What’s a free glass of wine at a restaurant really worth? The answer depends on how good the wine is. But it also depends on whom you ask. To the diner, it might be worth $15. To the restaurant, it could be a $4 expense. And to inKind, a company rethinking restaurant finance, the value is the connection diners and restaurants make over more than just wine.
Restaurants are more valuable than the food they serve. It’s the experience that matters. But hospitality—that ability to make diners feel welcomed and appreciated—is harder to quantify on a balance sheet. It’s more of a know-it-when-you-feel-it thing. inKind makes that connection tangible. It buys food and beverage credits from restaurants at wholesale cost, spending between $50,000 and $10 million per business. Then it sells this credit to diners, at retail cost, inside the inKind mobile app. Restaurants get a cash infusion. Guests, when they redeem their credit, get additional perks, like access to a concierge to help with booking, 20% off their tab, or that free glass of wine. In other words, no matter which side of the bar you’re sitting on, you win.
Ideas like this are a boon for restaurants trying to balance the desire to create memorable, even magical experiences for guests with the need to run a viable business. Events of the past four years—a pandemic, supply chain breakdowns, staffing challenges, inflation—have left restaurateurs little room to do what they encourage their guests to do every day: sit down, relax, and enjoy. But new hospitality technology, the type that helps restaurants and their guests, is promising to ease some of that strain.
The best tech tools help staff focus on the guest experience, says Mark Maynard, a restaurant consultant and former managing partner at New York’s Union Square Hospitality Group. “While traditional restaurateurs used to see technology as a barrier to a great customer experience,” he says, “now they see it as a necessary tool to improve the guest experience.” And several of the most interesting of these tools appear on Fast Company’s list of the Most Innovative Companies in dining for 2024.
One key area where tech can help is staffing. According to data from the National Restaurant Association, 70% of restaurant operators say they have job openings that are hard to fill. One solution: offload repetitive, time-sucking tasks to a robot. Slang.ai builds shockingly human-sounding voice bots that answer a restaurant’s phone and help diners with frequently asked questions, such as location and business hours, and can also help book a reservation. The company says that by 2030, it’ll save restaurants and diners a combined 1 billion minutes, not to mention the frustration it spares a single harried host inside a loud restaurant.
Hospitality tech gives staff tools to manage in-person interactions, too, especially during busy times. Last year, restaurant point-of-sale and payments provider SpotOn introduced “Seat & Send,” a feature that texts diners a link to preorder food and drinks while they wait for a table. Orders are sent to the kitchen just before guests are shown to their seats and arrive as they sit down. Diners are happy—who doesn’t want an appetizer to meet them at the table?—and restaurants can turn tables faster, seating more guests and selling more food.
These ideas work because they recognize what’s special about a restaurant: its humanity. Maynard says that’s especially important now. “Old-fashioned taking care of people is more needed and more relevant,” he says. “I know a restaurant group that uses the word store instead of the word restaurant. That breaks my heart, because what that means is they don’t remember that they are there to restore people.”
Explore the full 2024 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 606 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, artificial intelligence, design, sustainability, and more.