Episode 14 - Cody Jones
Jen Kern: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Restaurants Reinvented. This is Jen Kern, your hostess for the show, and I'm so excited today to welcome our first product and technology specialist. Cody Jones. Hi Cody.
[00:00:38] Cody Jones: [00:00:38] Hey there. How are you?
[00:00:40] Jen Kern: [00:00:40] I'm great. I'm excited to be talking to you today. As I said, you're our first Qu member on the show and really excited to talk to you cause you have so much product and technical experience and insights.
[00:00:53] And you're just one of those folks that I feel like, has the future of the industry like, right in the back of your twinkling of your eye. As you know, the show is all about reinventing restaurants. That pertains to marketers, as it pertains to the brand, as it pertains to really ditching the playbook and the status quo.
[00:01:11] And I know that you vibe with all those things. So with that if you could please give our listeners a little background about you how you started in industry and found your way to where you are today
[00:01:21] Cody Jones: [00:01:21] for sure For sure so you mentioned I'm a product manager here at Qu which basically means our job is to really make the product work the way it should for the users who use it and ultimately I've gotten here through an odd journey most product owners or developers right They start writing code and eventually find themselves wanting to helm the ship that they've been writing on for so long And my path was more of a I like restaurant technology and I like building things And then I put my hands together and so it started as with most things and most boys it started with a car I wanted to buy a car and so I wouldn't get a job And that ended up being because I was 14 and had a worker's permit I was only allowed to work the cash register So I ended up working at point of sale terminal for Oh good Two years to afford a car and in the process started to understand unfortunately how that thing works got behind it Started using it And as a angry user cash register saw the blog in it it kinda put me on this kind of a weird journey from there I didn't realize that we ended up actually working on the things but Lo and behold my love of technology and restaurants wound me to a place where I was selling said cash registers supporting them And then I found myself going up the enterprise ladder right As I sold to more and more places and got out of my home state of Arkansas where I was a little bit of fish and a little bitty pond I moved to Chicago and found myself working with bigger and bigger clients who needed more and more things of these point of sale systems and started finding myself on the inside of the restaurants working with the operators themselves trying to understand those problems and the nuances of each different type of restaurant in each different type of enterprise and how they fit together And obviously point of sale was a theme right I just found myself going from various incarnations of where I fit into the puzzle to finally um started building stuff to go along with these point of sales started building some web ordering applications And just found that building things was so much fun And actually came across Qu around the same time I was working with enterprise clients who were also working with Qu and obviously found a thing of love right This product is a beautiful thing but that I can go on for hours but that's not the question but ultimately yeah took that path again from more of a restaurant technology background in product more than a development background into product So I hope at least that means is I've got a nice Touch with the pulse of what's going on for the operators and hopefully some true empathy I hope most days but anyway hope that's okay
[00:03:39] Jen Kern: [00:03:39] Yeah that's great And you've been on the operator side right I know that you were with some brands
[00:03:45] Cody Jones: [00:03:45] I have both managed restaurants and have been the lonely delivery driver in sandwich maker I worked at a Jimmy John's kind of through all different stages of the cycle right Making sandwiches delivering sandwiches managing Way too many pizza delivery jobs and food jobs to mention I've waited way too many tables in my day but it does teach you a certain kind of empathy for those users Right I think it was Bourdain who said get between somebody in there $65 pork chop you'll start to learn a little bit about the kind of pressures that amount and a kitchen and getting through a shift you become a family There's things that kind of occur there And so if you're Providing technology to those people You basically have to be in that same position You have to treat it like it's part of the family Cause if it goes down to the middle of the Friday night trust me they will notice things will go awry so yeah
[00:04:29] Jen Kern: [00:04:29] Yeah that's so true I mean I love that quote getting between someone and their $65 pork chop for me it's even my $20 bowl that thing better be full at the top I actually logged a complaint last week cause I had a bowl delivered and it was like half full I was like are you kidding me Thankfully the brand Gave me my money back And that was very happy about that but I digress So I'm curious in all these different jobs so while you've been in all sorts of aspects of the restaurant industry I'm thinking of you as like this tech wizard guru and restaurant operating like savvy guy but you've done a lot of different roles what did you See with marketers How often did you work with marketers and what was your perspective and kind of view of them and these roles
