Transforming Restaurant Experiences with Personalization: Insights from Every Bite Co-Founders

In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guides podcast, host Jeremy Julian speaks with co-founders Lucy Logan and Sid Conklin from Every Bite. They discuss their innovative solutions for restaurant menus focused on personalization and food safety to better cater to a growing population with dietary restrictions and allergies. The smart menu technology offers a seamless, low-effort integration into existing restaurant systems, improving guest experiences and driving higher conversion rates. This episode dives deep into the impact of personalization in the dining industry, the technology behind Every Bite, and how simple it is for restaurants to implement these changes while enhancing guest satisfaction and loyalty.

00:00 Everybite

01:18 Introduction and Welcome

01:47 Meet the Entrepreneurs: Lucy and Sid

04:03 The Problem with Static Menus

05:06 The Birth of Every Bite

05:58 The Scale of Dietary Restrictions

08:08 Personalization in the Digital Age

09:41 Smart Menus: A Game Changer

14:54 Mobile and In-Store Experience

16:36 The Power of Customization

19:35 Seamless Integration for Restaurants

20:55 Introduction to PDF Import and Smart Menu

21:44 AI and Machine Learning in Menu Personalization

22:14 Simplifying Menu Updates for Restaurants

23:41 Real-Time Menu Sync and Automation

25:46 Enhancing Staff and Guest Experience

27:53 Onboarding and Personalization Process

29:48 Marketing and Customer Engagement

35:39 Voice Search and Future Innovations

38:14 Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

0:02

This is the Restaurant Technology Guides podcast, helping you run your restaurant better. In today's episode, I am joined by co-founders, Lucy and Sid from Every Bite they really put on a masterclass in food safety and really understanding what consumers are looking for when they go out to dine. Things that I never would have ever thought of because I don't have people that have food allergens in my home, but it is such a large population and the ways that restaurants have been doing it for many, many years has not. Been the best guest experience and these guys really are solving some huge problems and driving better guest engagement, more retention, more growth. And so, uh, I implore you to listen to what they're doing. It's a very low lift solution that can help restaurants get to the place that, uh, they become the preferred brand for people with food, allergens and really even diet. Sensitivities that they're looking to do. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julian. I am the Chief Revenue Officer for CCBs North Star. We wrote the North Star point of Sale solution for multi-units. Please check us out@cbsnorthstar.com and now onto the episode.

Jeremy Julian: 1:19

Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us, as I like to say each and every time. I know you guys got lots of choices, so thanks for hanging out. today is a fun episode and one of those, episodes that again, as I sit here, half of the reason I think I do this is to share with the world. All these amazing inventions and things that are coming out. But then there's the, other side of it. Since this, this world of restaurants have given me so much, I love learning new things and new entrepreneurs that are solving problems for people that are out there. And so I'm gonna introduce you to a couple of entrepreneurs. Sid and Lucy, why don't, you guys take it ladies first. Lucy, why don't you introduce yourself and then Sid, pass it over to Sid. You guys can just talk a little bit about who you guys are and then we'll get into. What you guys are building for the world.'cause I'm excited for the world to hear what, what problems you guys are solving. It's.

Lucy Logan: 2:04

Thank you. I'm Lucy Logan, and I've been in the food industry for. Almost 20 years. I started first doing nutrition analysis. So some individuals who will be listening to this probably would've known me from Menu Calc where we were doing and still do nutrition and menu labeling and allergen analysis for restaurant chains. so I've always been very close to the culinary and the sort of consumer side of the food industry. love technology, love our industry. And, a couple of years ago started to play around with some things around personalization on the menu. and that's when I was very fortunate to get introduced to Sid. and, some of the things we'll be talking about with every bite, which we founded together. Two years ago. so yeah, that's kind of me from the food industry side. And then I think the power is really in Sid and I coming together. So I'll let him introduce himself and then I know we'll move into every bite.

Sid Conklin: 3:03

Hi, Sid Conklin. I've been doing startups for way too many years. This is my sixth startup, and I'm blessed to work with Lucy. I love working with other founders who really have a deep understanding of the business. I love to build things, so I build companies in different. Technology sectors from shopping to ads, to sports roll-ups. and what I found when we talked with Lucy is that there's a huge opportunity here where there's a huge market. There's data that can unlock the market for personalization, but it has not been used. And so when Lucy and I started talking together, it became, wow. Let's do this. And that's how we arrived together.

