Double-double with a side of Nuggets
Anybody that has been in an relationship can sympathize with this - “What do you want to eat?” “I don’t know.” “How about this?” “No.” It’s an infuriating hour of my daily life with my wife. But there are some days where she has cravings for a burger or some tacos, and that’s all thanks to the food shows she watches on YouTube. So it made me realize, the way Yelp does things, with listing out names of restaurants with small thumbnails of food pics taken by customers was counter intuitive. People eat with their eyes - they want to see their food and build cravings. When you look at a beautifully photographed photo of a dish, regardless of what is written in the reviews, you just want that. You can almost taste it in the photo.
Now, I live in California, the battle grounds of In-N-Out vs. anything else. I love my In-N-Out burger, but I must admit, Mc Donald’s fries and nuggets have a sweet spot in my heart. So if I have a craving for nuggets, I settle for a Big Mac. But one day I realized that on my way home from In-N-Out, I can swing by Mc. Donalds and get some fries and nuggets! This was life changing and made me realize, people love options, and that’s why dining halls have become a phenomenon these past years.
So it got me thinking, what if we can make an app that can turn your neighborhood restaurants into a giant dining hall?
Making the Spread
In recent years, Toast, Inc. has been making traction in my neighborhood restaurants providing them with Point of Sales (POS) systems and recently have been trying to enter the consumer app space for delivery (partnered with GrubHub). The POS system integrated with a consumer app along with a delivery system made me think this concept of mine might work. To stick with the bread theme, and the idea that this is about ordering food from different restaurants, I figured perfect name must be Spread.
The Scope:
Create a new customer’s dining experience that is dish centric.
Allow customers to easily pick and choose dishes they want from restaurants within a 5 mile radius.
Design a payment system that allows for easy customer transaction while being able to divide the bill among the restaurants.
Consider logistics for delivery to reduce greenhouse gasses.
Consider how to acquire new restaurants with new experience.
Utilize current app functions to phases Spread’s main experience.
Create new apps while sicking to current brand guidelines
How to go to market?
Make it profitable/sustainable.
The exploration.
For this exploration, I have to make some assumptions about Toast’s POS system because I never worked on one, but I try to make these are fairly simple assumptions or features that can be simply added to the POS system.
The restaurant has:
Provided an address.
Provided a menu with timing to make certain dishes.
Transaction data to detect popularity of dishes.
Live data of current wait time.
Timing ticketing system for the kitchen.
On the consumer side, the user will only need to provide a GPS location or address for delivery.
When the user first downloads Spread from the App Store, they can instant begin “Building Your Spread” once they grant GPS or provide a delivery address. The user won’t be required to create an account until checkout. This is to allow the user to instantly get into the experience and enjoy the unique feature that Spread can provide right away.
The user lands on the “Hot Near You” screen. This screen highlights dishes that are popular within your area (delivery and dine-in) and is updated once the user enters or drags down to refresh the screen. This screen also allows for restaurants to highlight their daily specials as a sponsor. On one side, the daily specials allows for restaurants to feature dishes not normally seen (which typically won’t be popular), but also encourages the restaurants to explore and expand their menu.
The user can simply add whatever dishes they want and based on location of the restaurant and Toast will be able to provide an optimal route for delivery. The delivery route will consider the duration it take for the food to be ready, as well as an economical route between the restaurants and the delivery address. The POS system will enter the ticket to the kitchen based on current traffic within the restaurant as well as commute time for the driver. The Toast network of POS, Ticketing, Drivers and Customer’s app will ultimately work together to design a timing mechanism based on road traffic, restaurant traffic, and cook time within all the kitchens and delivery time, and if it all works outs, will provide a seamless experience for the customer.
Getting to Market
Although logistically challenging because of road and human variables, this can easily be perfected with a fast and easy MVP and a restricted area. The initial launch would start at urban areas with restaurant density. Residents living within the 5 miles of the restaurant zone will have access to the Spread beta. Once the proof on concept becomes successful, and modification of the beta app has been made with user data, Toast can look for more urban areas within the initial city and scale accordingly. Once we are able to map out the AI logistics between the Toast hardware and delivery system, we can then scale to other cities.
Conclusion
This was a fun project. It consisted of thinking not just a user experience between the phone and the application, but also had to consider real time logistic and complexities from multiple restaurants. There’s a lot of consideration that has to be made in order to meet the user’s high expectations for dining. Food gets cold, people want their food as fast and as hot as possible, but they want all the options. On the UI/UX side for the consumer app, it’s easy and straight to the point. But the real challenge to make this work is on the network of Toast hardware and delivery. For this project to really take off, Toast will need to build a comprehensive AI that can map out realtime data from restaurants, delivery driver, and traffic. I was fortunate enough to actually meet someone from Toast and presented this idea. The feedback was intriguing and the collaboration in brainstorming the idea further was fun. This one was a fun exploration. It’s an incredibly hard task to execute, but if someone takes it on and succeeds, it’ll change the way we do takeout forever.