[00:05:15] Cody Jones: [00:05:15] So yeah and obviously the different enterprises have totally different approaches to their marketing teams I think we've talked about this before the arts and craft department Is sometimes how it seemed with some with others They're much more in tune and they actually will pit technology and marketing together to see the results of their campaigns And so a lot of times as an it director I would find myself right in the crux of that Between someone who needs to put out a campaign and then someone who wants to see the results of that campaign right Your CFO and the operators who have to enact that campaign And so there's this dance that occurs Between being incepted And then the practicality of it actually being implemented at the store level in a way that the cashiers can actually execute that in a meaningful way that results in information that you guys can then act upon and all of that's limited by your tech stack It's the information again garbage in garbage out If we can't get it there's nothing to work with and if we can't implement it on a timely basis it's really hard for you guys to come up with a campaign that's based on reality right That's based in a certain timeline that you guys can actually put forth A lot of the times when I was changing out tech stacks even it would be heavily driven by obviously financial reports and things like that But very closely behind that was marketing because they were just like look we can't move fast enough If we come up with a campaign to deal with some sales dip that you guys have brought to us we can't actually act within a quarter It takes so long to update menus and get it out to the field but it literally keeps us from doing our job So it's a huge intersection If done correctly it can also enable each other very quickly right Especially at Qu You can give marketers their keys to the kingdom They can go in and get access to everything they need themselves And even to some level it can be set up with the marketers eye They can go and say we want to configure these menus And then again AP test them try to figure out how exactly we're going to use that because we can configure everything at the enterprise level and then push that down into the stores So again I think it's a huge opportunity when done correctly
[00:07:09] Jen Kern: [00:07:09] Yeah And it's so important today even more than ever I mean as you know I've been in B2B technology for my almost my whole career And so I'm super passionate about tech and the role that marketers play with technology decisions And one thing that's shocked me when I came to Qu is that there aren't often marketers involved in the POS decision making or they get pulled in late
[00:07:33] Cody Jones: [00:07:33] Exactly They're the last person to the party Yeah
[00:07:35] Jen Kern: [00:07:35] I'm just going to go on record and say that's wrong Like the board need to be involved early and often because of what you just said because they're pushing out campaigns they need the guest's data They need to make sure that all the tech stack for the company is working synchromoniously If I said that word with the marketing Systems and digital marketing systems And there are a lot of disconnects that I've seen across the board since I've been here so anyway let's take a little bit more into that like so you're a POS expert you've been working on some pretty cool stuff here at Qu that has to do with the future and integrating tech stacks So can you give me a little glimpse into what you're doing I'm just going to say with ghost kitchens and hosts kitchens and that new product that we've been working on
[00:08:27] Cody Jones: [00:08:27] Yeah totally so yeah our core competency is that point of sale but clearly as you mentioned these kitchens are having to adapt right We all are And the ghost kitchens is nothing new It's been around for awhile is it means a production in a way of consolidating and getting some efficiencies back into the space but with COVID hitting and this opportunity slash need paradigm If we have something we have space But no one's coming to it and we have food and people want it but they don't want to come in to get it It's become just a much more demanded thing right It's an Avenue that has become less of a fringe opportunity and much more of an entrepreneurial opportunity We go out there and really innovate in the space right now And I think people are more willing to accept that innovation at this point in time so what we have done in order to kind of meet this moment is decided that there's obviously a number of things we've hated for a while and this is a perfect opportunity to kill them one of which is the tablet farms right We know there are these ghost kitchens that are receiving all of their orders clearly through aggregators because they have 10 brands And they all need to come into one kitchen They all need to be produced there And then they're going to go out to wherever the end point is whether you're a ghost kitchen which is typically housing multiple brands maybe one's you know maybe ones you've don't Or host kitchen which is I really think a much more clever approach I may be biased but the idea behind taking an unused space and taking known brands that don't exist in the area and bringing them in whilst still keeping this community four-walled and entity up and running during these hard times it's just it's so appealing and it's the right thing to do and so I feel like there's this moment where the product that we had internally was a way for us to absorb third party channels Right we can take in Uber eats we can take in Postmates and DoorDash and these products allow us to be in the middle But what we decided was in this moment of need there needs to be some way for us to take these entities host kitchens right Let them not have 10 tablets let them operate with hopefully one tablet to rule them all and really just make it easier for a new kitchen who's absorbing these new concepts to really get up and spun up without a whole bunch of new learning curves for every different platform and not have to manage 20 menus because they're trying to innovate right now the thing they shouldn't have to do is manage 20 different tablets and 20 different couriers vendors in prices It just doesn't make any sense So yeah and that's really our kitchen app product is aimed at that aim of the spectrum right Getting those host kitchens up and running as well as some more kind of future thinking kitchen management solutions in order to make the production of said food faster but those are those things that really in the vein of can we get more orders in the door Can we let you fill them efficiently And keep track of them efficiently so that your end users your guests are satisfied They end up with an exceptional experience
