While small businesses everywhere are looking for ways to weather the current crisis, a local hospitality-focused startup is taking extra steps to support its customer base that has been severely impacted by the pandemic.
Plano-based OneDine, a software company focused on streamlining and personalizing service in the restaurant industry, saw restaurants being forced to close their doors and wanted to help out. So, the company is shifting gears from working to bring its tableside tech to the parking lot to help restaurants stay open and keep their customers safe. The company is also starting a petition to allow restaurants to sell uncooked goods, which qualify for SNAP benefits.
“I think these are rare moments in our time. I think it’s the first time in most of our lifetimes where there’s a national crisis that should bond everybody, put everybody towards a common goal and when people don’t align to that, you know where they really stand,” Rom Krupp, OneDine founder and CEO, told NTX Inno. "We need to keep them alive, so we have an industry to sell to later on, we have to make sure they survive. We want to be on the frontline with our customer, so they understand that we are the restaurant industry as well.”
Krupp said OneDine noticed early on that restaurants' parking lots would be largely empty due to the pandemic and wanted to find a way to leverage that, especially as many customers are looking for contact-less ways of making a transaction.
OneDine, founded in 2017, has created an extension of its platform to allow restaurants to extend their dining rooms into the parking lot. Customers can use their phone to look at menus, discounts and specials and order seamlessly to their car. Krupp said it's similar to moving a restaurant’s business model to one similar to Sonic. The company is offering it to restaurants free, with no future commitment.
“We took the approach of [putting] our future clients first and our employees first, and figured it’s always going to be easier to go find money later when you actually help the industry and kept strong people employed, as opposed to just coming out of it weaker,” Krupp said.
In addition to the effort to help restaurants quickly pivot their focus, OneDine is also looking to help out on a legislative level. The company has started a petition asking the USDA to allow SNAP benefits to be accepted by restaurants. Krupp said the bailout has affected industries disproportionately. And as grocery stores are seeing an increase in business, restaurants who are working to adapt by selling ready-to-make meal kits with uncooked ingredients are not seeing that same increase. Krupp said it makes sense to allow this to qualify as a grocery item, helping both residents and restaurants.
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“Why not allow restaurants, why not give restaurants the opportunity to fight for that wallet,” Krupp said. “One shouldn’t profit because the other one is losing just because of a government policy.”
Krupp said he considers OneDine not just as a provider of technology to the restaurant and hospitality industry, but as a part of it. And as such, he said OneDine is looking at changing gears to focus on contact-less and take-out related services for the long-term. Traditionally, its tech was focused on making efficiencies in customer experience and POS processes.
He said that as restrictions are lifted after the pandemic, he sees restaurant customers fitting into four broad categories: Those who will immediately return, those who will have a heightened sensitivity for safety for a while, those who will permanently be conservative about safety measures and those who will likely only return if they can do so with pick-up.
He said restaurants will have to completely rethink design in the wake of the pandemic, adding things like reusable menus and self-service beverage stations will likely become a thing of the past. He added that most will need to focus on enhancing drive thru on off-premise dining experiences.
“I see this event like ADA compliancy. ADA compliancy accommodates 6% or 7% of people with disabilities, and we changed the way we build buildings, we changed the way everything is,” Krupp said. “If we want to fight back to a market share, we have to learn now, for an extended period of time, how to deal with people in each one of those groups.”
"We need to keep them alive, so we have an industry to sell to later on, we have to make sure they survive."
Like nearly all startups, OneDine itself has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Krupp said much of OneDine is working remotely. In addition, revenue has slowed to almost nothing.
However, Krupp said he feels the pandemic has brought his team closer. In January, OneDine announced the landing a $5 million Series A funding round, which has since grown to $8.25 million in funding. He said this funding allowed OneDine early on to make the decision not to lay off any 24-member staff and to continue providing benefits, adding that, “if you don’t have service in your heart, you shouldn’t be in this industry.”
“It’s very easy to play the good guy when everything is good. But it’s very hard when it’s very, very bad,” Krupp said. “I see restaurants as our modern churches, if you may. Not to be blasphemous, but this is one of our last gathering places. We don’t have a lot of congregation, we’re on our phones all the time we’re on social media, we’re streaming our movies, a large percent of our population doesn’t go to large community-type organizations… so really restaurants are our last breaking bread kind of place, where we gather, we socialize… We need those in society, that’s what bonds us still and it’s such an important institution.”
