Raghav Poddar was studying computer science at Columbia University when he became intrigued by the challenges restaurant owners were facing maintaining an online presence. A self-described \u201cfoodie,\u201d Poddar \u2014 who didn\u2019t have much time to cook meals \u2014 was a heavy user of food delivery and pickup services in New York City.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany restaurants don\u2019t have much of an online presence, but they have the ability to cook more dishes and cuisines representative of their communities,\u201d Poddar told TechCrunch in an email interview. \u201cThere might be a broader slowdown in tech, but restaurants need to adopt and become good at technology now more than ever to protect their margins and grow their sales.\u201d<\/p>\n
The importance of an online footprint in the restaurant industry \u2014 and a quality one at that \u2014 can\u2019t be overstated. According to one recent survey<\/a>, 77% of diners visit a restaurant\u2019s website before they dine in or order out from the establishment. Of that group, nearly 70% have been discouraged or otherwise deterred from visiting the restaurant because of its website.<\/p>\n Poddar came up with a solution in Superorder<\/a> (formerly Forward Kitchens), a platform that provides websites, menus, photos and tools for order management, marketing, financial management and more to restaurants. Superorder today announced that it 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 Kan, I2BF Global Ventures and others.<\/p>\n The crux of Superorder\u2019s mission is helping restaurants to boost business from \u201coff-premise\u201d dining \u2014 that is to say, delivery and pickup services. The pandemic supercharged the growth of off-premise dining as restaurants were forced to pivot; two-thirds of adults say that they\u2019re more likely to order takeout food from a restaurant than they were before the pandemic, Restaurant.org reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n But Poddar argues that many restaurateurs, newly burdened by digital managerial tasks, are still leaving money on the table.<\/p>\n \u201cThe increased adoption of technology by restaurant owners doesn\u2019t solve the challenges of setting up, managing and understanding how to leverage this technology,\u201d he said. \u201cA task as simple as changing hours on all delivery platforms (e.g. Grubhub, UberEats) for a day can take dozens of clicks and hours of time.\u201d<\/p>\n Superorder attempts to streamline things by letting restaurants set up an online presence, including food delivery, where they can create multiple digital storefronts and accompanying financials and operations dashboards without having to contact each delivery platform.<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong> Superorder<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Superorder also consults with restaurants, helping them to launch \u201cvirtual restaurants,\u201d or storefronts for different brands operating within their kitchens. Poddar says that Superorder employs data science to identify in-demand dishes in a restaurant\u2019s delivery radius and works with the restaurant to create menus and photos for that brand, which Superorder then lists on third-party delivery platforms.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that virtual restaurants or \u201cghost kitchens,\u201d a concept that grew in popularity during the pandemic, don\u2019t exactly have high success rates.<\/p>\n Restaurants often struggle<\/a> with the cost of finding additional delivery people for their virtual restaurants, affording labor and marketing a location that\u2019s virtually invisible to the public. And some third-party delivery platforms have pushed back against virtual restaurants, accusing the restaurants creating them of spamming the platforms with repetitive listings and menus. As of March, UberEats requires virtual kitchens to maintain a high average rating \u2014 above 4.3 stars \u2014 and a low percentage of canceled orders.<\/p>\n But Superorder claims that it\u2019s more thoughtful in its approach to creating virtual kitchens than its competitors. For one, the platform uses generative AI to create menus and photos for each virtual restaurant listing, similar to tools<\/a> offered<\/a> by restaurant tech startups Swipeby and Lunchbox. Data from Grubhub reveals that restaurants with pictures for their menu items receive at least 70% more orders and 65% higher sales than those without pictures.<\/p>\n Of course, one wonders how closely the AI-generated images resemble the actual menu items. Gross inaccuracies could land restaurants on the hook for lawsuits over false advertising. But Poddar brushes these concerns aside, pitching Superorder\u2019s generative AI as a way for restaurants to provide images \u201cclose to\u201d real food visuals without avoid having to hire a professional food photographer.<\/p>\n \u201cOur competitors use the same brand across hundreds of restaurants, creating a \u2018one-to-hundreds\u2019 relationship \u2014 preventing restaurants from controlling the brand\u2019s quality, image and relationship with their customers,\u201d Poddar said. \u201cWith Superorder, restaurants can build a website through a search-based interface by typing in a query like \u2018Build me a website for an Italian restaurant in New York\u2019 and picking a design template. And they can create compelling food imagery assets and craft well-written, creative menu descriptions and item names with a simple click.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell-written\u201d and \u201ccreative\u201d is up for debate, too, given generative AI\u2019s obvious rhetorical limitations<\/a>. I\u2019d worry about accuracy; after all, generative AI has a tendency to invent facts<\/a>.<\/p>\n Somewhat concerningly, it\u2019s also not clear what\u2019s powering Superorder\u2019s generative AI features \u2014 i.e. whether the AI models were developed in-house or using a third-party API. The former could be more error-prone; we\u2019ve asked Superorder for clarification.<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong> Superorder<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But other aspects of Superorder\u2019s platform seem unequivocally useful, like an order management module that consolidates orders from all third-party delivery platforms into a single pane of glass. Superorder also synchronizes menus across platforms while optimizing menu item prices for conversion rates and sales, automatically reconciling sales, tax, commission, marketing and fees across platforms to identify (and hopefully not introduce new) errors.<\/p>\n Superorder clearly has its fingers in lots of pies \u2014 and competes with lots of startups as a result. Poddar sees Nextbit<\/a>, Virtual Dining Concepts<\/a> and Ordermark<\/a> as Superorder\u2019s main rivals, but one could argue that the firm also goes head to head with ghost kitchen companies including MadEats<\/a>, CloudEats<\/a> and Lunchbox<\/a> \u2014 at least on the digital asset management side.<\/p>\n But New York City-based Superorder is slowly but surely growing since emerging from Y Combinator\u2019s Summer 2019 cohort. With a staff of about 70 people, it now operates in over 180 cities across the U.S. with more than 1,500 restaurant customers and has facilitated around 1.5 million orders to date.<\/p>\n There\u2019s lots of money in the market besides \u2014 more than enough to go around, one would presume. A recent report<\/a>\u00a0estimates that the market for online food delivery will grow from $160 billion in 2022 to $483 billion by 2032.<\/p>\n Poddar says that the plan is to use Superorder\u2019s new round of funding to expand the company\u2019s operations, sales and engineering teams.<\/p>\n \u201cIn addition to scaling customers, we will also expand our product offering to become the full off-premise operating system for restaurants,\u201d Poddar said. \u201cWe\u2019re working on expanding further into the restaurant software stack and become the all-in-one software platform that gives restaurants the tools needed to drive profitability from delivery and takeout.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"Superorder\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/64b65d55ad558e5a92b5ce81_autopilot.png\")
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