01]:

Yeah, it was a pleasure. Feel free to check out whisk AI for more resources and schedule a demo with one of our product specialists to see if it's a fit for.

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