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How Your Restaurant Can Step Up the Restaurant Experience with Data

Food is serious business. Now, on The Main Course, host Barbara Castiglia will invite insiders on the front lines of food to share their expertise, strategies, and forecasts for navigating the ever-changing restaurant industry.   Data and technology are used in restaurants but not used to build relationships. It’s mainly used to track customer purchases, track inventory, scheduling…

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Food is serious business. Now, on The Main Course, host Barbara Castiglia will invite insiders on the front lines of food to share their expertise, strategies, and forecasts for navigating the ever-changing restaurant industry.

Data and technology are used in restaurants but not used to build relationships. It’s mainly used to track customer purchases, track inventory, scheduling and reservations. Joel Montaniel, the CEO of SevenRooms, wanted to change that. He talked with Barbara Castiglia on The Main Course about data and how operators can build better relationships with customers.

Montaniel always wanted to build businesses and be an entrepreneur. He started in finance, and he got paid well, but it was an unfulfilling job.

“But, I wasn’t getting that itch scratched,” he said.

“In the early days, typical to a lot of startups, we wanted to become a company that was all about technology helping businesses build relationships with people” – Joel Montaniel

His passion for restaurants started when he found himself going to them during his free time. He didn’t have much free time, so he wasn’t able to attend them enough to become a regular. This piqued his curiosity and passion for restaurants. It started on the customer side but eventually led to the business side.

The idea for SevenRooms came when he noticed that if you didn’t attend a restaurant enough, they wouldn’t know anything about the customer. “They were numbers, not faces.”

“No matter what we could do for the consumer, the operator needed to pay for a role,” Montaniel said.

That was their lightbulb moment: Instead of focusing on the consumer, what if we focused on the operator.

SevenRooms helps restaurant operators leverage customer data to improve the experience. As part of their service, they offer Pickup and Delivery solutions; Reservation, Waiting, and Seating Management; Data and Guest Profiles; Guest Engagement, and Marketing.

“In the early days, typical to a lot of startups, we wanted to become a company that was all about technology helping businesses build relationships with people,” Montaniel said. In restaurants, relationships and people are the most important thing. It’s all about who you know. Technology is mostly transactional and focuses on purchases, etc. They wanted to change this perspective.

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Restaurant kitchen automation is moving from robots to connected equipment

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Sweetgreen says its Infinite Kitchen can assemble up to 500 bowls an hour and costs $450,000 to $550,000 per unit. Foodservice Equipment and Supplies reports 2024 Kitchen Innovations Award winners are adding sensors, AI and tighter links to POS, KDS and delivery systems. The operational shift is toward automation that removes steps and variability, not fully staffless restaurants.

  • 01The KI Awards trend is integration, robotics that season and pack, and pizza systems designed around POS, KDS and delivery feeds, which is where automation stops being a demo and starts being a production line.
  • 02For operators with small footprints or volatile staffing, equipment that recognizes food and auto-selects cook programs is becoming a training strategy as much as a cooking strategy.

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GLP-1 users cut food spend

GLP-1 users cut food spend

PwC and Acosta Group data show GLP-1 users are spending less on food and changing what they buy. PwC reported GLP-1 users spent about 11% less across most food categories, and the steepest pullbacks were in sweet and salty snacks and baked foods. Acosta Group found users report buying more fresh and high-protein items while reducing purchases of sweets, salty snacks and sugary beverages.

  • 01The bigger operational risk is mix, not just volume: surveys from PwC and Acosta Group point to snack and sugary beverage softness alongside protein and produce lift, a pattern worth validating in loyalty and POS data.
  • 02Pack architecture becomes a supply-chain decision: when 47% of users report smaller portions (PwC), right-sizing case packs, planograms, and menu portions can prevent margin leakage from shrink and waste.

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Restaurants are buying more customer tech even as visits stay 7% below 2019

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U.S. restaurant operators are budgeting more customer-facing technology for 2026, with 60% prioritizing customer experience investments, according to the National Restaurant Association data reported by Restaurant Business. The push comes while average chain restaurant occasions remain 7% below 2019 levels, a gap Restaurant Business says has persisted even as kiosks, digital menu boards, loyalty programs, and AI tools proliferated. Bar & Restaurant’s reporting on high-volume staffing shows why the timing matters operationally: with labor still tight and peak periods exposing process friction, operators are trying to shift guest decisions earlier, improve scheduling discipline, and free managers to coach instead of firefight. The near coin-flip in consumer sentiment, 41% saying tech improves hospitality versus 38% saying it hurts, indicates deployments that reduce staff burden without making the guest feel “sent to a screen” will be the ones that hold up in 2026 traffic conditions.

  • 01A useful benchmark for 2026 tech budgeting: 60% of operators plan to invest in customer-experience tech, but that category only outpaces front-of-house tech (54%) by six points, so many programs will compete for the same dollars and implementation bandwidth, according to the National Restaurant Association data reported by Restaurant Business.
  • 02The metric mismatch is becoming a planning risk: Restaurant Business says kiosks can lift sales per transaction, but operators still lack a clean way to measure whether customer-facing automation quietly suppresses visits, especially when chain occasions are already 7% below 2019.
  • 03For high-volume concepts, the highest-ROI “tech” may be workflow discipline: Bar & Restaurant reports operators leaning on forecasting, clear labor rules, and centralized reservation and add-on decisions to reduce peak-hour conflict, which can make customer tech feel like convenience rather than a substitute for hospitality.

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