How L'Osteria is Leading the Future of Restaurants with Digitalization

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About The Episode

Welcome to yet another insightful episode of the Food Service Growth Show. Your ultimate destination for all things restaurant management and digitalization! This episode is all about restaurant digitalization.

In this episode, we’re joined by Peter Schimpl, VP of Digital & IT at L’Osteria, a prominent German brand with 150+ outlets. Get ready as Carl and Peter unravel the mysteries of restaurant digitalization and discover how L’Osteria is spearheading the future of restaurants with its innovative digitalization strategies.

Read The Interview

Carl: Hello, I’m Carl Jacobs and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Apicbase. At Apicbase, we are building the world’s best F&B management platform. But in this podcast series, it’s all about finding answers on how to grow and scale your food service business. I’m talking to experts and industry professionals who are passionate about building a healthy food service industry. Join me on this fascinating journey of entrepreneurship in food. Hello and welcome back to the Food Service Growth Show. Here is another episode. And today I have Peter Schimpl with me. He’s the VP of digital and IT of L’Osteria. It’s a German or mainly German, chain. Welcome, Peter.

Peter: Thank you. Thank you for having me today.

Carl: It’s a pleasure to have you, actually, in the preparations for this podcast, already quite some interesting things were mentioned, so, I’m happy to have you.

But, as always, the first question is, can you please, briefly introduce yourself so that people know who is Peter Schimpl? Where is he coming from? And what is your job at L’Osteria.

Peter: Yes, my name is Peter, so I’m 58 years old, father of a proud father of a son. and I’m 30 plus years now in the industry. So I started in the industry at McDonald’s, where I started as a programmer, as McDonald’s for the POS system and for the back office systems, and made my way through.

And then I led the McDonald’s. It, for the German market and ten smaller markets around Germany for at least 15 years and decided then to become an entrepreneur since, at McDonald’s, I learned to love innovation, technology innovation. And, I worked together with my colleagues then in France to introduce, self-order kiosks and digital menu boards to the German, Austrian, Polish, Russian market. And, then I worked as a freelancer for one year and, as last year, since they needed a little bit support on how to digitize, how to set up digitalization, as this was one of three pillars where they define growth. And afterwards, their two one year on, as a consultant, they asked me whether I not whether I like to lead the department and, to start digitalization or to continue with digitalization at Austria. and there I am for almost one and a half years now, now in the official position in one and a half years and, consulting position at Austria.

Carl: All right. And, for the people that don’t know Austria, can you understand the concept and the idea behind the chain?

Peter: Yes, Austria was founded in 1999. So we celebrate 25 years of last year, this year, in Nuremberg, from two guys called, Friedemann Findeiss and Klaus Röder. And Klaus Röder was one of the youngest franchisees of McDonald’s. And it was a little bit more of an accident when they founded Austria, since this was their base station restaurant in Nuremberg, and the owner decided to go back to Italy. They say, you cannot let this go. This is full every day you are very good at what you’re doing. And then, Klaus decided to buy the restaurant for cheap money since he was, Going back to Italy, and when they started the restaurant, they had one challenge. So all the Italian chefs left. And Friedman did not know how to cook fish and meat and things like this. And he was coming from McDonald’s. So then it was born, pizza and pasta. And that’s where we are for today. And pizza and pasta. He could do very well. And it was, and this was born and Klaus was, had the spirit of McDonald’s. so he understood how important it is to systemize, to make things, to make rules and things like this.

And so they started slowly the expansion. And L’Osteria is now around 170 plus restaurants. We will be 200 plus, by the end of this year. We plan to open 30 plus this year, restaurants 40 plus in 2025 and 50 plus in 2026. So very challenging and at the moment we have about 7000 employees. and we’re in nine markets, most European markets. we are in. So a very good story, very growing. We’re growing about double digits every year and sales as well. So very successful. Thank God. Very successful. And, expansion will go on in Europe.

Oh, that’s a fantastic story. And, it’s actually interesting to hear that, the founders, came from McDonald’s, or one of them came from McDonald’s. So what was the process management? And was it already, you know, part of the really initial days of L’Osteria, or was this something that was added later on?

