2022

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How Restaurant Operators Can Defend Against Ransomware

Modern Restaurant Management

It’s a restaurant operator’s worst nightmare. You have stores full of patrons, and no way to collect their money because the POS system has been hijacked by ransomware. That’s how the McMenamins restaurant and hospitality chain closed out 2021, a banner year for ransomware attacks. The bad news is that according to most predictions , 2022 will be worse as gangs organize and focus on SMBs.

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Restaurant Payments Go from Cash to Credit to Contactless – to Cryptocurrency 

Modern Restaurant Management

The value of the cryptocurrency market almost tripled in 2021 , with digital currencies having the potential to achieve returns higher than the stock market. People use cryptocurrency for quick payments, anonymity, investments or to sidestep transaction fees charged by banks. As payments evolve, consumers adapt and restaurants must meet them there. Why the Crypto Craze?

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Fraud and Cybersecurity Trends: What the Restaurant Industry Needs to Know

Modern Restaurant Management

A lot of people would assume that fraud in the restaurant industry doesn’t extend beyond dine-and-dashers and bad cheques, but those with experience in the industry, especially at the level of popular franchises and chains, will tell you that fraud is more common than most people recognize. The food service industry has had a tough couple of years, and a large part of what has kept restaurants afloat has been a move to digitalization.

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Food Delivery and Service Robots: Changing Face of Restaurants Industry

Modern Restaurant Management

The development of robotics in the post pandemic scenario has changed the overall scenario for the industries, especially the restaurants industry. The prominence of food delivery and service robots has increased in the overall restaurant industry. This is owed to the uncertainties faced by the restaurants at the global level. In order to deal with these uncertainties, the top players had to work on bringing in technological advancements to survive and recover from the losses caused by the pande

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Food & Beverage Industry Report 2024

Driven by a diverse and exciting ecosystem of passionate, ambitious, and often young entrepreneurs, the Food & Beverage (F&B) sector is a highly competitive environment full of immense challenges and exciting opportunities. Expert Market’s 2024 industry report, sponsored by Toast, is informed by a survey of 522 U.S. food and beverage professionals, from restaurant owners to food service managers, providing insights into the real-time challenges and opportunities within the industry.

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To Mitigate ‘The Great Resignation’ Refocus on the Employee Experience

Modern Restaurant Management

The landscape of the restaurant industry has changed forever due to Covid and the operational complexities that the pandemic introduced. As brands scrambled to change their business models – whether through the adoption of touchless payments, delivery and curbside pickup, or the use of QR codes to access online menus – consumers were also forced to adapt their dining behaviors.

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How Sizing Up The Competition Improves Your Business Plan

Modern Restaurant Management

It may sound like just an excuse to eat out, but experiencing the food and ambience of your competitors is essential to writing a persuasive restaurant business plan. Think about it: you can’t possibly know what your restaurant is up against unless you do your research. Research, in this case, involves visiting, eating at, and making copious notes about the other restaurants in your area.

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Another Employee Tool in the HR Shed

Modern Restaurant Management

In all my years in the restaurant/bar/hospitality industry, I have never run into the hiring situation that we are in today. I don’t have one customer in any state who has all the employees that they need. Some clients have 90 percent of the staff they need, but most are closer to 50 or 60 percent. As I have written in the past, the most important thing you can do is to hold on to the staff you have.

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Improving Your Curb Appeal by Maximizing Your Curbside Pickup Offering

Modern Restaurant Management

During the pandemic, quick-service restaurants (QSRs) were forced to innovate if they wanted to succeed. That meant streamlining their operations – and consumers quickly got on board. Contactless payments started as a safety precaution for many quick-service restaurants (QSRs) – allowing them to offer a curbside service that kept patrons out of the dining room.

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Growth of Modern Contactless Payments: Increasing Restaurant Profitability and Efficiency

Modern Restaurant Management

Contactless payment solutions drive operators’ revenue and elevate customer experiences, but how can the technology set restaurants up for long-term success? Contactless solutions have become a tool to ensure the survival of many businesses over the past three years. The restaurant industry has perhaps seen higher adoption rates of this technology than any other industry.

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Why Your Restaurant Should Prioritize Order Accuracy

Modern Restaurant Management

Here’s an important – but often overlooked – truth for the restaurant industry: To make your customers to feel valued and appreciated, you must get their orders right! All too often, restaurants are fumbling on that basic principle. Perhaps they’re understaffed and struggling to keep up with incoming orders. Or employees haven’t been properly (and regularly) trained.

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How Restaurants Can Attract and Retain Workers Tempted by Retail Holiday Job Offers

Modern Restaurant Management

Restaurants are still suffering from a labor shortage – according to the National Restaurant Association , as of September 2022 “eating and drinking places [were] still 560,000 jobs (or 4.5%) below their pre-pandemic staffing levels – tops among all U.S. industries.” As a result, we’re seeing restaurants closing early or not able to open at all because they don’t have enough staff.