Jeremy Julian: 3:40

love that. and I, and again, I've gotten the privilege to know you guys. shout out to our friend, Tammy Billings for connecting us, a while ago. And Lucy, you alluded to what you guys are building. You guys are two years into this journey, but I. Why don't you talk about it at a high level, what was the problem you guys were trying to solve, and then how is everybody you guys believe the place that, that people are gonna go, whether they know it or not, to, to solve that, that problem.

Lucy Logan: 4:04

I think the weird thing was is restaurants have always had this problem of, guests would come into, either on premise or they would email into the guest relations or they would send a message on social media. I. Hey, I'm someone who, is gluten insensitive or, I'm a vegetarian, or I'm looking for menu items that are a certain dietary preference. And every single restaurant typically has a static menu. So they would then come back to our nutritional team and ask those exact questions, which recipes have soy, which recipes are gluten free? Which recipes are our highest caloric one. We would then answer those, and it was just this forever ending manual static flywheel. And those are the types of questions that. We would hear a lot and think, how can we automate this? And that was around the time that Sid and I got connected and I was telling him this is all these questions and it's all the time across two locations all the way up to a two, 3000 location brand that uses us. And then it was that sort of aha moment of how can we automate and digitize that in effect FAQ from the guest to the restaurant and to the kitchen and the back of house. And thus every bite was created to offer this personal experience, which I'll let Sid speak to on the technical side.

Jeremy Julian: 5:26

Before we jump into that, I'd love to have you explain how big of a challenge it is for people that are not as familiar with this type of thing, because they either don't have. They don't have dietary restrictions. They're not around people that have dietary restrictions. I think it's a much more common experience than one might. one might think, and I'd love to have you define how big of a challenge is it for restaurants to deliver this data, and how often is it really coming in? Before we talk with Sid about how we had to calculate that data and start to present it back to the guests.

Lucy Logan: 5:58

So if you were to just focus on the food allergic dining community. So one in 10 Americans have a food allergy, and that's growing. So we're, little under 34 million people have a food, allergen. And then when you add that into vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, halal, any other, again, personal branding, dietary needs. It's about 85 million, and then you can start to layer in, I don't like garlic, I don't like red onions. And it's 105 million people in the United States that are all navigating that same laminated menu, trying to figure out how can I find me in this menu? and And I think the challenge has always been restaurants have been force fed that nutrition and ingredients and allergens are bad for business. It's just a compliance piece because if you're 20 or more locations, by law, you have to do the calories. What we are seeing in the data, which you know, I know we'll be talking about later. Is nutrition when it comes to the calorie side of things. That is the sixth most interacted with filter on our technology. Consumers are looking for, I. Ingredients, they're looking for personal preferences. you think about Starbucks, I want a double shot of X that's not caloric based. It's personal dietary preference based. So I think changing the game away from this is a compliance to, this is a. And unlock and a marketing opportunity is definitely something that we feel is the biggest opportunity. And it's for 85 million people.

Jeremy Julian: 7:42

yeah. And when you shared with me that the amount of people that it impacts it, I was blown away. I'm not gonna lie. I was just like, what? again, I've not had that experience while I've had the dietary preference thing in my family, but not necessarily, the health related or otherwise. So talk to us a little bit about just I know we, I know most people know the current state as a static menu or it's a plastic laminate that's somewhere in the property where they can go figure these things out. But you've lived in a digital world and you've really taken almost everything that you've done and said, how do I take what we do in the physical world and digitize it? Is that fair from your entrepreneur entrepreneurial journey over the last number of years?

