Raghav Poddar was studying computer science at Columbia University when he became fascinated by the challenges restaurant owners face in maintaining an online presence. A self-described “foodie” — who never had much time to cook meals — Poddar was a heavy user of food delivery and pickup services in New York City.
“Many restaurants don’t have a large online presence, but they have the ability to cook more dishes and cuisines that represent their communities,” Poddar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “There may be a broader slowdown in technology, but restaurants need to embrace technology and become good at it now more than ever to protect their margins and increase their sales.”
The importance of an online footprint in the restaurant industry – and quality at that – cannot be overstated. According to a recent one reconnaissance77% of restaurant patrons visit a restaurant’s website before dining inside or ordering outside. Of this group, nearly 70% were discouraged or prevented from visiting a restaurant because of its website.
Poddar came up with a solution in Super request (formerly Forward Kitchens), a platform that provides websites, menus, photos, order management tools, marketing, financial management, and more for restaurants. Superorder announced today that it has raised $10 million in a funding round led by Foundation Capital with participation from Y Combinator Managing Director Michael Seibel, Cruise co-founders Kyle Vogt and Daniel Kahn, I2BF Global Ventures and others.
The core of Superorder’s mission is to help restaurants boost their business through “off-premises” dining – i.e. delivery and pick-up services. The pandemic has fueled the growth of off-premises dining as restaurants have been forced to pivot. Two-thirds of adults say they are more likely to order takeout food from restaurants than they were before the pandemic, Restaurant.org Reports.
But Poddar says many restaurant owners, newly burdened with digital administrative tasks, are still leaving money on the table.
“Restaurateurs’ increased reliance on technology does not solve the challenges of creating, managing, and understanding how to leverage this technology,” he said. “A simple task like changing business hours on all delivery platforms (like Grubhub and UberEats) for one day can take dozens of clicks and hours of time.”
Superorder attempts to simplify things by allowing restaurants to create an online presence, including food delivery, where they can create multiple digital storefronts and accompanying financial and operational dashboards without having to connect to each delivery platform.
Superorder also consults with restaurants, helping them launch “virtual restaurants” or storefronts for different brands that operate within their kitchens. Poddar says Superorder uses data science to determine which dishes are needed in a restaurant’s delivery range and works with the restaurant to create menus and images for that brand, which Superorder then lists on third-party delivery platforms.
It should be noted that virtual restaurants or “ghost kitchens”, a concept that has increased in popularity during the pandemic, do not have high success rates.
Restaurants often struggle With the cost of finding additional delivery people for their virtual restaurants, providing labor and marketing for a location that is almost invisible to the public. Some third-party delivery platforms have spoken out against virtual restaurants, accusing the restaurants they create of flooding the platforms with repetitive menus and listings. As of March, UberEats requires virtual kitchens to maintain a high average rating — above 4.3 stars — and a low percentage of canceled orders.
But Superorder claims to be more thoughtful in its approach to creating virtual kitchens than its competitors. First, the platform uses artificial intelligence to generate menus and images for each virtual restaurant menu, similar to… tools progress By restaurant technology startups Swipeby and Lunchbox. Data from Grubhub reveals that restaurants with photos of their menu items receive at least 70% more orders and 65% higher sales than those without photos.
Naturally, one wonders how similar the AI-generated images are to actual menu items. Serious mistakes can put restaurants on the hook for lawsuits for false advertising. But Poddar dismisses these concerns, pitching Superorder’s generative AI as a way for restaurants to deliver “close” to real food photos without avoiding having to hire a professional food photographer.
“Our competitors use the same brand in hundreds of restaurants, creating a ‘one-to-hundred’ relationship – preventing restaurants from controlling the brand’s quality, image and relationship with their customers,” Poddar said. “With Superorder, restaurants can create a website through a search-based interface by typing a query such as ‘Make a website for an Italian restaurant in New York’ and choosing a design template. They can create compelling food photo assets and craft creative, well-written menu descriptions and item names with a click.” Simple.
The terms “good writing” and “creative” are also moot, given productive AI Obvious rhetorical limitations. I would be concerned about accuracy. After all, generative AI tends to invent facts.
Somewhat worryingly, it’s also not clear what powers Superorder’s generative AI features — that is, whether the AI models are developed internally or using a third-party API. The former may be more error-prone; We asked Superorder to clarify.
But other aspects of the Superorder platform seem downright useful, like the order management module that consolidates orders from all third-party delivery platforms into a single pane of glass. Superorder also syncs menus across platforms while optimizing menu item prices for conversion rates and sales, and automatically reconciles sales, taxes, commissions, marketing, and fees across platforms to identify errors (and hopefully not introduce new ones).
Superorder clearly has its fingers in a lot of pies – and as a result is competing with a lot of startups. Poddar sees Nextbit, Virtual Dining Concepts, and Ordermark as Superorder’s main competitors, but one could argue that the company also competes with ghost kitchen companies including MadEats, CloudEats, and Lunchbox — at least on the digital asset management side.
But New York City-based Superorder has been growing slowly but surely since emerging from Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 cohort. With a staff of about 70 people, it now operates in more than 180 cities across the U.S. with more than 1,500 restaurant clients and has facilitated about 1.5 million orders. Until now.
Moreover, there is a lot of money in the market – more than enough for trading, one would assume. newly a report It is estimated that the online food delivery market will grow from $160 billion in 2022 to $483 billion by 2032.
Poddar says the plan is to use Superorder’s new funding round to expand the company’s operations, sales and engineering teams.
“In addition to expanding the customer footprint, we will also expand our product offering to become a complete off-premises operating system for restaurants,” Poddar said. “We are working to further expand our restaurant software suite to become a comprehensive software platform that provides restaurants with the tools to increase profitability from delivery and takeout.”