Restaurant menus are more than a simple list of dishes; they need to get customers excited about the food and prone to their cravings, so they’ll likely spend more.
Restaurant owners know it, so they use psychological tricks to get the most out of their menus. One of them is adding easy-to-prepare sliders to the menu options to increase revenue. Also, have you noticed how many restaurants use colors like red and yellow? That's because they presumably stimulate appetite.
Still, few things can make taste buds salivate as great pics of food. One local startup based out of University of Massachusetts, Boston thought that photos of food on menus were good, but not great—and decided to upgrade restaurants' menus with animated visuals and videos.
Called PinOn, the food tech startup designs and sells an eponymous iOS app that markets as "smart menu" for restaurants. The app, which customers can download on their phones by scanning a QR code placed on the restaurant's table, shows pictures and videos of each menu item and keeps track of which items get the higher number of views. Customers can also place their orders through the app, which is not intended to replace paper menus—restaurants can provide both.
"In 2019, everyone is on their phone at their table anyway,” said Peter Wolfinger, VP of sales and business development at PinOn.
In fact, several fast-casual restaurants and food chains have included their menus on branded apps, often with the option of mobile ordering to dine in-house, to go or to have it delivered. Panera Bread, for example, started a 'Panera 2.0' program in 2014, which included the update of its mobile app and the installment of self-order kiosks—an effort that paid off, as 33 percent of the company's sales in 2018 came from kiosks, online and mobile sales.
For PinOn, the value of its service resides in providing restaurants with analytics on what customers are browsing on their smart menus, which could help owners manage inventory and adjust pricing, Wolfinger explained, with the end of goal of reducing food waste.
"The food waste for traditional restaurants is typically as high as five percent of their revenue," CEO Leon Cheng pointed out. "If we can, using technology and our product, help them save even some of the cost from the food waste, it would be a huge savings for restaurants."
The startup was founded by Cheng, who holds a master's in human and computer interaction from Northeastern University, and it's based with a team of six at UMass Boston's Venture Development Center. It received a $250,000 angel investment from an individual angel in Boston, which the company won't disclose. Currently, the PinOn app is in use at Wow Barbecue, an Asian barbecue place in Brookline.
"Lots of restaurants are often traditional in nature, and they aren't aware of resources that are available to them from a technology standpoint," Wolfinger said. "Our goal is not to make a lot of money, is not to get a ton of users: it's to help make restaurants smarter."