Sid Conklin: 8:21

Yeah.'cause basically, the driving force that all the business I've been in are about personalization and what we see, there's a McKinsey study that's goes around that basically says if you basically do personalizations, you can raise the top line, revenue by 40%. And it makes sense. We see personalization in Spotify. Amazon, all those worlds adapt to me. But when Lucy and I started talking about it, it was really odd that a restaurant doesn't adapt to me at all. That, Lucy and I go in the same restaurant. We have different atory things. You hand out the menu and then the first thing we'd even start asking You imagine doing that in e-commerce site. it'd be like, what? And so what it dawned on me, which we had accepted for. Ever is that. That's just the way it is. But when you stop that and think about it a little differently and see about how you can then allow people to personalize, and there's a lot of different data dimensions. We've talked about allergies, we've talked about nutrition calories, but we've also talked about like people don't like nightshades, people don't like X, Y, and Z, and that's exactly what we found in the e-commerce world that I came from, is you wanna be able to have them turn on these filters really quickly and find out what they get. Really matches them. And the longer that takes, the more breakage there is. And. You lose the chance to really get a transaction. And so this is what we saw when we first started going to the smart menus. We put it on the sites and all of a sudden people would come, and Lucy and I were talking about at the beginning be like, maybe they'll just come in for one or two times and then they'll be gone. Never happened. They kept on coming back and coming back. And then we started saying, what if we have for this feature? We put on these ordering buttons and all of a sudden people started clicking and then we put in personalization with the ordering button. Now the dishes, when you basically surface something, it says, my dishes, that will fit you over the entire menu. And all of a sudden we just saw the numbers take off. And I guess this is the big message we want to get out is what, as Lucy said, everybody thought this was a compliance. No, it's an unlock. And just to give you an idea, the magnitude of unlock classically in the restaurant business, there's two to 6% conversion between QSR and, fast casual where we, what we're seeing is basically a four to five x multiplier in that conversion. So this is dollars and cents for restaurants, which is

Jeremy Julian: 10:36

you talk about conversion, I mean you're an e-commerce guy, so I hear conversion. So tell restaurant operators, tell restaurant marketers, tell restaurant CEOs that are listening. What does that actually mean for them? what is two to, two to 6% conversion look like? Is that they go on the website, they look at product, and then they abandon like. I know what it is, but I'd love for you to tease that out a little bit, Sid, because again, this is the world that you've lived in. So educate our audience as to what does that actually mean, and then you're talking four and five x those numbers, which clearly are astronomical when you can get a five x return on anything. so what is conversion? I guess either one of you guys can take that.

Sid Conklin: 11:14

So it's just a simple thing. If you basically have 10,000 people come to your site, and I'll just use 6% as a great target, that means 600 people will turn into an order. So if you're a business, it's pretty simple. If you have 10,000 people walk through the door and only 600 people buying, that's the conversion. Doesn't matter which cost to get'em there. Doesn't matter anything around cost. It's just 10,000 people came in, 600 people ordered. What we see when we do that. Is we can basically multiply that and get it up to 18.5%. So now, 10,000 come in 600. Now basically you're getting 18, at one,

Jeremy Julian: 11:52

Yeah. 18.

Sid Conklin: 11:53

1800 orders, and it's just that simple. So why wouldn't you do this? And the, the we're so firmly believed, and we've been running this across, a bunch of our sites. We've seen it every case, every time. It does it, no matter if it's fast casual, it's QSR, casual dining. It's always the same curve. We turn it on and it goes right up.

Jeremy Julian: 12:12

and I know I just, I was just at, at Restaurant Leadership Conference and the Technomic presentation talked about the fact that we live in a hyper personalized world. You talked about Spotify. I tell all of our listeners that have listened for any number of, months. I was traveling with one of my kids. They needed to submit a homework assignment. and so they logged out of my Google account and into their Google account and then handed me my laptop back. And I was like, what? What did you do to my computer? Because you screwed everything up.'cause the whole browser, everything was different. And our listeners will pick on me about it, but it's true. Our Facebook feed looks different. Our, Twitter feed looks different, whatever you want to call it, everywhere in the world. It is that way. Everybody's looking for that norm effect, the cheers effect when I walk in that they know who I am and they're willing to do that. It sounds like you guys are at a place where you guys are trying to create that digitally. we were talking pre-recording my sister lives up in the Bay Area. She happens to be a pescatarian. She likes to find places that she can eat and at one point she was a vegetarian. She wanted to go eat places, that only had that kind of cuisine. And so back to what happens is she would go to the same two or three restaurants that she knew she could get something rather than exploring. Is that kind of what you guys are seeing in the data? Lucy?