[00:11:07] Jen Kern: [00:11:07] And integrate all the data right through one menu
[00:11:10] Cody Jones: [00:11:10] That's it And with one menu we can really take everything and push it down into these third parties It gives us the ability to manage these menus and then it gives us the ability to aggregate all that data that would have come from 12 tablets and 12 sources that you would go to 12 places to hear reports from and put that all under the house of Qu And we can see all that data from one place Act on it export it Exactly
[00:11:31] Jen Kern: [00:11:31] yes And so I don't want to skim over this because it's a really cool concept and very important and I'm not sure how many of our listeners are familiar with this term hosts kitchens can you provide a quick definition of host kitchens And obviously we're working with Franklin junction in that regard and the difference between a host kitchen and a ghost kitchen both of which are very interesting and good opportunities for marketers to be bringing to their operators as a viable business opportunities and new channels for driving revenue right now
[00:12:05] Cody Jones: [00:12:05] Absolutely And there are a slew of both And so the ghost kitchens are really entities in and of themselves right So they've popped up in various incarnations sums that I don't care for as much For instance the parking lots turned into feed halls seem a little strange to me but there are other companies that are doing it in ways that I think are very innovative And the idea is it's not an existing kitchen It's a new kitchen and its entire purpose is to Play host to a number of kitchens but it's really doing it again in this ghost manner because it's not a real place And it's not a real store It can be in a strip mall It can be down the street from a you know black building with no windows there's a couple of incarnations There's a couple of people fighting over what that means for communities and the restaurants that have been lost and how it replacing those little black boxes may not be wonderful but the result is you get Multiple brands able to spread throughout the geographic areas that they may not actually have the infrastructure to spread to by taking advantage of these ghost kitchen concepts And they're really these third parties almost similar to the third party aggregators to get orders in This is almost an aggregator to help you get your orders out and so to me that's butted up against what we're calling the host kitchen the Franklin junction approach which is really more we have real estate right We have these restaurants that right now especially right now are hurting I can't get it people to come in sometimes by law sometimes because they just don't want to right It's still a little scary out there And so people want this food right They still need food And for a lot of places there are tons and tons of open space And kitchen space that they have available to them That's not a capacity and they have one brand that they're selling out of that kitchen So their ability to sell on third parties is there but it's limited right It's definitely lower than their kitchen capacity So if instead they can partner with again a company like Franklin junction and bring in these third party services but pair them with more than one concept Pair them with something else they can make in their kitchen We've seen with the Ruby Tuesdays that their kitchens are very versatile They can make seafood they can make hotdogs they can make all sorts of others secondary non-related items to the core movie Tuesday offering And it makes sense in their kitchen It makes sense from a capacity perspective They have it they can do it And then when they're out in the store they're actually still keeping a part of the community alive It's still a restaurant it's still there and it allows them to increase the revenue And these times like today and in the future it's Also a way to expose brands right They get to expose these brands to the communities that Ellis otherwise would never see them come in because it was financially or just for other reasons not Feasible right they weren't planning to expand the brand footprint to that particular region and so this really allows maybe not another foothold but another plan of attack For anyone who's out there trying to do both
[00:14:47] Jen Kern: [00:14:47] well yeah And it opens up a whole new guest demographic and market right So expanding guest profile
[00:14:55] Cody Jones: [00:14:55] that's it then you don't risk this again my food came out of a black box I don't know where it came from or who made it and it makes you feel like maybe there's still some connection there's people on the other side of that still making your food which I like
[00:15:07] Jen Kern: [00:15:07] Yeah And there's a huge financial slash efficiency play here right from my understanding what the ghost kitchen model the operators clearly a lot less real estate Less overhead you're saving on the footprint as well as a lot of other costs And you're sharing those costs with other brands that are using that kitchen and with the host kitchen model there's financial inefficiencies on both sides for both the brands So the brand that might be coming in is going to pay a lot less and the brand that's not using all of its space all the 24 hours is going to have some incremental revenue
[00:15:45] Cody Jones: [00:15:45] that's exactly it And since these forms of orders are coming in and don't be wronged to go orders are harder to plaque They're harder to get ready to go But they are ultimately more efficient since they come in all through one channel right And since they're coming into our one tablet it's one place to get all the information and make your orders from which also makes the process that much more efficient And so if you can get in there and get into that rhythm where that one kitchen is making multiple concepts well and efficiently and getting all that reporting data I just think it's a great experiment for showing How we can really fine tune that kitchen experience to be this engine of revenue which is of course to your point going back to the marketing is driven based on those decisions that you learn from the results of those campaigns So the more we can close that loop or get it tighter to where every decision you guys make is based on data Which is then quickly and easily adapted to for the menu adapted for all your third party menus And you can really have actionable data that's quickly actionable is just it's a dream