Peter: No, it was at the beginning in the first restaurant. Not since they had to survive in the first restaurant. So they had no clue about how to do Italian restaurants, how to do full service and things like that. And it always taught me he was always calling Klaus, and Klaus is saying how it’s going. He was sitting in this restaurant and called Friedman. Friedman called and said, I’m running out. The restaurant is full, but the cloud is only hearing that the restaurant is full. I’m fine. So, and, then they started the idea to expand it, and then they needed to have processes in place. They needed to have rules in place. They needed to have systems in place to make it bigger. And of course, the DNA of McDonald’s from Klaus and Friedman helped them both to systemize, last year and to start or to build the base from where we are right now.

Carl: All right. So in your introduction, you mentioned that you were leading the digitalization at the moment. in Austria. How big is your team?

Peter: The team is quite small. It’s about ten people. We will get a little bit more, this year since we focus this year a little bit more on data. pretty small team. And, why is this small ? We focus on standard software, so it’s more to get. To adapt to standards out of the software and not customizing the software to our standards. And this is one of the challenges we always face. So if you do customization and reach the 80 plus percent to drive since the last 20% is the hardest one. And if you go this route, you need a bigger IT department. You need to make sure that you have developers. You make sure as long as you’re able to. Go with the standard with the industry standards provided by the software. You can drive this with a relatively small group of people, and fight this challenge every day. That, of course, operations like to have their 100%, their stars. And you have to say, okay, no, this is standard. We go to the standard. And for this reason, we have a small team of ten people running the whole it, for the head office and for all the restaurants.

All right. very interesting actually, to hear that you are going with, with, let’s say, the standard software. But, before we go there, you know, when they asked you one and a half years ago to lead that department, how did you start such an assignment? I mean, how do you go about from the idea to digitize and to, you know, improve on that matter, to where you are today? And what is the plan that you actually presented to the founders or the boards in order to, you know, go digital?

Peter: Yeah, it’s a very, very interesting question. Since the first thing where I’m a strong believer in digitalization, don’t do digitalization on a project. Will the strategy, digitalization strategy first build an ecosystem, build a target where you like to be? So we built about 3 or 4 bubbles for the restaurant’s pie. And then on this we built smaller bubbles where we said, okay, this is our digitalization strategy. We call this lost area digital ecosystem.

Otherwise, if you now build an ecosystem first or a strategy on how to digitize, you will digitalize islands, but they will not fit together and you will not have an action overview. For this reason, we call it our bubble chart where we had red bubbles, a lot of red bubbles at the beginning and a lot of connections. But now you see bubbles turning green. So we put this one and everybody can see what our strategy is. And we work against the strategy and not on the islands. It’s not on urgencies and not on. So if everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. But yeah, you know that there are some urgent things coming up and to have the strategy in place and work against the strategy. Yeah. Keeps us focused on projects, keeps us focused on the way we like to go. And this was the first thing we did together, with operations to build our digitalization strategy. And we call the strategy the digital ecosystem lost the digital ecosystem. And now we work for two years against the dots in the ecosystem we defined.

Can you tell a bit about these, these bubbles or these, these pillars in your ecosystem, which are the ones that you are filling in, which are the ones that you know are the first ones? Do you need to tackle it? What’s the structure behind it?

Peter: Yeah, the first one was Restaurant Systems. So Restaurant Systems was itself the biggest bubble since we’re, our money comes from the restaurants. We focus on the restaurant, get good service out of the restaurants. There’s a lot of bubbles, from inventory management to POS systems to people systems to a lot of bubbles. We have to tackle it first. The biggest challenge we had at the beginning was the POS system. We had to replace the POS system since this was the biggest project we had. So you have to replace the POS system with an innovative new one, which supports full service. Then we built the bubble called CRM. The challenge we had or the challenge, not the challenge we had. The challenge usually in the restaurant industry is that we don’t know anything about our customers. So in the past, you did not need to know. So they come in, eat pizza. If you know them and they you’re fine.

But now with marketing, marketing needs to target the customers better. They need to know that. You need to know which channels they are using, need to know how often they come, what they eat, what they don’t like, and things like this. And we were challenged by marketing, to do this since our marketing, our head of marketing comes from Montblanc and Thomas Sabo. So of course, if you buy a pen for 500 bucks. You leave your data there. So. But if you buy a pizza for 13 bucks, maybe not. And, But he challenged us. You said one of the bubbles needs to be CRM. And then we had the third bubble, analytics.

So can I ask quickly about the CRM bubble? Is this about customer loyalty. It’s like catching your customer and making sure he returns. Is that the end goal of CRM?