Lucy Logan: 13:23

Yes, and I think to go back on the, this numbers that Sid was talking about, the biggest difference in the unlock is our smart menus. Sit on a restaurant's website under their button or their link that says, click here for nutrition information, click here for our allergen guide. So if you are one of the 85 million people, you are going to the restaurant's website in advance of maybe doing an order pickup or actually making a reservation. So you are a. Pre-qualified lead already by being one of those 85 million people. You're then going to the restaurant's website. You are clicking on that page, which is now our smart menu. And then that's where we have our order button that takes out all the way through to the conversion. We definitely see on average on our smart menus, about a 25 to 30% repeat visit rate, which is just off the charts. You wouldn't get that on a PDF of a P of an allergen or a nutrition. I. We know that the food allergic diner about 46%, average will sign up to a loyalty program over a traditional diner, which can be 12 to 17%. So these huge numbers when it comes to brand loyalty is literally sitting right there on their website, but they haven't unlocked it in a smarter way, which is what we are doing with the Smart Menu technology.

Jeremy Julian: 14:54

No. and so Sid, pivoting back to the smart menu technology, we've talked a lot about kind of the e-commerce site, but we all live in a mobile world. We all carry around a computer in our pocket. Whether I'm dining in, I had lunch with a, a client today and had I had a dietary restriction, I know what the experience would've looked like'cause they're not a client of yours. But had I. Needed to get to that. What does it look like when I'm in venue? What does it look like when I'm traveling on the train or in an Uber on my way across town? What does that mobile experience look like or the in-store experience look like? Different than when I'm on a full-size browser sitting at my desk at home on my MacBook or my Windows machine.

Sid Conklin: 15:31

Yeah, so our, all our technology is responsive, so it adjusts to basically the size of your screen. And so basically once you basically start walking the world, it adjusts to the right size. So it works for your mobile device. It's also smart, it detects where you are. It can show you locations of restaurants that are nearby. So if you basically say, I'm at. Jimmy John's and I wanna know, I want to order location. I'll say, oh, based on this, you're this location. It also basically is integrated when you get to the restaurant. We've now integrated QR codes directly into the restaurant. So they can be in a menu, they can be on the table, they can be everywhere the store wants to put it. And what we're seeing at, cracker barrels, people are just putting that on the waiters are saying just look at the QR code. And they basically go on that. And we see over a thousand searches a day where people getting on that QR code get into our smart menu, and then do searching for what items that we're looking at Starbucks. excuse me, at.

Jeremy Julian: 16:21

and I think, you guys alluded to it, but I think it's also an interesting paradigm'cause it, there was a lot of friction before and so I'm certain that reducing that friction is ultimately getting back to that personalization, reducing that friction allows. and again, I think I'll tell you guys, tell our listeners have heard this story, but we had a client years ago, this is 10 plus years ago, that put kiosk technology at the table and they were in a place. They came from a previous brand where less than 15% of the orders that went into the kitchen got modified. As soon as they gave the guests the ability to take ketchup off of it or take tomatoes off of it, they would instantly do it.'cause now they were in control of their own experience. It created an operational challenge'cause now they didn't know which burger had no tomatoes and which one did, and now they had to figure out a whole labeling thing. But it was amazing. Once you put the power in the hands of the consumer and allow them to do that, the friction goes down and they jump on it. To your point s is that kind of, again, back to what you guys are seeing in the data is that once I make it easy, I'm not having to ask somebody and has, lemme go find it in the office, lemme go figure out where the laminate is. I don't go to our website. I think it's down on this page.'cause that's what happens today versus being able to put it in front, front and center with the guests. is that again what you guys are seeing, Syd?

Sid Conklin: 17:36

It's amazing how much too, once we basically turn it on and it's one of those things you say, They can basically go and filter and search and basically perros and resolve the menus. And what we saw is that they weren't just doing it like 1, 2, 3, 4, or five interactions on average, we're seeing 10 interactions. So that means that people are going in and selecting maybe multiple allergies, maybe they're looking for different things that they want, Facebook, cucumbers or anything like that. And what we see is we, as we, the longer they used it, the more they used it. And then we also allow people to save dishes. And so we started to see people saving more and more dishes. And so what we're seeing is exactly what we see in Starbucks. And anyone else, once you do that power, as you alluded to, to basically customize, I customize the heck out of it and then I save'em so I can basically repeat them when I want to use it so I don't have to do that work And so we're seeing that again happen in food. And you think about this market's been around, everybody understands how to order, but nobody has ever been given the ability to really customize it. And this gets back to what Lucy's talked about when we first got going is, the big driver is repeat visitors. Everybody wants to be the norm. And it, if I just, if you don't gimme the ability to tell you what I want or who I am, then who am I? I'm just another head that comes in. But as soon as I start talking to you about who I am, I get the norm effect. That's, that is the key that we're trying to do in a market where there are so much competition and I can go right down the street for another type of brand or another type of experience. How do you stand out? It's all about personalization.

