Restaurant Tech Trends

Margo Hughes, Executive Director Business Services @ Bluemont Group

🍩 DONUT WASTE: $3M PROBLEM, MEET YOUR MATCH 🍩 Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I'm joined by Margo Hughes, Executive Director of Business Services at Bluemont Group, a Dunkin' franchisee with ~100 locations across seven states. Margo's become one of the most visible voices in restaurant AI thanks to Do'Cast: the donut forecasting system Bluemont co-developed with PreciTaste that's already cut donut waste by up to 30%. 📉🍩 📺WATCH AND LEARN📺 👉 The wild origin story of Do'Cast 👉 How a $100/day waste problem becomes a $3M+ headache when you scale to 100 stores, and how Bluemont is on track to save another $1M 💰💰💰 👉 Why over-optimizing waste actually means you're "managing your business down" 📉 👉 The hyperlocal demand forecasting variables nobody sees coming: local election days, school field trips, sports games, weather, and that one neighborhood that always sells more sprinkles 🌦️🏈 👉 The puppy analogy every operator evaluating AI needs to hear. 🐶 ➕ PLUS: Margo shares what's next on her hit list AND drops a hot take in our rapid fire round on whether AI is more hype or more substance in restaurants right now. You'll have to watch to hear it. 👀 Margo, thank you for the puppy wisdom, and for proving that "small pond" reputations get built one great interview at a time. Now I gotta go try a sour cream donut. 🚀

David Cantu, CEO @ Craftable

🏢 FROM THE FLOOR TO THE BACK OFFICE 🏢 On today's 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sit down with David Cantu [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#], CEO of Craftable [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#] and former co-founder of HotSchedules [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#]. David started on the floor at Outback Steakhouse and PF Chang's, then turned that operator DNA into a 20+ year run building tech that powers hospitality. Watch this for an insider's look into how David and the Craftable team are helping 😮80,000+ operators😮 protect their margins today 🚀 📺WATCH AND LEARN📺 👉 The origin story of HotSchedules, born out of a real problem he was solving as a PF Chang's GM. See how the team bootstrapped through the dot-com implosion and 9/11 before scaling over a decade - all before ever taking a dime of PE money 👉 Why David believes the current AI wave is forcing legacy platforms to rebuild themselves from the ground up, and how Craftable rebuilt its architecture to be AI-native 🤖 👉 How Craftable surfaces margin erosion signals in real time, from a 35% spike in lime prices to kilowatt-level waste, and why visibility alone drove a 600 basis point P&L improvement at a restaurant David recently operated 📈 ➕ PLUS: David's candid take on the Founder's Dilemma and knowing when to self-select out, plus why ops-led tech buying usually beats CFO-led ➕➕ PLUS PLUS: Rapid fire answers on lettuce wraps vs bloomin' onion and the most overlooked line item that kills restaurant margins Thank you David for sharing your hard-won wisdom from 20+ years of building in this industry. 🚀

Ra'Chard Dennis, SVP Operations @ Insomnia Cookies

🚀🍪🌙 WARM COOKIES AT 2AM?! 🚀🍪🌙 On today's 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sit down with Rachard Dennis [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#], SVP of Operations at Insomnia Cookies [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#], the late-night delivery-first brand delivering warm cookies to your door when most restaurants are long closed. With stops at Target, Subway, Wingstop, Taco Bell, and Smalls Sliders along the way, Ra'Chard is a proven operator who knows execution is everything. 📺WATCH AND LEARN📺 👉 How Insomnia is scaling from 360+ locations toward an 1,800-location global vision, and the "five strategic prongs" that are driving that growth 👉 Why Ra'Chard's mantra is "no cubicle decisions" and how asking his team "tell me where you're cheating" has become his secret weapon for surfacing field innovations worth codifying 👉 Ra'Chard's honest take on what gets oversold in the POS space and the RFP questions operators forget to ask that come back to bite them at 1AM ➕ PLUS: What Target taught Ra'Chard about leadership at age 24, how Insomnia balances in-house drivers vs third-party delivery, and his hot take on cookies for breakfast 🍪🌅 ➕➕ PLUS PLUS: Rapid fire answers on dunk vs no-dunk, crispy vs gooey edges, and one flagship at 100% vs 500 at 80%. Thank you Ra'Chard for the field-tested perspective. This one's packed with ops gold for anyone scaling a multi-unit brand. 🚀

