As restaurants across the country evolve to accommodate the new climate, and takeout and delivery becomes the new normal, demand for technology that eases these growing pains has skyrocketed. Established chains like NYC-based Hale and Hearty, which handles significant volume on a daily basis, now have to take on a complete alteration in how they operate. Whereas services like takeout and delivery used to only comprise about 5% of total sales, for many businesses, it’s now 50% or more.
The systems and technology most businesses have in place were never designed to deal with this volume. Thankfully, Los Angeles, CA based enterprise management company, Appetize, stands ready with its state-of-the-art platform to help businesses streamline and condense their operations.
“We’ve always looked at things from a customer’s perspective,” says Appetize VP of Sales Brian Whitney. “There are so many different types of customers always looking for different types of service. We define “customer” as everybody, from managers to business owners looking to streamline operations to their end-user patrons.
The common thread that links every type of customer is their desire to do what they need to do quickly and efficiently. At Appetize, we understand this and provide them with the tools to do so, regardless of which side of the counter they’re on.”
Appetize brings a unique advantage to the increased volume demands of the restaurant industry. The company cuts its teeth building out solutions for many of the nation’s largest stadiums including Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
Appetize’s fully cloud-based point of sale, digital ordering, and enterprise management platform is particularly suited to larger scale businesses, such as NYC’s Hale and Hearty, which has 20 locations across the city, Long Island and Boston. “Whereas platforms such as Clover and Square work well enough for smaller businesses, they’ve never scaled well as the size of the business increases,” said Whitney. “These platforms must be managed on a location to location basis, which is tedious and a large time sink for employees. With Appetize, changes can be pushed to every location from a single device, drastically reducing the time employees need to spend micromanaging the technology and instead allowing them to attend to customers more frequently.”
Another benefit Appetite offers over its competitors is its platform’s ability to collect and analyze data. “Appetize boasts a full suite of analytics reporting that’s both available at the store level as well as the corporate level,” Whitney explained.
“Furthermore, any report you can run at a store level, you can also run at an enterprise level and vice versa. This allows operators to see sales, data reports, and other relevant information through either the platform for a single site or those of a group of sites, depending on how our advanced enterprise hierarchy system is setup. You can also tag different locations to keep track of which type of data is coming from each one.” Appetize also offers robust business intelligence capabilities.
“With our open API, we’ve also been able to integrate with NetSuite. Through this, customers have access to their ERP package, giving them access to a service that typically comes at a much higher cost. What’s also unique about Appetize is that our APIs are actually what we use to power our own system,” mentioned the VP of Sales. “In our case, it’s actually beyond seamless. Most companies use different systems to collect and distribute their data. This creates discrepancies in what’s taken in and given out. We eliminate this issue by providing interface points with the exact same source material we collect. This increases transparency between us and our customers and allows them to provide their own with better service.”
As Appetize prepares to celebrate its first decade of providing solutions in 2021, the California company has already established itself as a leading player in the business management software and hardware industry. As more and more restaurants take a leap of faith and begin to embrace technology, Appetize is ready to help any and all not only make a smooth transition, but come out the other side more robust and capable than ever before.