Jeremy Julian: 19:09

and back to Lucy's comment about the fact that there's a hundred million people in the US alone that are looking for this. Lucy, for those naysayers that are out there that are, like, I am an, I'm a director of marketing, I'm a CEO, I'm a, I. I don't have enough time. I don't have time to be dealing with this crap. help them understand how easy you guys make it.'cause I think it's incredible how you guys are able to make this so seamless for the restaurant operators to deliver this to their guests. we've already talked about how much better it is for the guests, but a lot of times these projects get stuck because. They've got 400 other projects on their plate and they don't have capacity to do it. They might want to, they love the idea, but they're struggling'cause they don't have enough time, they don't have enough budget, they don't whatever. It always is that constraint. And I know you guys have worked really hard to make this so much simpler for the end user that is managing the menu, that is updating these things on a weekly basis or whatever.

Lucy Logan: 20:02

And I think one of the things that has enabled us to scale as quickly as we had, going back to what we were talking about when we first got started, are people going to be going to our smart menus? And Sid and I would sit at the end of the day and we'd hit refresh on our dashboard and be like, okay, 500 people. We are now at a quarter of a million people every month coming to our smart menu. So we still do the evening refresh, but we've definitely proven that product market fit for the guest. zero churn, zero drop off. So it's really great to see that we've built something that the guest loves. But absolutely the question, the restaurants will always say to us like a, A CMO or a marketing team will go, love it. Didn't know this was even possible, but. HA integration has to be involved. We gotta pull in the tech team. You don't, if you are 20 or more locations, you're 90% there because you've probably already done the nutrition information. It's sitting on a PDF that you've put in the far right corner of your footer. We've built a proprietary, PDF import, so we can take it in. We run some various sort of AI and some machine learning behind the scenes to add in some of our smart menu. Filters, if it's, allergens or diets or other preferences. So we can pretty much take a PDF and some of your other data sets in Excel or A CSV, personalize that into your smart menu within a day or two if you want photos, maybe another day or two. So the restaurant is already 90% there. We can take them that final 10%, which is the most valuable 10% of the personalization journey.

Jeremy Julian: 21:43

yeah, and create those filters. Sid, should we ask her how the ML and the, and the AI is working? since you're the tech guy? we'll ask the sales person and marketing person how all of that stuff works.

Sid Conklin: 21:51

But actually it's really cool. if you think about it, a lot of the dishes out there, they don't tell you it's vegan or veggie, vegetarian or pescatarian. We have algorithms good for that. We also have algorithms that basically go through pitchers. And just be surprised how the pictures offset so that what you thought was the main course of the dish is not right. And there are different dimensions and different clarity and doing quality. We use all that, AI algorithms and and ML to basically clean all that up. yeah, so it's the key with all this we talked to on, and Lucy expressed to me is it has to be simple. It has to be one instruction. hey, we basically built all our technology is if they have a, a current PDF on their site, it's typically on a URL. We give them our URL, they drop it in for their existing and it's

Lucy Logan: 22:36

Yep.

Sid Conklin: 22:37

That's.

Jeremy Julian: 22:37

it scrapes, it pulls it up. And that, that to me was really powerful.'cause I, again, I see way too many people that will listen to the show. They'll find me at a trade show and go, I love that. But it's project number 42 on my list. I can't figure out how to do it. So oftentimes when I talk to founders, it's like, how do you guys make it simple for the CMO, the CIO, the, the CEO that's trying to get there. How do you guys deal with the pivots within brands? Most re Breck restaurant brands? I, again, you brought up Cracker Barrels, Sid. I know they just released their summer menu. They've got these new campfire feast things that are out there. And so there's things that are changing on a consistent basis. So I'd love to understand what is the, what does the upkeep look like? Not just the, how early in the process do you guys typically stay involved? those kind of things.'cause I think even some of the laws, and I'm not as familiar, Lucy, you'd probably be able to speak to it. I don't know how specials work. when you've got a place that's doing. Daily specials or monthly specials, do they need to put those all into the calorie counts and all of those allergens or not? And what does that normal upkeep look like when people are doing quarterly menu reviews and changes and LTOs and things like that?

