Currently, restaurants can use Memphis-based Bite Ninja’s platform to outsource drive-thru and counter shifts to the startup’s network of trained 1099 contractors, who take orders from their homes. Those workers can be in the same city or live on the other side of the country. They can work a variety of shift lengths, whether it’s one or two hours during the busiest periods, or a longer, more sustained time.
Now, Bite Ninja is poised to launch an additional offering — a queuing system called NinjaQ, which is set to allow restaurants to also have their own staffers work remotely.
“As workforce demands and rising costs continue to put pressure on the restaurant industry, we uncovered a market opportunity to upgrade our services and provide a solution where restaurants could utilize their own staff through our remote work offerings across multiple locations at the same time,” Will Clem, co-founder of Bite Ninja, said in a press release. “This advancement in our technology presents restaurant franchise owners with a unique opportunity to utilize existing staff to help combat the industry-wide labor shortage.”
The goal of the patent-pending technology is to provide an effective, efficient ordering process for quick-service restaurants that minimizes labor costs, and it’s set to use Bite Ninja’s customer detection system and remote staffing capabilities.
Let’s say a customer is detected in the NinjaQ. A cashier of the restaurant, working remotely, can be routed to the needed station to take their order. Then, once the order is complete, they can be routed back into its queue to await the next customer, remotely shifting between the restaurant’s locations and stations as needed. Restaurants can adjust staffing levels to match in-store demand, lowering the number of cashiers and customer-facing employees in the queue during slow periods, and adding more during busy ones.
The news comes as Bite Ninja continues to gain momentum. Though it started in local garages, the startup now has an 11,000-square-foot headquarters in Cordova and more than $15 million in seed funding.
And earlier this year, Clem told MBJ that the company was doing pilot programs with some of the largest quick-service restaurant chains in the U.S. — ones with thousands of locations.
“Anybody would recognize these names,” Clem said. “There’s a lot of hardware being installed across the country. … So, when that approval from corporate comes, it’s going to be like you flip a light switch and, boom, it’s going to be a crazy fast growth rate."
