Pizza Today _ January 23 - 3

COMMENTARY
JEREMY WHITE
Tech Savvy?
I
n the major industry survey we
conducted last fall, we asked pizzeria
owners about investments in
technology. As an industry, often times
independents are slow to adopt new tech.
Sometimes that's because there's a cost
barrier that exists until the market ultimately
ushers in some aff ordability. Other
times it's because we struggle to see the
application on an independent level until
many years down the road.
I can recall, many years ago, a debate
on whether pizzerias should off er Wi-Fi.
" Will it encourage customers to linger
(this ain't a coff ee shop, after all!) and slow
down table turns? "
Good luck fi nding a pizzeria today that
isn't off ering free Wi-Fi to its patrons.
In a similar vein, we found in our survey
that 26.4 percent of pizzeria operators
say they do not off er online ordering. Th e
good news is that means the overwhelming
majority do off er what we now deem
an essential service. Here's the bottom
line: a robust online ordering platform
will increase your check averages, speed
up your service and decrease mistakes in
the ordering process. Plus, your customers
expect it and want it.
We'll have a seminar on " Maximizing
Online Ordering " at Pizza Expo 2023 in
Las Vegas for this very reason. It will be
led by Melissa Rickman, a Colorado-based
pizza maven who has written articles on
the very topic for us here in this magazine.
Succeeding in the online ordering game
really should be seen as a cost of entry to
the business these days. Rapid advancements
in tech are making online ordering
quite pedestrian at this point, to be frank.
Consider this information from
JEREMY WHITE
Editor In Chief
jwhite@pizzatoday.com
Technomic, Inc., which we included in a
consumer insights section of the State of
the Industry Report you can now access at
PizzaToday.com:
* 42% fi nd an online ordering system
where they can track their pizza order
to be appealing.
* 23% of American consumers would like
to order pizza from their smart TV.
Th at's a 20% increase from 2020.
Let's look at that second piece of data.
Nearly one-fourth of American pizza
consumers would like to have the ability
to order pizza from their smart TV. Th ink
about that. What pizza companies are
most likely to have the tech in place for
that now? Do Domino's and Pizza Hut
and others of their ilk come to mind? You
bet they do. You can cede that territory to
them right now, only to have to fi ght and
claw in a decade to take some of it from
them. Th at's what happened around 2000
when companies like Papa John's were
dominating the online ordering space and
the vast majority of independents thought
they'd never need to take orders via any
method but a landline telephone.
What's more revealing about that
statistic is the fact that it represents a
20% increase from when the question was
asked in 2020.
I received a press release the other day
in which Jet's Pizza announced it had
crossed the $100 million mark in sales
made utilizing AI technology. Admittedly,
as an independent operation, you aren't
on the same playing fi eld as a company
that can muster $100 million in sales via
artifi cial intelligence. But, according to
Best,
the release, Jet's fi rst began exploring AI
technology in the fall of 2019. Th at means
in just three years via text ordering, phone
bots and other AI, the pizza chain has
become an industry tech leader.
Can you invest millions in new tech as a
small business? Of course not. But you can
seek out ways to fully embrace aff ordable
tech and maximize your potential with it.
Because, like it or not, avoiding advances
in 2023 and beyond merely isn't feasible if
you want to stay relevant.
VOLUME 41 * NUMBER 01
JANUARY 2023
Photo by: Zach Bauman
zachbphotography.com
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Pizza Today _ January 23

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