First Bite

New York City mayor Eric Adams announced last week in his annual State of the City address that the city would be creating a watchdog agency to regulate the booming delivery industry. The Department of Sustainable Delivery would be the first of its kind of the nation and would be designated to protect both delivery drivers and consumers.

What makes people really love a restaurant brand? Not just “what brand do they most frequent?” because inevitably the McDonald’s and Starbucks of the world would be at the top of the list purely as the winners of a numbers game. Rather, what makes people put that restaurant at the top of their mental list of favorite places to eat?

According to a new report from Yelp, new restaurant openings surpassed pre-pandemic openings in 2023. This indicates the industry may have made a full recovery nearly four years after mandated closures were put into place to control a then-unknown and quickly spreading virus, which impacted an estimated 110,000 restaurants.

Chipotle is preparing for its busiest time of year – March to May – by targeting 19,000 new hires throughout the next couple of months. To incentivize potential employees, the company has added several new benefits, including the addition of a student loan retirement match program.

Potbelly announced Monday the redesign of its loyalty program, Potbelly Perks, which now emphasizes faster and more custom rewards, and an easier-to-use customer interface.

Pinstripes embarked upon a pre-IPO roadshow in early 2020. We all know what happened then, however. Then Omicron happened. Then the IPO market all but froze last year. Fast forward to 2023, and Banyan entered the conversation and invested $21 million upfront as a “precursor.”

The state of Massachusetts and Grubhub have reached a settlement in the state attorney general’s 2021 lawsuit against the third-party delivery company for repeatedly violating the Massachusetts pandemic-era delivery fee caps.

Not even a month into 2024 and it’s safe to say Dutch Bros has had a busy year thus far. As the calendar turned, Christine Barone officially took over the CEO role after serving as president for a little over a year. The company shared development guidance, aiming for 150 to 165 new units this year, including its initial entry into Florida in Q1. The long-term growth target is about 4,000 locations.

As voice AI and robotics technology becomes more intelligent and widely-used, one of the more common user-end complaints is that the technology is not quite sophisticated enough to handle interactions as perfectly as a human might. For example, Presto Voice AI company recently published an article detailing its “Human in the Loop” approach to voice AI: people that are able to take over if and when AI is unable to understand a human—which Presto says it does not have to do 85% of the time.

Not only are robots and AI becoming more adept at understanding human guests, they are also becoming more conversational. Vox AI is (yet another) voice AI company that is looking to revolutionize the drive-thru and the company differentiates itself by claiming to be the most intelligent and conversational voice AI on the market now. RichTech Robotics — known for its robotic barista/bartender, ADAM — announced similar updates to the drink-making robot, which makes him more conversational than previous iterations.

In other news this month, POS integration platform Chowly acquired digital marketing platform Targetable, and PathSpot introduced a new platform that targets food safety.

The ICR Conference, the food and retail industry's investor event, occurred earlier this month with many public companies presenting key findings and future plans.

Executive editor Alicia Kelso attended the conference and was able to speak with executives. Many of those conversations will appear on our website in the upcoming days and weeks.

Today, she spoke with First Bite about what she learned from the 2024 conference and how Papa Johns stood out to her among the crowded rooms.