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Three Types of Bad Reviews and How to Respond to Them

Modern Restaurant Management

Bad reviews can come from anywhere and stay on the internet for thousands of potential customers to see. Some reviews point out small, one-off incidents and others touch on systematic problems. To help ease some of the frustration that follows receiving a negative review, look at it this way. All negative reviews hold valuable information about how your restaurant can improve.

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Technology Can Help Restaurants During ‘The Great Resignation’

Modern Restaurant Management

Across the United States, businesses are suffering from unprecedented staffing shortages in the aftermath of COVID. Nowhere is this more clear than in restaurants; many wonder if parts of the workforce left the industry for good and how they will fill that gap. With a critically shrunken talent pool, restaurants are racing to fill positions in every part of the business — front of house, back of house, and corporate teams.

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Five Ways to Increase Sales at Your Restaurant this Valentine’s Day

Modern Restaurant Management

On Valentine’s Day, restaurants fill up quickly with reservations from couples eager to spend a romantic night together. In fact, before COVID in 2016, both single people and couples spent a total of 35 million dollars on Valentine’s day experiences. While gifts are great, dates night at a sit-down restaurant remain probably the most common and traditional V-Day activity.

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How To Do Restaurant Week the Right Way

Modern Restaurant Management

As Restaurant Week is returning across the country, and with that also comes fresh opportunity as diners are returning to restaurants with excitement and new expectations. The event celebrates another year of connecting hungry guests with discounted meals at restaurants all over the country, and 2022 is shaping up to be a different experience than in years past.

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How Technology Tools Help Restaurateurs Do More With Less

Modern Restaurant Management

Ensuring guests experience true hospitality is tantamount to running a successful restaurant. Thanks to restaurant technologies, it’s possible to not only deliver a superior customer experience — the crux of hospitality — but also take things to the next level. Yes, the importance of a good customer experience has always been key. However, between staffing shortages, high customer expectations, and pent-up demand due to the ever-in-flux restaurant landscape, it’s more int

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Restaurateurs Foresee Bright Future as Fine Dining Turns Vegan

Modern Restaurant Management

We are witnessing the evolution of fine dining. Astonishingly veganism is a chief enabler of this culinary transformation. Starting out as a whole grain diet for radicals, vegan food culture has evolved into Michelin star worthy mega trend for future chefs and culinary experts. Nowadays, vegan food is becoming normal in restaurants and fast food joints.

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Using Live Video to Showcase Your Restaurant (Infographic)

Modern Restaurant Management

In today’s world of continuous distraction, it’s important to be able to find strategies for your restaurant that stand out from the noise. Many restaurants have spent a great deal of thoughtfulness and money on carefully preparing their aesthetic both on location and online, but what is the next frontier? Given that we are in a picture perfect Instagram age, many restaurant connoisseurs and foodies crave a deeper experience – enter the world of live video.

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How Email Marketing Can Boost Your Restaurant Brand

Modern Restaurant Management

Many business owners believe that emailing is an obsolete form of marketing. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even for a unique niche like restaurants, the power of email marketing can boost brand awareness and ROI. Paired with features like a striking restaurant logo and using a color palette so your brand is easily recognized, emails can help you get the customers you’re after.

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How to Build Customer Trust with QR Codes

Modern Restaurant Management

QR code usage has surged throughout the pandemic. According to a 2021 Ivanti Research Study, 83 percent of respondents stated that they used a QR code to make a payment or complete a financial transaction for the first time ever. However, there are security concerns with this growing technology, which largely stem from customers sharing data that restaurants could then sell.

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Private Equity in 2022

Modern Restaurant Management

For much of last year, private-equity groups didn’t participate in too many deals. They were still building an understanding of the post-pandemic economy and valuations, making it difficult to evaluate investment opportunities. Adding to direct pandemic-related concerns were the inflation of two of the industry’s largest costs: labor — up 13 percent over the past year — and supply chain costs, up more than 11 percent.

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Restaurant Retention: How to Keep Employees Happy

Modern Restaurant Management

During the Great Resignation of late 2021, staggering numbers of employees left their jobs in search of new opportunities. Lack of opportunity, low pay, difficulty with childcare, and feeling disrespected at work were amongst a wide variety of factors listed as motivators. Amongst those who left their workplace, one-fourth of those were in the hospitality industry.

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Why the Shift Experience Is 2022’s Answer to Staff Retention

Modern Restaurant Management

After a tumultuous few years, hourly workers across industries, including hospitality, continue to feel the strain of the pandemic. From unpredictable schedules to being denied time off, shift workers are frustrated and exhausted. Worldwide, 40 percent of job candidates rank schedule flexibility as one of their top factors in career decisions. Now more than ever, business owners must actively support their employees to increase morale, job satisfaction, and staff retention.