[00:16:46] Jen Kern: [00:16:46] Yeah that's what we need We're all shooting for that and I think one of the things that's not talked about enough it was talked about for awhile in the industry And then I think people got sick of hearing it is this whole single menu management thing And what you alluded to the tablet farms I'm still shocked when I go to some places and see eight different tablets just sitting on a counter Exposed to the guests even some of them aren't even behind the counter like towards the kitchen
[00:17:10] Cody Jones: [00:17:10] from a marketer's perspective You're looking at it going Oh my goodness The brand is represented horribly here They look ugly and nasty and gross And from an operator technology person's perspective I'm looking at it and going Oh that's going to break All the wires are strong about it's going to fall on the ground There's no way that one's parking Tell me she's not charging her phone on that Right I just started to go insane and cause in the best of times the technology works in your favor But it's Murphy's law out there right Friday nights are whenever your computer decides to restart it's when every cable becomes unplugged of its own volition so I try to in the restaurant technology world simplify everything So to your point One menu one tablet because we were adults and we run enterprise organizations and I don't want to run my organization on a fire tablet right.?I want to run it on something that's restaurant hardened that plugs into the wall That can't hopefully be knocked off the counter with a slip of a drink so there are a number of things there that get me but need the least to say we need to have a simplified approach right We need to be able to have a resilient and simple solution no one wants 10 tablets right No one wanted that That's just what happened and so hopefully between one menu and one tablet we can come in here and really just show operators what it's like to work in it I try to live my life by this concept of Lagom Which is a Swedish term It basically means not too much not too little right Just enough I'm saying I'm sure I'm botching it some person is going to get on here and correct me the idea is to not ever over design something or under design it get it just right And there's this nice middle ground where things will work simply and well And I think We need it more than ever in the restaurant industry We need to take that approach it's hard We want to be the Ikea of point of sales What I'm trying to say
[00:18:53] Jen Kern: [00:18:53] Oh I liked that I liked that idea And talking about these things fast forward now we're in a pandemic all of a sudden we see restaurants sprinting to catch up in terms of technology Sprinting like all of a sudden now it's okay getting serious Let's get serious about this digital transformation thing
[00:19:14] Cody Jones: [00:19:14] Right It's funny Cause everyone wants to have digital transformation right It's the big buzzword has been for you years I worked with lot's of companies such as Walmart who are all in that trench We're trying to take anything that's analog today and make it digital so that we can get these things moving forward We can get processes more efficient But then COVID hit And that went from a nice to have especially in the restaurant industry to a we must have I think the best example is digital As you mentioned it went from maybe you're lucky if it's 20 or 30% of your footprints digital And you've managed to get some people using your digital platform to where restaurants are surviving on purely digital ordering And I say surviving that's probably not the right word Right They are getting by barely And a lot of them need those channels to work all the time efficiently as their only source Now And a lot of them are building models just around that No storefront again these host kitchens right They can't have people come in So it's all about these delivery services It's all about digital and to the point I think it's back to the efficiencies right If you can't have your business open in the model that you originally intended You're not going to have the same cost structure Everything's different Your labor costs may be higher because you're having to put more effort into getting these to go oders out And there's no people on the floor There's no booze And a lot of these restaurants to sell for Europe you know higher margin items so you're just not getting a lot of that And so for us to be able to bring those efficiencies into that space I think it's going to be huge any who
[00:20:40] Jen Kern: [00:20:40] Yeah Yeah the good news of the all that is people are Starting to pay attention and are starting to get really serious about their tech stack And I say good news because for us it's good news at the same time they have a limit with how much they can focus on right now and their budgets what they can afford So we're not probably not going to solve all that today
[00:21:03] Cody Jones: [00:21:03] it is a good point And the folks out there need these solutions There's a level to which some people are seeing this as an opportunity and building new tech stocks specifically to go into this new market And there are others who are trying to adapt so to your point I hope the offerings that we're spinning up will be both ends of that spectrum Right Those who are still trying to get from point a to point B and those who may be looking to take advantage of what I think is a new paradigm right This first kind of idea I think both are possible Both are good And to your point we really need to make sure we're handling both ends of it for sure
[00:21:33] Jen Kern: [00:21:33] Yeah and when you talk about that paradigm shift what would you say marketers need to do from a paradigm shift standpoint when it comes to these topics when it comes to pandemic-proofing your business and considering the ghost and host like how would you put that for them
