🚨 RESTAURANT INDUSTRY HEAVYWEIGHT ALERT 🚨

Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends, I sat down with Danny Klein, VP of Editorial at QSR & FSR Magazine and producer of the QSR Evolution Conference - among his many pursuits.

If you pay attention to where this industry is headed, Danny is clearly at the tip of the spear of the conversation. Don't miss this one.

📺 WATCH AND LEARN 📺

👉 Why Danny believes the #1 threat to QSR over the next 5 years is… QSR itself (and how brands get in their own way)

👉 The real story behind Women in Restaurant Leadership (WiRL), how it went from an "accidental" networking event to a 500-person conference and full media platform

👉 What’s changing at QSR Evolution 2026: new venue, upgraded production, and a keynote lineup that includes CEOs from White Castle, Shake Shack, Texas Roadhouse, and more

👉 Danny’s candid take on AI in restaurants: where it’s delivering ROI, where the hype got ahead of reality, and why small, practical wins matter more than moonshots

➕ PLUS: Danny shares his unfiltered view on the explosion of restaurant podcasts and the simple reason voice AI on the 📞phone📞 may be one of the most underrated opportunities in restaurants

Huge thanks to Danny for the thoughtful, honest conversation and for everything he does to elevate this industry. If you care about QSR, the media in this industry, or where restaurant tech is headed, this one’s worth your time. 🚀🍔🤖📈

🧠 FRANCHISE DATA ≠ FRANCHISE INTELLIGENCE 🚨

Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sat down with Gary Liskovich, Founder & CEO of Harmonyze, a company tackling one of the messiest and most under-discussed problems in franchising: turning fragmented franchisee data into actual, real-world performance improvement through better coaching.

📺 WATCH AND LEARN 📺

👉 Why franchise business consultants spend 4x more time prepping for calls than actually talking to franchisees and how that breaks the coaching model at scale

👉 How Harmonyze "harmonizes" (see what I did there 😂) POS, loyalty, delivery, kiosk, LMS, ops, and even recorded leadership calls into one intelligence layer focused on EBITDA

👉 What happens when coaching shifts from reactive, anecdotal check-ins to daily, proactive, location-level insights pushed to the right people

👉 Real A/B test results where franchisees improved performance nearly 3x faster than control groups in the same quarter

➕ PLUS: Gary shares why most of the best coaching insights don’t live in dashboards or manuals but in recorded Zoom calls with brand leadership, and how AI can finally surface that tribal knowledge at scale

➕➕ PLUS PLUS: Rapid fire takes on gratitude as a daily habit, the future of franchise coaching, and the correct coffee order for a serious ops conversation ☕️

Huge thanks to Gary for the thoughtful, founder-level conversation and for building tech that actually respects how franchising works in the real world. 🚀

Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends we sit down with Eric Caron, Senior Director of Digital Products at Caribou Coffee, a brand with 800+ locations, a fast-growing drive-thru footprint, and a LOT happening in digital.

📺 WATCH AND LEARN 📺

👉 How Caribou rebuilt its tech foundation - from reproducible data and controlled testing to a unified Flutter app and lightning-fast Stripe checkout

👉 Why the brand draws a hard line between helpful AI (smarter ops) and creepy AI (facial recognition, over-automation)

👉 What Caribou’s two store formats mean for digital ordering, loyalty, and creating the right guest experience, whether it’s a "just give me caffeine" day or a "stay for the moment" visit

➕ PLUS: Eric breaks down where menu boards, loyalty, and personalization are headed and why "just because you can doesn’t mean you should" is the guiding principle for tech at Caribou.

Thank you Eric for the honest look at how a major coffee brand is modernizing without losing the human touch. 🚀

On today's 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends: Brendon Gilbert, VP Technology at Vibe Restaurants! Vibe is a multi-brand franchise group behind 70+ Little Caesars, nearly 90 Wingstops, and a growing number of Whataburgers.

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 Why Brendon was hired as Vibe’s first tech leader and how early wins came from blocking and tackling rather than shiny tools

👉 How Vibe balances franchisor-mandated tech (POS, payments, hardware) with portfolio-level systems (ERP, payroll, HRIS, scheduling) to scale across three brands on its quest to grow from $200M to $350M

👉 What it takes to operate a brand that is 70%+ digital at Wingstop and why connectivity, failover, and single-number support matter more than buzzwords

👉 Brendon’s POV on AI-assisted scheduling, turning hours of manual work into a 15-minute workflow without losing local knowledge or hospitality judgment

Huge thanks to Brendon for a practical, operator-centric conversation about scaling tech in the real world.

Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends we sit down with one of the sharpest minds in restaurant analytics: Michael Lukianoff, Founder and CEO of SignalFlare.ai. If you care about pricing, menu architecture, or the future of decision intelligence in restaurants, this episode is a must-watch.
📺WATCH AND LEARN📺
👉 Why the “last mile” of analytics has always been the industry’s Achilles’ heel and how Signalflare’s new Navigator product turns messy, multi-source data into simple, actionable decisions for non-technical operators
👉 How mobile data, credit card panels, and true trade-area modeling reveal that restaurant overcapacity and margin compression are structural problems, not temporary ones
👉 Why Mike believes most enterprises will need to rethink old data warehouse assumptions and why the next generation of restaurant tech requires a clean-slate approach to learning systems
👉 How AI becomes smarter only when operators treat it like a learning partnership rather than a one-click magic solution. It is not plug and play. It is raise and teach.
➕ PLUS: Mike explains why mispriced add-ons quietly destroy margins, why menu architecture deserves more attention, and why every great operator should use AI to learn, not to automate.
Huge thanks to Mike for breaking down how decision intelligence is evolving and what restaurants must do to stay ahead in a demand-shifting, overbuilt market. This one is packed with clarity and operator-first insights. 🚀

🚨FIRST-EVER OPERATOR EPISODE ALERT🚨

Today’s 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends marks a big milestone. Every week we talk with founders, CEOs, and tech execs shaping the future of the industry. This time, we’re going straight to the front lines.

For the first time ever, we’re joined by a franchisee/operator - someone actually running restaurants day in and day out - and there's no one better to kick this off with than Eric Culton, the ops leader behind a $30M+ McDonald’s portfolio across five Pacific Northwest locations.

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 How Eric’s Digital Ambassador program is driving in-store app adoption and higher digital mix

👉 Where vision AI is can deliver results (hint: speed, compliance, and ops visibility), and how Eric’s piloting it with Cambridge UK-based Tenyks AI

👉 How he’s using Slack and QSRSoft to replace chaos with clarity, and why email chains and group texts are officially done

👉 Why Eric believes the AI Integrator will be the leadership role of the future

➕ PLUS Eric’s rapid-fire answers on fries, drive-thru times, and what great operations feel like

Huge thanks to Eric for helping us move into this new chapter.

🚀TODAY on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends we sit down with Greg Zamfotis, Founder of Gregorys Coffee — a specialty coffee brand that’s grown to 50+ locations while staying laser-focused on tech, unit economics, and coffee as a true social connector. ☕

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 Why Gregorys partnered with Craveworthy Brands to accelerate franchising, and how their shared-services model is helping fuel nationwide growth

👉 How Greg balances hospitality first ("coffee as a third space") with automation and tech — from equipment that dispenses cold brew to personalization powered by AI

👉 Why he thinks the future of coffee tech is all about personalization and creating the perfect custom guest experience

➕ PLUS: Rapid-fire answers on espresso vs. cold brew, the Gregorys menu item he’d go out of his way for (SPOILER: 🍂🥤 Fall Oat Boy), and why he finds testing new tech exhilarating.

Huge thanks to Greg for joining and sharing how Gregorys is scaling while staying true to its roots. 🚀

🚀 New episode drop on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends! Incept AI co-founder Justin Foster sat down with John Schattinger, VP Technology at Robeks, a fast-growing smoothie and juice brand turning tech into throughput across POS, loyalty, digital, and ops. 

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

 👉 Why Robeks moved to a new POS solution and how it unlocked easier integrations and faster rollouts with partners.

 👉 How shifting from dollars-for-points to a tiered, item-based structure improved margins and increased visit frequency for members hunting that free smoothie. 

 👉 Learn how Robeks' Harmonious Bites rollout is tracked with product mix plus retention and check analytics and guest sentiment to ensure upsell without cannibalization 

 👉 Where John sees practical AI: personalization and agentic coaching

➕ PLUS - What’s next at Robeks: John discusses first-party catering and digital voice ordering.

➕ PLUS PLUS: Shout-out to the vendors mentioned in this episode who are helping make it possible at Robeks: Toast, Olo, Bikky, Tattle, and PAR Punchh . Vendor teamwork makes the dream work!