Lucy Logan: 23:41

One of the things that I think we do really is we come from a place of history with restaurants. So we know LTOs, we know seasonal favorites, we know chef specials. We know they want to use their menu as their sandbox to play around with different culinary trends and changes. And because of that and our history of coming from the nutritional side. The recipes have a live sink through to their smart menu. So if we take Cracker Barrel as an example, let's say they're going to be changing out their prep recipe of their biscuits. They go into the recipe side of the backend of the technology, they swap out an ingredient. Smart menu knows that because there's a live sync, and then it updates within a matter of minutes. So there's a. Autonomous kind of always automated update that it knows that if it's a nutrition, an allergen, an ingredient, and a name, and then there is the ability for the restaurant to turn it on and off. So literally like in a POS, we're gonna 86. This menu item, same functionality, you just click a button that says Remove from smart menu. And it's completely automated and updated. Where again, if you think around front of house staff. Again, cracker Barrel changing a menu item that the team member and the, table site, they may not know if this new biscuit has soy in it. So they're gonna go, actually, I don't know, let me pause, go and ask somebody in the back of house that's gonna slow down the table. Turn. So this complete 360 data view is really important to us, and we cut our teeth on that from a regulatory side. Now we know to bring that experience to guest experience, increasing table turns, efficiency of the back of house efficiency of operations. Very much of, very much how a restaurant would probably use the POS style functionality is how that would work from the back of house recipes to the front of house menu.

Jeremy Julian: 25:44

To the, yeah, to the smart menu. Yeah. And I'd love to know, I guess just an opinion. Have you guys seen it helping staff even, is there a time that you guys are seeing staff members using smart menus to help educate guests or educate themselves? I know one of the big things is they're supposed to know the menu. They're supposed to know all of these things before they go out on the floor, but it's hard to hire people. Oftentimes they have very little experience by the time they get out into serving the staff. So even in our world, we've helped with, things like that on the point of sale side for what I do for a J job. But I'm wondering, even in the smart menu world, are you guys at a place where the staff is using the tool to help make things better for them? Have you guys seen any of that yet?

Lucy Logan: 26:21

I, I had two calls last week where, they said that they're actually going to put the URL on their handhold. Device. So that was while they were transitioning to put the QR code on the table or maybe a tabletop or a menu insert. Again, it gives that ability of. I know who you are. I'm trying to create that personal experience. We ran a report or a survey, I should say. and it took on average, 11 minutes for a guest who has a dietary preference to find a menu item versus on smart menu. I think we're a minute and five seconds, and so our customers will say to us, it's awesome. We'll tell our guests, Hey, any allergens at the table? Any preferences? Scan our QR code. It gives them those additional 10 minutes to upsell menu items to push for cocktails, drinks. And it enables the front of house staff to get back to what they do best, which is building experiences for the table.

Jeremy Julian: 27:20

And not having to memorize what items are vegan versus what items are vegetarian versus what I, they're now guiding them through the guest experience rather than having to memorize all of this stuff. And again, I think it's amazing that you guys are allowing that and creating that experience both for the staff member and the guests. Again, I. Early, early days. many moons ago I was waiting tables. And you'd have to memorize all of these things and you'd have to figure out what, what was in there. Because to your point, guests are gonna come in and ask and it's really embarrassing when you gotta go. Ah, I don't know if it has, if it's fried and peanut oil or whatever else. and, it could be a challenge. What is your guys' go-to-market Activi activity? Sidd, you talked about some pretty serious numbers. and I know that you guys have been putting this, these things out there. I should probably ask the salesperson and Lucy just what is it that, that people need to get started and what is the, what does it look like to get onboarded? Kind of what does the process feel like? What does it sound like? And where does it go from, from now if they're excited about this. and here at, I think you guys have been playing around a little bit with how, what makes the most sense for restaurants. So can you guys share a little bit of that?

Lucy Logan: 28:23

There's a hybrid model, so if again, you've got those nutritional allergen PDFs. even if it's just your webpage, we will take that and then turn that into a smart menu. We like to say, imagine personalizing your menu within 24 hours. That's what we can do. and we've done that for 70 plus brands. We're, I think 6,000 locations, maybe a wee bit less. so we know how to get that. Kind of personalization offer up within a day or two. So right away we can give that smart menu to the brand, they can put it online. We can start to track and see what the guest is doing, which is some of our insights, dashboard that we have. And then you have a secondary option where if you want to go really deep, a true build your own concept, and then you just send us the recipe specs or an Excel file, we will have all your modifiers. So as you're building your menu item like a Chipotle, we know that the cilantro rice has soy, or we know that this particular, chicken marinade has wheat in it. So we immediately get you in that personalized layer within 24 hours, and then we can work on deepening that over time. But you don't have to wait weeks to do any implementation because you've already done the hard work by doing the nutrition allergen analysis on your PDF.