[00:21:52] Cody Jones: [00:21:52] I think it's a great tool Start using it to your disposal right at this point if you know that your traditional model whatever it was if you're a quick service restaurant and you didn't have a whole lot of table service or anything like that we have a couple of models that we're working with that are these I call them fast-fine Right They're kind of a mix between table service and fast service and so there's this nice place where they could really live that now it's harder they can't get through that the same way and so I think there's a way that the marketers in those perspectives can come and look at how do we up our digital game Which obviously may immediately mean something augmented and the tech stack Cause maybe you don't have native online ordering your using a third party which allows you to make no changes on your own So how can you go about taking that leap Right And as a marketer how does that interact with how you've typically gotten people into the store how you've gotten butts in seats If you're now switching to digital for the first time that's one approach If you're just trying to change your digital approach maybe it's more about how do we make this a custom experience So I always have tried many times to emulate Sweetgreen right In terms of their online ordering experience it is second to none And you can compare that to some of the kind of white label solutions like Olo So if you're working with Olo right now and you've got a white label solution that's very basic and you want to move up to that next tier of a fully customized online ordering system that allows you to bake in marketing campaigns bake in more user centric design Pull in ways to be more cognizant about that order in that user give the salad sweet green effect or again the I really think Domino's kind of pioneered it right The ability to see the cognizance of your order What place it's in what's going on with it and take that to the next level And that's a marketing piece to me That's a way to keep the customer engaged to build brand loyalty And so as a marketer find out which place you're going to Are you just spinning it up or do you need to take it to the next level And then your tech stack will definitely play a component in that And again I don't think there's a world in which the it department and marketing departments shouldn't be in lockstep because one enables the other And if we're setting you guys up for failure there's no way to move forward so I just think it's a great pairing
[00:23:57] Jen Kern: [00:23:57] So insightful Cause as you were talking I'm like thinking about all the touch points between the technology the food the consumer the marketer the guest advocating for the guest getting that loyal guests to return making sure they stay happy
[00:24:15] Cody Jones: [00:24:15] Or they get a half salad Their bowl half-full and you got to call them on it And I mean I will say this there are a bunch of people doing this using technology for that purpose in marketing you've heard me go on about Michael's story on the pizza folks at length they're not doing it wrong they have this thing called the plug it's basically a text platform and I don't know this to be true but I believe it from what I understand it's both internal and external use and it's I think and I've talked about doing it here You can text to a number but I think it goes to Slack That's what I think happens Or maybe it's a third party tool I don't know this but I think it's what's happened And then somebody somewhere tons of people will answer your question Right So like I had an issue with my pizza the other day I was like there's a line like 20 deep Should I probably just wait until they you know like a little bit longer than they were like yeah give it 10 to 15 minutes And they're like and if it's not ready let us know We'll take care of it And it was ready and there was no big deal but I got immediate feedback
[00:25:07] Jen Kern: [00:25:07] when you say there was a line you mean outside the store
[00:25:10] Cody Jones: [00:25:10] Oh my God Yeah Here in Bethesda like Every time they have new special Oh yeah yeah and of course they're socially distancing as they should And so people have to bounce out and it's not allowed in the store and it's a process but the pizza and those garlic knots they're so worth it anyway all that to say I think they also use that internally So if I as a manager I'm having issues I can get on the book I can ask questions to corporate I can ask questions to the executive team and just that transparency that it provides and that ability to Give people the way they communicate Text everyone texts People are expecting that kind of immediate response I don't think any other restaurant group is doing it that way And it's just Oh it's so clever I like it so much
[00:25:47] Jen Kern: [00:25:47] Oh yeah Yeah And I really honed in on that with Andy he's the new president over there And Because I remember five years ago and I actually said to him I think you were one of the first restaurant groups in the tech space And he said well yeah you know we're the ones that really committed all into it Early on Right Cause I remember five years ago being in a Georgetown restaurant and they're like text us anything And I'm like what but yeah he talks about that And the other thing you did just touched on that week cause we didn't talk about the internal side of it is communications and that's something as a lifelong marketer like communications tends to fall pretty squarely in the marketing team's responsibility even though I will avow that Everyone's responsible for communications
[00:26:29] Cody Jones: [00:26:29] Should be Should be
[00:26:30] Jen Kern: [00:26:30] but marketing is typically the one to help drive it, pull it all together. And make sure across teams there's strong communications. People know internally what's going on with the company. And then, the external side of it. And having that kind of tool when there's such low barriers to entry with texting, it's just so easy.