Kathy Alcaras, Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Leader

🍽️ 40 years in restaurants. 14 on the ops floor before crossing over to tech. Today's guest has seen it all... and she's got the receipts. 🧾 Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sit down with Kathy Alcaras, a multi-unit restaurant technology leader with stops at Polly's Pies, Grill Concepts, Eureka Restaurant Group, Jollibee Foods North America, and Pressed Juicery - plus she's a Hospitality Technology Top Women in Restaurant Technology Award winner. 📺WATCH AND LEARN📺 👉 Why Kathy doesn't lead with technology - she leads with outcomes - and how 14 years on the ops floor made her a fundamentally different kind of IT leader 👉 How Kathy stood up online ordering in under two weeks during COVID - as an IT team of one - and the four-step playbook she used that still works today 👉 Why knowledge base management is the most underrated AI application in restaurants right now and why AI doesn't fail because of algorithms. It fails because of data 🧠 ➕ PLUS: Kathy shares what she's looking for in her next chapter, what's changed (and what hasn't) for women in restaurant tech, and why the best partnerships in this industry feel like making a new friend for life 🤝 Thank you Kathy for the candid conversation and for sharing a career's worth of hard-won perspective. The industry is better for having leaders like you in it. 🚀

Zach Richard, Sr. Director of Data Science @ McDonald's

🍟 THE GOLDEN ARCHES PULLED UP TO THE PODCAST 🍟 Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sit down with Zachary Richard [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#], Senior Director of Data Science at McDonald's [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#]. If you've ever wondered what it looks like when the world's most recognized restaurant brand puts serious firepower behind data and AI... this is the episode for you. 📺WATCH AND LEARN📺 👉 How Zach helped build McDonald's data science function from the ground up - including the messy reality of centralizing analytics inside a 75-year-old, heavily franchised global organization where even basic data like "does this location have a drive-thru?" wasn't always reliably available 👉 Why McDonald's treats its business as a three-legged stool of customers, crew, and corporate - and the hard lesson Zach's team had to learn about why the math alone will never be enough to move the needle at scale 👉 The surprising insight hiding inside McDonald's AI drive-thru data: it's not just an ops play. Voice AI can generate a never-before-available direct signal into customer behavior - what people order, what they ask for when it's unavailable, and whether LTO availability windows are actually calibrated correctly 👉 Why Zach believes the real long-term value of generative AI isn't just the solution you deploy - it's the novel data that gets created as a result, and how smart operators will use that data to drive decisions across menu, marketing, and supply chain 👉 The edge computing vision Zach is most excited about: AI-powered crew enablement tools that let a crew member snap a photo of a broken piece of equipment and instantly get the exact fix they need - right on their phone, without leaving the floor 👉 Why Small Language Models (SLMs) may outperform large ones for restaurant ops - and Zach's bold prediction that in two to three years, agile 10-20 unit operators could actually have a technological edge over the big chains 👉 The one restaurant tech trend Zach thinks the industry is sleeping on and why the ROI math and the all-or-nothing mindset of large chains is holding it back ➕ PLUS: Rapid fire! Zach's go-to McDonald's order and his prediction on whether a human will still be taking orders at the front counter in 2035. ➕➕ PLUS PLUS: Shoutout to Zeke, Zach's 15-year-old deaf dog who made a surprise cameo mid-interview by jumping onto the couch behind him. 🐶 Legend. Thank you, Zach! One of the most substantive conversations we've had on the show. If you care about where AI is headed in QSR - not the hype, but the reality - this one's a must-watch. 🚀