This month, in the midst of new regulations going into effect in California, Fourtop is rolling out its advanced restaurant data automation platform for two California brands: Kevin Hart’s plant-based QSR concept Hart House and Nekter Juice Bar, acai bowl, juice and smoothie brand. Both restaurant brands are looking to leverage a foundational investment in Fourtop’s groundbreaking data infrastructure to drive improvement across business functions and fight back against some challenges that are threatening the future of the restaurant industry.
This February, the National Restaurant Association released its latest State of the Industry report, predicting that restaurant sales would top $1 trillion for the first time. However, the rosiness of the sales projections exposes a harder truth about the future of the restaurant industry. In the same NRA report, operators were nearly unanimous in their anxiety about the persistence of high food and labor costs and their impact on restaurant viability for the future.
The Fourtop platform brings together data from across a restaurant’s operational systems, including those systems used for marketing, inventory management, employee scheduling, and financial reporting. By processing and automating all of a restaurant’s data in sophisticated, optimized workflows, Fourtop can help restaurants achieve significant bottom-line results in real-time and at scale – two of the hardest things for multi-unit restaurants to do.
In a recent analysis of user data, Fourtop identified opportunities that could lead to a 26% increase in restaurant profitability, by activating and orchestrating data analysis across forecasting, scheduling, supply chain, and marketing to quickly identify inefficiencies and cost escalations and spotlight areas of opportunity for increasing profits.
“The most forward-looking restaurants are realizing that data should no longer be constrained to dashboards,” said Darien Bates, Fourtop’s CEO. “Data should be the fuel for driving more effective and more scalable restaurant automation in every area of the business. When systems operate in tandem, the value of data is multiplied.”
Every restaurant is a little different, and so too are the uses that restaurants can activate with their data.
For Hart House, a visionary brand founded by comedian Kevin Hart, which has put a heavy emphasis on investment in its employees, advanced data analytics are at the core of how the brand is discovering and enhancing the value driven by its workforce.
“Restaurants need to be assessing their labor value in completely new ways,” says Hart House CEO, Andy Hooper. “We have to start looking at the same kind of ‘Moneyball’ strategies that have worked in other industries to make the most out of our available talent. Humans are the most important part of running a quality restaurant, and we need to access and activate as much data as possible to put our people in the best position to succeed. We all win together when our data is effectively aligning our employee and business outcomes.”
For Nekter, a forward-thinking healthy-lifestyle bowl, juice and smoothie brand, which has led the way in both healthy-eating and smart technology applications, the investment in Fourtop’s system creates new opportunities at every level of the business, from creating greater visibility in supply chain and business management, to being a foundation for more advanced and responsive customer engagement marketing platform.
“Technology has been an incredibly important part of Nekter’s success and there is much to still be gained from the technology currently available to us,” said Steve Schulze, co-founder and CEO, Nekter Juice Bar. “We have always been aggressive in its pursuit and exploration yet conservative in its development and implementation. That plan has worked well for us, and I will continue to challenge our teams to operate under those guidelines. The doors that will open due to technology advancements will continue to offer brands like us the opportunity to reach a large guest base, build a more efficient business model, and provide a better guest experience.”
In partnership with Fourtop, both brands are building additional automations to further streamline operational demands, improve profitability, and grow sales.