Huge thanks to John for a candid, metrics-forward convo. 

#restaurants #qsr #loyalty #pos #AI #customerdata #smoothies #robeks #operations

🚀 On TODAY’S 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends we're talking scale, edge, and resilience with THE ONE AND ONLY Niko Papademetriou, Co-Founder & SVP Sales & Business Development at Qu, a company that is lighting the enterprise restaurant POS space - and *beyond* - see what I did there - ON FIRE 🔥🔥🔥

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 Why 'edge' matters in restaurants: how Qu’s Qube A/E/IQ platform is pushing intelligence into the four walls for speed, uptime, and resiliency

👉 How Qube E uses sensors and equipment monitoring to catch fryer and HVAC failures before they happen

👉 The future of AI at the edge: Qube IQ demos showed how a $30 webcam + AI can identify ingredients, open checks, and add upsells - all offline

👉 Lessons from rolling out 2,200+ Jack in the Box locations in just 15 months, and what great change management looks like at the store level

➕ PLUS: Niko shares why he says Qu isn’t just selling POS they’re in the business of expectations and change management. Personally, I think this is a lesson 90%+ of revenue-side restaurant tech execs should learn.

Huge thanks to Niko for joining and breaking down what’s next for enterprise restaurant tech. This one’s a must-watch if you care about speed, uptime, and real-world AI in QSR.🚀🍔🚀🍕🚀🐔

Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends we’re talking brunch tech with Mark W. Landes, VP Technology at Snooze AM Eatery: the better-for-you brunch brand known for craveable pancakes, bright dining rooms, and waitlists that move because the tech actually WORKS. 🌞🥞🥂

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 How Snooze’s Toast POS rollout + handhelds unlocked more table time for Snoozers and gave guests faster, more accurate orders. Even with Snooze’s famously customizable menu (allergies included!)

👉 Why adding QSR Automations KDS was a game-changer for handling modifiers and complexity in the back of house.

👉 How Snooze partnered with Bikky to connect POS data and guest behavior, using insights to tweak menu items monthly and boost retention.

👉 Where AI is making a real difference – from Axial Shift forecasting to new automation that frees staff to focus more on guests - and less on repetitive tasks.

➕ PLUS: Mark shares how Snooze’s rebrand rollout was fueled by data, his favorite brunch order (HINT: pancakes all day🥞🥞🥞), and why classic maple syrup is still in it FTW! lol

Thank you Mark for giving us a peek at how Snooze is scaling hospitality and tech side by side. 🚀

“It’s more than just a restaurant. It’s a platform.” - Jason Rusk, EVP of Restaurant Operations at Wonder

Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends, Jason joins Incept AI co-founder Justin Foster and breaks down how Wonder is scaling a vertically integrated mealtime platform after a major raise, a brand refresh, and rapid expansion toward 90+ locations.

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 The playbook to hit ~90 stores and why Wonder expects to pass 100 soon

👉 How QR-coded items turn expo into scan-and-bag accuracy that doesn’t clear the KDS until everything is in the bag

👉 Vision AI on the makeline: moving from “made” to “made right”

👉 Training at scale: replacing memorization with AI assistance and simulation-based decision training

➕ PLUS: Jason’s favorite pick from the Wonder roster, which expansion city he's most bullish on, and Wonder's entire 2025 summarized in one word!

Thanks for joining, Jason! 🙌

🏔️"We are at the base camp of Mount Everest and have a beautiful climb ahead of us."🏔️

Today 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends welcomes a true industry heavyweight: Noah Glass, Founder & CEO at Olo.

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 How Noah sees digital hospitality breaking out of the app and touching 100% of transactions with Olo Pay and POS-linked data, so operators can personalize even in drive-thru and in-store.

👉 Why the next phase of restaurant marketing is agentic AI and true one-to-one personalization that remembers each guest and recommends what actually moves visits and check.

👉 First-party vs marketplaces: why Noah sees the real win as not just margin: it’s about owning the guest relationship and the data that powers smarter decisions.

➕ PLUS: A peek at OrderReady AI, kitchen 🏎️“race car in the red”🏎️ ops, and Noah’s founder mantra of being “grateful and unsatisfied.”

➕➕PLUS PLUS: Learn what one capability Olo dropped Noah would revisit if he could. HINT: 🔠

Huge thanks to Noah for joining and for the candid take on where hospitality at scale is headed.

Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sit down with Bill Lindsey, Partner & Co-Founder at COGS-Well. Bill’s a 🏢builder🏢 and a TRUE entrepreneur: cash flow positive from day one and on his fifth back-office product for restaurants.

Working with his team, Bill's shipping fixes for the messy parts of managing restaurant inventory - and helping operators see value fast. 🏎️

On a personal note, I admire Bill for taking the hard path in entrepreneurship. Building a bootstrapped startup is no joke in any industry; it's especially tough in restaurant tech and Bill is an example of perseverance to many - including me. Keep rocking it, Bill! 🎸🚀 🎸

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 How COGS-Well helps restaurants get set up in days (not months) by providing a standard packaging library that auto-maps vendor pack sizes to recipe units.

👉 How operators can get cleaner inventory counts by reducing garbage-in garbage-out errors

👉 Why taking a different approach to inventory management can lead to less busy-work and more time to run the restaurant.🕰️

➕ PLUS: Bill’s 3 cold calls → 3 customers origin story, and why actual vs theoretical is still the hill to die on.

ROCK ON, BILL! 🚀

🧠 RESTAURANT INDUSTRY NERD ALERT 🚨

My absolute favorite kind of guest - a self-described restaurant industry nerd. Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends we’re talking with Joseph Ortiz, President & COO at Farmer Boys, the Southern California-based fast casual chain known for farm-fresh burgers and all-day breakfast. YUM. 🌅🍔🥓

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 How Farmer Boys cut its drive-thru times by 3 minutes without chasing flashy new gadgets and how better use of data and operational focus made it happen

👉 Lessons learned revamping loyalty: from heavy discounting (👀 free burger abuse) to smarter guest engagement with PAR Punchh and consultants helping to drive real retention gains

👉 Where Farmer Boys is placing early AI bets (including feedback analysis with Chatmeter, future labor scheduling with UKG) and where they’re holding back (drive-thru voice ordering… not yet)

➕ PLUS: Joseph shares which underrated piece of tech he swears by, what Farmer Boys’ next big growth markets are (hint: 🌵 Arizona now, Utah/Colorado/Texas ahead), and his go-to menu item that made me hungry just hearing it. We need a Farmer Boys in Seattle!

Thank you Joseph for the candid conversation and for sharing a peek behind the curtain at how Farmer Boys is modernizing while staying true to its roots. 🚀

TODAY on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends we sit down with Tim Newton, Chief Technology Officer at Long John Silver’s. With nearly three decades of restaurant tech leadership (Papa John’s, Fat Tuesday, Waitr, now LJS), Tim is leading a modernization push at one of America’s most iconic seafood brands.

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 How Tim and team are rolling out kiosks across 220+ corporate-owned restaurants — and why they started selling more baskets

👉 The growth path ahead for digital ordering and delivery (currently 7% of sales) and why doubling that mix in the next two years is a must

👉 How Long John Silver’s is reaching Gen Z through mobile, gamification, TikTok, and influencer marketing — while still honoring the nostalgic brand experience generations grew up with

👉 Tim’s candid view on AI: from demand forecasting to menu innovation, all the way down to fryer automation and voice AI ordering in the car

➕ PLUS: Rapid fire answers on cloud vs. on-prem, the #1 trait he hires for, and his go-to menu pick at LJS (spoiler: it’s not fish 🐔).

Thank you Tim! This one’s packed with leadership lessons and a clear-eyed view of where QSR tech is headed. 🚀

This may very well be my favorite 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends podcast episode to date.

Not because I have such immense respect for David Greschler, CEO and Co-Founder of NomadGo. Nor because his interview was flawless (it was). It's because I'm elated for the NomadGo team to see how all their hard behind-the-scenes work culminated in yesterday's announcement that Starbucks is rolling NomadGo's tech across 11,000+ corporate-owned restaurants!

(note: this episode was recorded last week, before the announcement dropped)

Whether you're on the restaurant side and want to get a sense of why Starbucks partnered with NomadGo, or you're on the tech side and want to get some insights into how to build winning products...