[00:26:47] It's bing, right. To keep the company unified as well. they are obviously exemplary across the board in terms of how they communicate with their own internal staff and advocate for them at every turn. I mean their voting time, the rest of it. I mean, it's just, that's a huge other topic. But to your point, they've not only taking that approach to simplify things, do that channel texting. But they've gone to the other end. So it's my understanding. They built a very similar, OMS product to manage their orders. When it comes into the store that they worked with a development shop and built it themselves. I mean, they are very much a tech forward company and I think they just spent up their new fast venture company.
[00:27:23] Cody Jones: [00:27:23] Did you see that? So basically I think they're looking to bring a, restaurant that fits those qualifications. Technology first, community first, real good ties to giving back and doing right. And they're looking to bring a known brand. A brand that's already been existing public. And I think it's really just their way of saying, Hey, we really do think this works, right?
[00:27:43] There is a combination of attributes that make someone, an unfair advantage. And I think that technology, obviously, I'm a little biased, is a human component in that, but the rest of what they're doing too, it's just a kudos.
[00:27:55] Jen Kern: [00:27:55] Yes. Just such a phenomenal brand. So we talked about host kitchens. We talked about ghost kitchens. Touched on Franklin Junction. How all this pertains to marketers. Question for you.
[00:28:06] I heard someone say ghost kitchens and host kitchens. They don't apply to everyone. They're not right for everyone.
[00:28:13]Cody Jones: [00:28:13] I think what the ghost part of that I can certainly get on board. There are certain concepts, certain things that just wouldn't make sense in that perception because they have such a brand that you have to go and be part of it. Right? To go and be part of the ambience is the brand, right?
[00:28:25] And that's just, it's gonna be hard to translate digitally. But there are so many concepts and I think we are right in the apex of it because we fit into this quick service rom so tightly and quick services, so easy to make a digital experience out of, that most of the people we deal with, it's going to be a no brainer, right?
[00:28:41] Especially with the host kitchen. If you are just trying to expand your brand and you want to do it with a known kitchen, that has certain ties to its own community. Without breaking those components. I think host kitchens make so much sense. The ghost kitchen is really a matter of it almost feels to me like an A/B test.
[00:28:57] Like, if you want to try out a market, maybe throw in a host kitchen, or a ghost kitchen for a little while and see if it makes sense for you to put in your own brick and mortar. But I don't know. The ghost kitchen to me is such an enigma, right? Like, it is everything and nothing all at once.
[00:29:09] It's the combination of a catering hub, or a commissary kitchen mixed with multitenant, which is interesting. But also fraught with all sorts of like issues with brand consistency. I feel the same about like delivery. I really feel like in house delivery is the way to go. And I think technology could enable that better. Domino's owns their own delivery and it's a huge thing.
[00:29:32] So all of that to say, I think host kitchens make a lot of sense, ghost kitchens are really a place to test things out.
[00:29:39] And I think a lot of brands will get their start up there. And then I'm hoping but, you know, doors will open again. People will have kitchens again. And then I think it just becomes an interesting avenue for efficiency, right? More than a thing born out of COVID, it becomes a thing born out of just wanting to be more efficient and use them.
[00:29:55] Jen Kern: [00:29:55] Well, I like how we've been circling around this topic of what I would call the unbreakable bond between marketing and tech. Right?
[00:30:04] And I would say, I want it to be unbreakable.
[00:30:07] What advice would you give to marketers given that, tech and marketing are very intertwined?
[00:30:12] What advice would you give to marketers to be able to advocate more for the technology that they're using? The technology decisions that the company is making and the technology that's brought in house? I mean, I had one guest, Steph Hoppy who's said it best. She said there shouldn't be a talk discussion internally about a MarTech stack. It's about the company's tech stack.
[00:30:35] It's not like our tech stack and there's another stack. No, it's all one stack.
[00:30:40]Cody Jones: [00:30:40] I totally agree. I think that for a restaurant, for instance, your technology stack, it's all encompassing, right? It is HR to financial. To in the store. To marketing and it should be everything all under one roof. And again, I do typically take a best of breed approach, right? I really want the solutions for each person that they need, right?
[00:30:57] So if marketing needs their project tool of choice and the development team has a different one that is perfectly fine and is absolutely the way it should be. But you should find ways to integrate those tools. To have sources of data, and then have that data reused throughout the other tools.
