EAT'N: Toward a Smarter and Highly Efficient Dine-In and Take-out Experience

The dining experience today is time-consuming and fragmented for guests, and restaurateurs too are bearing the brunt of it. It is hard to realize how broken the system is; everyone involved has been experiencing it since the beginning. Imagine all the pre-meal steps involved: seating customers, providing menus, taking orders, punching the orders in the PoS. And all the post-meal steps: providing checks, processing payments, signing receipts, adding loyalty points. The actual ‘eating’ time for customers is squeezed between these pre-meal and post-meal time-consuming, administrative, and manual tasks. Imagine the chaos during rush hours; staff members overwhelmed with all these tasks and prone to error, as well as impatient customers, trying to get to their meetings in time. Therefore, dining at restaurants and collecting food orders from takeaways is in urgent need of automation. EAT’N is a game-changer that has shouldered the responsibility to dramatically improve guest experience and optimize restaurant operations. The San Francisco-based company offers an agile application for food establishments to deliver a memorable eating experience to the guests.

With EAT’N’s automation in place, ordering processes get simplified.

This eliminates the need for staff to approach the guests for administrative tasks such as taking menu orders, bringing checks, and processing payments. Thus, the platform can play a vital role in helping food establishments reduce their labor costs.

Everything is automatically done through the EAT’N app. Customers can dine in at their tables by ordering through the app. They can also place pickup orders if they want to take their meals back to work or home. “Analytics built into the application help restaurateurs understand customer needs better,” affirms Ali Yousafzai, the Founder of EAT’N. What is more, the analytics in the artificial intelligence (AI)-infused app reads guests’ behavior through machine learning (ML). This provides the information related to guests’ visiting time and preferences of food based on which restaurants or food trucks can deliver the right kind of service and at the right time.

Ease of access to the application is the key reason why EAT’N is able to assist restaurants. The restaurant sign up process is done online and can be completed in just a few minutes. Eaters can download the app free of cost from the App Store or Google Play store. Once installed, the app draws guests' attention to all the partner food vendors that are located nearby. Guests can choose from personalized menus that are provided to them in the app, and can also stay updated on every aspect of the ordering process.

“We believe in collaboration and tailoring the solutions based on our customers' needs,” says Yousafzai. EAT’N partners with food establishments and takes their restaurant menus into its database. For marketing, EAT’N utilizes social media tactics to help customers attract more guests.

In an instance, one of the vendors situated in downtown San Francisco was struggling to satisfy its customers despite providing delicious food before collaborating with EAT’N. Waiting for the orders was the biggest issue that its customers were facing. With EAT’N’s solution in hand, the vendor provided its customers with the liberty to receive orders once the food is ready. Customers were now able to save 25 percent of their time.

Yousafzai foresees the immense potential for technology in the restaurant industry. Technology can do wonders to optimize the dining processes, increasing revenue and customer satisfaction. Bagging innumerable positive feedbacks from its customers, EAT’N is looking forward to expanding its business and partnering with new restaurant chains and groups .