Jeremy Julian: 29:47

I love that. one last set of questions. Have you guys found that brands are using this as an advantage to market to their consumers at all

Lucy Logan: 29:55

Yes, we,

Jeremy Julian: 29:56

and talk, let's talk a little bit about that, because I think it's, Sid, you mentioned, I can go anywhere there's. Within, a nine iron of me. I've got three Thai places that I can go to. So the Thai place that's gonna serve my needs the way I want them is gonna end up getting my business more than the other two that are not there. So talk me through what does that look like from a go to market to trying to track new customers?'cause a lot of people are trying to keep people coming back, which I think you guys have already talked about, that the consumer experience is great, but how do we get more customers in the door to make this an advantage to them to publicize it from the rooftops?

Sid Conklin: 30:30

Also what we found early on, which was really surprising, is that. Chefs do incredible jobs to make incredible food, but we all see it as just one thing, a hamburger. We don't see all the different things they're putting on there. We don't see that it's, grass fed beef. We don't see any of that. we turn around and say, wait a minute. If you're doing all this work, let's make, let's promote it. So in our smart menus, all that data is there. So if you're, if you do something amazing, you can, the DERs can actually find it. And that's the big difference in a world. If everything is vanilla, you don't stand out. You have to fight to get everyone but you. You're, but you're not vanilla. You've done these incredible things. for example, customers, these. build your own and they wanna put like 10,000 different things on that. We carry all of that and we support all that. And so what we're seeing is really from Gen Zs and millennials is pushing, which represents 44% of the buying population. We're seeing them push the industry now to everything around customization, personalization, where they want to control what it, what gets added and puts all on for those types of restaurants. we're awesome for them'cause we basically externalize all that so they can go find it. If you don't know, you don't look. So what we try to do is solve that problem right out the gate by having the smart menus put all that information out so they can start

Jeremy Julian: 31:47

Yeah, and I think like you guys have said all, all along. The more the consumers see it, the better off the journey gets. And again, almost every person that comes on the show, we talk about how do we create the best guest journey possible? And this is one of those ways. And Lucy, how would people get in touch? they want, they need this. They realize that they've already got all of the, but it's what they're doing is a disservice to their end users. how do they get in touch with you guys? How do they learn more? How do they sign up?

Lucy Logan: 32:12

Two very simple ways. Just go to every bite.com and then actually, brands can click on the Explore menus, which is the top right corner, and they can see all of the other brands as smart menus and actually experience and consume it as a real world guest. And then we're putting out, white papers and facts and stats and reports all the time on LinkedIn. So definitely, find us on LinkedIn and follow us there. and just one thing I just wanna kind of mention when you were talking around the sort of attracting new business and helping unlock other diners. The other thing that Smart menu does really smartly is, again, if you're a guest and you've filled out your dietary preference, I love the example on weight back burgers. They've got a garden burger, and within that garden burger it contains, I. I think it's either dairy or egg. It's one of the two. Is it dairy? You would not know that if you read the menu and the front of house staff probably doesn't know that. So now when you go and have the experience with way back smart menu and say, I'm looking for items that are free from dairy, it's going to tell you that garden burger Patty actually contains it. What we're now working on is actually then doing predictive menu, display other dairy free dishes that would suit your preference. Other dairy free menu I or other menu items that people who are looking for dairy free also like these. So not only are we enabling that guest experience, we're actually encouraging them to go all the way through to the shop at, the shopping cart and the, checkout experience. it's marrying both that sort of menu and culinary and data together and doing it in a automated, predictive manner, which starts to be a little bit like a server in your pocket.

Jeremy Julian: 34:04

and I think there's one other thing, there's two other things that I'm, that I want to ask before we do sign off. The first of which I'm sure from a menu engineering perspective, giving that data back to the culinary team that says, there are so many people looking for this, and you don't have an offering or you have one offering. Help create a secondary or tertiary offering for that is that, both of you guys, for those that aren't watching on video, both shook your heads violently that says yes. So that sounds like it's something that, that offers that capability. Is that correct?