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Managing Inventory with Quality Data and Automation

Modern Restaurant Management

Accurate inventory management is crucial to running a successful business because it directly impacts a company’s bottom line and is key to maximizing profits. Having an accurate handle on inventory enables a business to become more resilient and know what they can sell and when they can sell it, helping mitigate out-of-stock scenarios. At one point, inventory management was a meticulous, lengthy and manual process for the Independent Purchasing Cooperative (IPC), an independent member-own

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How Restaurants Can Drive Profits and Growth During a Perfect Storm

Modern Restaurant Management

Soaring prices, continued supply chain disruptions, and ongoing staffing shortages are creating a perfect storm for restaurants. Food and labor costs are elevated and expected to remain high in 2022 , negatively impacting restaurants’ profit margins. Additionally, supply chain disruptions remain a huge problem, with 96 percent of restaurant operators saying they experienced supply delays or shortages last year.

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How Digital Can Help Brands Create Personalized Experiences for Guests

Modern Restaurant Management

For the past several years—and especially since the pandemic—restaurant brands have focused on enhancing digital experiences that allow them to offer more off-premise options and streamline operations to address staff shortages. While digital tools help solve these problems and open up a new world of marketing possibilities, they can also help brands create more personalized experiences, and therefore, a more meaningful relationship with their guests.

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Key Benefits of Restaurant Loyalty Programs

Modern Restaurant Management

Being a business owner you must be aware that a repeat customer is better than a new customer. This is due to the reason that repeat customers tend to spend more money as compared to new customers. Therefore, if a business can retain its customers, it can easily boost the profits by 95%. However, for today’s businesses, retaining customers is not that easier.

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Seven Restaurant Trends That Will Define 2022

Modern Restaurant Management

Though many of the market forces that shaped the restaurant industry in 2021 were closely linked to disruption from the pandemic's onset in 2020, 2022 brings new challenges — and opportunities. Unprecedented labor and supply chain pressure will drive most of the restaurant trends that will define 2022, industry analysts say. This instability will push operators to trim costs by shortening menus and investing in labor-saving technology to free up cash for wage increases.

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Is Your Ice Cream Too Cold? Lessons in Fighting Friendly Fraud

Modern Restaurant Management

In mid-December, a story went viral on Twitter across the pond about a customer being refunded by a food delivery service after complaining that the “four milkshakes, a cheesecake and an ice cream” they had ordered from a Manchester restaurant were “too cold”, as reported by Manchester Evening News. The restaurant owner turned to the media as he felt he had to speak up against the “spate of suspicious refunds” he had been experiencing, with seemingly legitimat

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More Restaurants Are Turning to Voice Tech: Here Are Three Reasons Why

Modern Restaurant Management

Technology has been a great help during these testing times and, in particular, more and more restaurateurs have been turning to conversational voice AI ordering systems to help them meet —and increase— their orders with the resources they have available. When it’s designed for a specific use case (like restaurants), voice technology is actually pretty straightforward to deploy.

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Six Strategies to Improve Restaurant Efficiency

Modern Restaurant Management

Restaurant efficiency is the key to making a profit in an industry with thin margins and fierce competition. Inefficient restaurants are usually the result of a combination of, if not, all of the following factors: Bad stock management and rotation. Untrained and unmotivated staff. Inefficient management of staff. No realistic table management. This guide sets out six tips for improving your restaurant efficiency that can be implemented immediately and cheaper to your pocket.

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Taking Loyalty to the New Normal Level and Beyond

Modern Restaurant Management

The pandemic has challenged the relationship between restaurant operator and guest. Brands that have shifted to a more customer-centric approach have an understanding of loyalty as being earned and not sold. Modern Restaurant Management (MRM) magazine asked Suzi Tripp, VP of Insights at digital transformation firm Brooks Bell how restaurants loyalty programs are evolving and the importance of having a head of loyalty who understands why people buy, how they buy and how often they buy.

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My One Piece of Advice For The Restaurant Industry

Modern Restaurant Management

As I sat down to write this article, all I could think about was how the foodservice industry is so vital to our daily lives. When we don’t want to cook, we call our favorite restaurant. When we want to celebrate our wins, we gather at our favorite restaurant. When we want comfort in tough times, we order from our favorite restaurant. Some of our best memories include our favorite restaurants.

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Why Recipe Writing is Pivotal for Professional Kitchens

Modern Restaurant Management

If you want to make money selling food, you need good recipes. A professional kitchen’s main responsibility is to turn out a consistent, quality product so whether you’re working in a restaurant, a manufacturing facility or any other food preparation business, if you can’t turn out a quality, consistent product, you are unlikely to have a successful business.

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Unique Ways Restaurants Can Use QR Codes to Drive Sales

Modern Restaurant Management

As the impact of the pandemic wanes, restaurant owners should evaluate the contactless service options they implemented to keep customers and staff safe to see how they can help drive sales. When restaurants got the green light to reopen their dining rooms, they implemented a host of safety procedures to prevent the spread of germs. Restaurants across the country shelved their paper menus and turned to digital options to reduce touchpoints.

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Leveraging POS Systems to Future-Proof Your Restaurant and Maximize Profits

Modern Restaurant Management

As the impact of the pandemic continues, restaurants face constant and evolving operational challenges. At the end of 2021, four out of five restaurants reported facing a staffing shortage due to reduced operating hours and dining capacity. A fragmented supply chain is also increasing ingredient costs, leading restaurants to balance staff churn with a changing menu to keep revenue consistent.

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