[00:31:12] So that same way that we would approach it. Even here within the four walls of Qu. Whenever the independent teams are working on their own tools, we should bring that all together under one roof. We do it using a tool called a hop. And so basically it's development staff, the CXP staff, the sales staff, and hopefully we can, make sure marketing is always tied in there as well, is any request that comes through is then put into one single place in a repository. And so the same thing is true. Any their tech stack, right? If you can bring in your ideas, whether it's a new marketing campaign or a new digital transformation, a campaign from the executive team, or again in product. We want to build a new, cool, fancy feature. Whatever those things are, if we can make sure the tech stack that you're using for whatever your business approach is, all tied together. You find yourself in this nice place where everyone gets to do the work and the tool of choice, but the data is assessable.
[00:32:04] And so to your point, as a restaurant marketer, those may be things like, I want to make sure that my point of sale and my digital offerings are fully aligned with the mechanisms that I need to be able to put in place to achieve my campaigns. And so as soon as I initiate the concept of a campaign that goes into the proper working tools for the organization to keep everybody on the same page and to make sure that if a marketing campaign requires a product or a technical from the point of sale perspective counterpart, right?
[00:32:35] And another piece of work that you can tie those things together and track them uniformly across the quarter for the year. To me, that tech stack should never end at the four walls of the restaurant or the enterprise organization. They should really be looked at as a holistic, organizational entity.
[00:32:49] A thing that ties us all together. And so again, those tools may be separate, right? You may need a different tool for each organizational member or unit. But if they're all tied together in a uniform textile, you will find yourself able to reuse data that came from another area of the business that you never thought would be valuable versus the other. The spectrum which we've all been in.
[00:33:08] You find there's data that's been collected and it's somewhere. And it doesn't do anything and you can't access it, or leverage it. so again, I really think to your point, if you view them as anything other than a single tech stack, you'll end up siloing something off. You'll end up hurting off your nose to spite your face somewhere.
[00:33:26]
[00:33:26] Jen Kern: [00:33:26] Absolutely. This has been so much fun talking to you, Cody. You're so smart. You're so entrenched in the industry. I really appreciate your time. I think, as we wrap, I'd like to hear your thoughts and predictions, as you look in your crystal ball for the industry. I seen you over there months ago, I saw you doing your touchless wizardry with the kitchen screens and making the screens move, not even touching them, but using gestures.
[00:33:48] And I was just so blown away. So I know you have a good pulse on the future and what may be coming.
[00:33:55]Cody Jones: [00:33:55] I like to pretend myself a futurist for sure. And I definitely get excited about new cool things. I'm definitely your local mad scientist for sure. I'll say this, as you alluded to the big thing on my mind right now is touchless tech and it comes across from all sorts of reasons, but COVID is clearly a good driver. Before COVID we had all been talking about kiosks and the fact that a statistic came out that was something like 99.9% of kiosks have feces on them. I know, it's horrible. It's ah, but it's true. It's like money, right? Like everything has it. It's horrible. And so my initial thought was like, what about touchless, kiosks?
[00:34:30] Cause didn't no one has to touch that. But it immediately went into the kitchen. Like I said, coming from an operator background and working in kitchens, I hate nothing more than the ticket that falls into the Mariner. Right? Wow. It's the worst. And then you're trying to go around and get someone to reprint this ticket thing.
[00:34:46] It's like completely illegible. so the idea of a kitchen screen was always appealing to me. And then this idea of having to like touch something with your dirty hands to bump things off the screen was also gross. And so I just keep coming back to you. Can we go Minority Report?
[00:35:02] It's been what, 10 years now, since that movie came out. I've been all sorts of tech conventions where they have touchless technology. But then you never see it come down to the actual user. But in the last year, it's almost like my childhood. Me is sitting around going, it's finally here.
[00:35:17] It's finally here. Touchless tech has become a huge thing. And as you saw me playing around with the office with some kind of gen one touch tech. Which was very much not suitable for restaurants get dirty. And restaurants have issues. But I think we're there. There's a couple of new technologies that I won't name by name here, but that will, I think, changed the game in the space here and make the ability to interact with your technology more through gesture.
[00:35:41] And I think voice also plays a part in this, but I like to say this aloud. Restaurants are noisy. We have a lot of people who are like, let's put AI voice tech in there. I'm like people scream. There's a lot of water noise. If I'm the chef in the room, I'm certainly not the chef who doesn't scream.
[00:35:56] But ultimately those things. I think you're going to be huge. I think the ability to use that in the kitchen to use it at the guest side of things is just gonna be an awesome. Futuristic. Again, minority reports, tile fun lab for me. So hopefully more to come on that soon. And the second largest like, cool little things, ELO, one of the companies that we work with, is actually already come out with in the span of a couple months.