Sid Conklin: 34:32

We, we've seen one of our customers, they took off, a tuna fish sandwich, which is the only pescatarian dish they had on their menu. So immediately basically stopped it, and then we looked at the data, and that's 14% of their user coming were marked as pescatarian. So you just created a hole for yourself. The other thing we saw is we track all search terms and search terms are very high value. So if they're looking for, tomato salad or anything like that, we can tell you which, which match your menu and which don't. And so anything that doesn't match, we can tell you that, hey, that's another hole that you're basically not filling. And remember, you go to a menu, you don't see what you're looking for. Hey, I'm out.

Jeremy Julian: 35:07

I'm out. I'm abandoning the cart and I'm moving somewhere else.

Sid Conklin: 35:10

And I just wanna think to, we wanted to get back to like, how do you engage with it? Super simple. sales@everybody.com. Send an email. We'll get right on it. And remember, it's your marketing budget. We're gonna make more powerful. So you're either gonna get back more conversions or you can make that marketing budget due, longer, last longer. And basically we're doing this on a paid performance basis. So there shouldn't be any reason why you're not connecting with us to really help them move this on.

Jeremy Julian: 35:35

Yeah, no, I think the lack of risk and really just the added benefits are amazing. so just, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask a simple question that just came to mind that I think people are gonna continue to modify towards is the whole idea of voice search. Have you guys started to consider voice search that, you know, using a large language model that says, Hey, I'm a. Rather than typing in and clicking boxes, going to the model and saying, Hey, I'm a pescatarian. I'm dining out with a vegan. And, it's the start of a bad joke, I'm sure. But, I'm dining out with a vegan and a halal eating person and I'm a pescatarian. Can you find a restaurant in the neighborhood? But, teasing. But is voice search coming? Is that kind of on the path?

Sid Conklin: 36:12

it's a little scary sometimes. I feel you're looking over my shoulder as I work at night. Yes.

Jeremy Julian: 36:16

I just, this is what I think about It's part, I said it at the onset like it's like these things get me so excited to see where the industry is going and I just see it. I use voice so much more than I did two years ago, even to correspond with people, whether it's a voice memo or voice to text. And I just see it as something where I'm driving. Taking the kids back from ball practice and saying, Hey, I'm looking for, I'm looking for something that's gonna fit these dietary needs. You know what? It's huge.

Sid Conklin: 36:42

yeah. So and this is the perfect medium too, because we're working with data that's very deep. Very clean because basically the restaurants keep it up to date. It has to be, a, according to the FDA standards. So we have great data. So we've taken that and we're making what we call a domain all, so it's not, we're not trying to create a large language model or frontier model. We're trying to take of one that's focused around food, as we call it foodie. And we basically put all that information in so that you can text it. This is still in the lab. It's not out there I think. But it's pretty amazing what you can ask it and what it can find for you and how you can be specific. And what we've found for from some of our early users using it, it allows'em to have a richer conversation.'cause you don't need to know how to do a ui. You just say, and they can go super detail. We can go all the way down, and because we have all that data, we can give them that insights. And now it's basically a proprietary one where they can basically find out what we want. And so we're talking with some of our restaurant, partners to basically start figuring out how to deploy that on their site. So you can imagine that it's everywhere. It can do it through text, you could do it through WhatsApp, you could do it through a phone call, however you

Jeremy Julian: 37:48

Yeah, your personal assistant, your Alexa, your, your Google assistant, whatever in your house. no, I love that. And again, I see it as this evolution. as you guys said, when you guys started this journey, everybody's why have we been doing it this way for so long? And it seems so simple. once you get to the other side of it, but all along it's like we've just been doing it this way forever. And once you really define the problem, which is why I love having entrepreneurs on that are really scratching a niche that's been out there for some time and solving real world problems. Lucy and Sid, thank you guys so much for not only coming on the show to share what you guys are doing, but really going out and doing your best to go change the world for consumers and for restaurants alike to make it a better place. to our listeners guys, go check out every bite.com. connect with their sales team. very low risk. If any risk at all. It's a couple of phone calls, get everything up and going. I really would encourage you guys,'cause it's a very large consumer base, that you guys are underserving now without a tool like this. And, to our listeners, make it a great day.

38:42

Thanks for listening to The Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Visit restaurant technology guys.com for tips, industry insights, and more to help you run your restaurant better.