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 Why 🧿vision AI🤖 and 🛸spatial vision🧿 are not the same thing, and why a 3D understanding of the world is so crucial to achieving accurate inventory counts for restaurant operators

👉 Why David believes some of the best technologies are those that go deep to capture the minutiae and the edge cases. I agree. 🔎🔎🔎

👉 The best way to measure accuracy of tech products. HINT: it has nothing to do with how the vendor does it. 🤔

➕ PLUS David likely disagrees with Leon Davoyan, EMBA on the most important question of this interview: What is the most over-ordered condiment in America? 🤣

A huge shout out to the entire NomadGo team, and to Starbucks, for what has certainly been an extended collaboration filled with many lessons learned, but one that's led to a bright new opportunity for both companies ❤️

The ⚾HEAVY HITTERS⚾ keep on dishing knowledge on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends. Today, Deliverect President, Americas Justin Falciola (who also happens to be the former SVP Insights & Technology at Papa Johns and former CTO CKE Restaurants, Inc.) comes on to discuss how this restaurant tech heavyweight plans to crush it in North America and LATAM.📺WATCH AND LEARN📺👉 Why Justin made the leap from restaurant brand to the tech side, and how a global perspective is fueling Deliverect's next chapter - including Justin's prediction on how soon the company could reach its NEXT billionth order👉 Which lessons Justin took from his restaurant brand tech leadership experience, how he's applying those today. Solid NUGS here for anyone in a leadership role in this industry 🪙🪙🪙 ➕ PLUS which restaurant technologies Justin is most excited about. He's broken it down into TWO key areas where technology has the most potential to radically reshape the guest experience.➕➕PLUS PLUS get Justin's hot take on the never-ending pineapple on pizza debate 🍍🍕 😂 Thanks Justin and best wishes to you and Deliverect on your continued success!

We recently had the opportunity to connect with Momos' Co-Founder and CEO Sai Alluri and on today's 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends Sai shares a bit about the company's evolution and how he sees AI-powering the future of growth in his space. This is one you don't want to miss!

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 Learn about Momos' journey from enabling 3PD / reviews for restaurants, to aggregating feedback across channels, to leveraging AI to pinpoint location-specific problems among thousands of survey responses and reviews so operators can quickly identify what's most important and make needed improvements 📈

👉 How to move from getting 20%-30% survey reply rates to close to 100% response rates in just 90 days 😮

➕ PLUS: Meet Alfie and Rockie! And get Sai's hot take on the future of platform consolidation in the industry and which non-Momos AI technology he's most excited about. HINT: 🤖 📣

This interview is made us hungry for tacos! Tacos from bartaco more specifically. With AUVs well over $5M and an expanding footprint, this chain is onto something big. Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends we sat down with bartaco CEO and President Anthony Valletta to uncover how tech is driving this brand into the future.

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 How a new hybrid 'high touch, high tech' guest experience is reducing turn times, superior hospitality, and putting control in the hands of guests. This innovative service model is already paying dividends 📈

👉 Why Anthony is so excited about personalization and what bartaco is doing with its data to supercharge growth. Anthony even shares one data-driven win that brought same store sales up by 6-7%. Dang! And hint: 🍚

👉 How bartaco is leveraging technology ranging from computer vision to AI-driven chargeback management to get a firmer grip on its business and drive efficiency and consistency across its operations. Shout outs go to Solink and Loop AI - Delivery Intelligence Platform!

➕ PLUS: Get Anthony's hot take on the best hospitality podcasts in the biz, including two that are standard fare for new employees onboarding at the company.

Thank you, Anthony! 🚀

UN-BELIEVE-ABLE guest! On today's 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends we are discussing restaurant labor. Scheduling, time-tracking, payroll, and beyond. Jordan Boesch, Founder/CEO of restaurant tech heavyweight 7shifts is with us. With $128M raised to date, this company is redefining the future of how restaurant operators manage and excel at HR.

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 How 7Shifts emerged from Jordan helping his dad solve a scheduling problem he faced at his Quiznos locations and into an industry behemoth serving 50,000 restaurants today 😮 📈 😮

👉 Which 🪄 magic 🗝️ key the company relies on to amp its scale-up, and why it's so important for restaurant tech companies to remain hyper-focused in this area

👉 How and why 7shifts is running a total ⚙️in-house vertical integration⚙️ of the HR stack, including a payroll space dominated by giants like ADP. And why Jordan thinks it will work.

👉 How AI can and should be used WISELY to create schedules: lessons from the ground 📆 📆📆

Plus if you're ever in Saskatoon, Jordan has a great restaurant reco! Thank you for coming on, Jordan! 🚀