[00:36:20] An attachment for our touch screens. I know we have like a MSR attachments, right? We have fingerprint attachments, all sorts of things that can go on there. They now have one that will do temperature checks.
[00:36:30] So imagine you're walking into the kitchen. Attached to the POS. And so you literally can hit a button, right?
[00:36:37] Logging in. I'm going to clock in. June comes in and she clocks into the kitchen and it takes a snapshot of you and it takes your temperature and it's durable. There's some privacy implications there surely. But the safety of it, right? Knowing that you can then use that information publicly to say, Hey, our guys are getting checked every time they come in the door. Our guys are being asked if they're wearing masks. That's this thing that we can build out in our systems would be the ability to just have a checklist. You go into the kitchen, you start to work. Oh, I'm here. Hey, have you washed your hands? Have you checked your temperature. Have you got your gloves on your mask on? So I think these are all things that will be certainly helpful in the short term.
[00:37:13] And then really the most exciting thing for me that we don't do at all. And I totally say this is just a geek moment is robots, right? For years and years, we've all had the fears the robots are coming, the robots are coming to steal our jobs. I really think the robots are here, but they're cobots, right?
[00:37:28] They're there to help us. And there's some really good restaurants that are working with just like spice kitchens has an awesome Kobata kitchen. Miso robotics, who has the flippy robot and the fry robot. Those things. I want nothing more in this world and for people who are stuck cooking fries and flipping burgers to spend their time elsewhere, That's not a job for the meat between the human ears. It's a very downtrodden job. That's it. it's a robot because they are their coworker, right? They're not replacing your job. They can't do everything a human can do, but they can do these minute repeatable tasks that are probably not good for people ultimately.
[00:38:08] You're wearing out after arm. You're doing other things that are not good for your body. You're sitting there on the hot grease. And they're much more efficient. And so to me, I think there's a really cool kind of intersection there between these ghost and host kitchens and the robots and the technology that we provide.
[00:38:21] That's really gonna enable these kind of kitchens of the future to get up there and just change the game. Right? Offer good products for multiple brands, quickly, easy, and efficiently. Without again, going full robot, I'm not looking for Solylent Green. I'm hoping we don't go that part.
[00:38:38] But anyway, that's my pulse on probably the next two or three years. We're going to see a lot of that.
[00:38:42] Jen Kern: [00:38:42] That's wild. I get a little bit like freaking out But I get
[00:38:46] Cody Jones: [00:38:46] Yup. Yup. Yup. And, I'm certainly hoping that doesn't mean. All of us are eating from replicators in five years. That's not where I want us to go. Let's still make good food.
[00:38:56] Jen Kern: [00:38:56] But there's things going on now. Genetically Bioneers. By what is it Biogen?
[00:39:02] Cody Jones: [00:39:02] Oh yeah. The bioengineered nuggets from Russia now the KFC is going to be curving. My lady is vegetarian and she, all of the beyond meat is amazing. Right. And they have all these, like the impossible burger is great. but I do worry about it. I think, we'll see. We'll see.
[00:39:17] Jen Kern: [00:39:17] Same. Okay. Well, such a pleasure. This has been so fun talking to you, getting all your insights and inside that nerdy, geeky, brainy of yours. I absolutely love it.
[00:39:27] Cody Jones: [00:39:27] And it wasn't too scary, please.
[00:39:30] Jen Kern: [00:39:30] I'm not scared. I don't think our listeners will be scared either.
[00:39:34] Cody Jones: [00:39:34] Well, good. Take around or just, you know, traipse around in there. It's definitely a place to visit, not to live. But I'll say this, it's a fun place to be. We're at this real intersection of the needs that are popping up due to this unprecedented time we live in and it's really. It's a great time to be in the space. I couldn't be happier to be building tech right now.
[00:39:52]Jen Kern: [00:39:52] Well, it shows and you're doing an amazing job. Thank you for all your contributions here at Qu.
[00:39:57] Now you're very integral to our product and innovation. So glad to have you on the team. And wish you all the best. And the, return to your hometown.
[00:40:06] Cody Jones: [00:40:06] Yes. Yes. I've got a pack boxes as we speak. My wife is probably doing way too much of the share of packing. I should probably get home and make up for that.
[00:40:15] Jen Kern: [00:40:15] Well, Great being with you here today. And, we'll talk again soon.
[00:40:18] Cody Jones: [00:40:18] Hey, thank you so much, Jen. Have a great day.