Peter: The end goal is loyalty, one of the tools we are using to understand our customer better. But there’s other tools like Web Shop and they order for delivery or pickup. We get data from them when they come in or do the newsletter. We got data from them. So we said, okay, customer relationship management is so important in the future. It’s not the important thing today, but it may be an advantage in 2 to 3 years if you know your customer better than anybody else.

Carl: Yes, yes, yes.

Peter: The reason we had this as a big pillar, on our side, besides the systems and the third big bubble, what we had was, analytics data. Since all these systems are generating data. But the challenge we had, if you generate data, you don’t have information. So we have to transform the data into information. And this was the third bubble said if we have this customer relationship, if we have the restaurant systems, if we have the back office systems, right, we generate a huge amount of data and then we have to build up analytics and BI for this data to be smarter than we was before.

And is this something that you want to do in-house, or is this also something that you want to do with standard tools in the market?

Peter: Well, this is. A challenging question since we did it not in-house. We use standard tools for the, for the last couple of years, since there was no team to build data. You don’t have data engineers. data scientists. but we’re more and more concluding that we need to own our data. And this is and of course, everybody tells you if I buy, for example, Apicbase and I have my recipes in, of course, I own the data. That’s my recipes. But this is not what we mean. Owning the data means where they came from, how they transformed into information. Maybe you aggregate them and you do calculations on them. So the level is we need to understand where they’re coming from, exactly how they’re coming from. What are the data points provided, for example, by Apicbase or Lightspeed POS? we could use it for analytics. Secondly, we need to see which data points we are using and how we need aggregations for it. and the third one is KPIs. Clearly KPIs we need to identify and know our KPIs. yes.

So I will give you an example. In the food industry, you usually have comparable restaurants. If you open 30, 40, 50 restaurants a year and you make a comparison against last year, of course you are better since you open 30 restaurants. So, but you have to calculate this out and this means it is comparable. So if it’s comparable and the KPIs comparable can be different. Our owner Mike wins with a comparable 13 months. We say comparable 12 months. So you need to have a clear definition of your KPI to trust your KPI. So if you don’t have a clear definition, what is net sales? What is the productivity of members? What are the cost of sales, theoretical food cost, all this stuff? If you’re not clear in your definitions of the KPI, you cannot trust the KPIs you see. And this is what we say on your data is to have full control from the source. Know what is possible to get on the information from the transformation to the analytics. And we think that in the future this will need to be in our hands.

Carl: Yeah. What we see especially in larger chains is that you indeed work with, you know, standard software to solve the day to day operational or, or yeah. A problem, let’s say inventory management, processing all of these things and that you then kind of pull in all of that data into a data lake and that you build your own business intelligence on top of that in, in power BI or any other tool that is out there. So you, you kind of you, you have you are on the, on the, on the knobs, on the buttons to make sure that, you get the right data in the right place and that you can use them throughout the whole organization, both from, from operational point of view, all the way up to the, to the board level. then that makes total sense. so very interesting actually, to to hear you talk about these three big bubbles and about, about, the different segments that you are digitizing.

Is there also a time frame that you have defined for yourself, like in 2025, 26, 20, 30, whenever we need to be fully digitized?

Peter: Yes, there is a time frame, but how can I show you the picture? So the bubbles did not have fixed lines or really straight bubbles. So why are we using this? So we think this is a living organism. It’s a breathing system. So you cannot it will never end unfortunately for digitalization unfortunately for us as well, it will never end. But we call it a breathing system. Some things will. Some bubbles will come in, some will disappear. Some will get different connections than they had before. there’s a lot of examples. How to do it. Text encryption. Fiscalization. regulations which need to be adapted or new things like artificial intelligence.

We have to, to take a look at maybe they help us in the kitchen, maybe they help us in the back office. Maybe they just help us in formulating emails or newsletters or something else to the customers. and we started to do AI right now in marketing for translation to the nine markets where we are. So it’s not done anymore by translator. It’s done automatically. Even the voices are translated. and this is for this reason, we think, yes, we will. Get better, we will. More green bubbles, but new bubbles will appear. and this is. And we call it. We like to have it in the breeze. We like to keep it breathing. Yeah, yeah, it. Expand it and shrink it down if not needed and adapt it where needed. So yes, hopefully we will do the smaller bubbles. Tick, tick it off. But there will come new bubbles at any time.

Yeah that that’s unfortunate. With digitization it is a never ending story. but let us zoom in then into a few of those bubbles that you already did. Or are you doing what is in what is a time frame. If you take, for example, the point of sales, the change from one point of sales to another in 150 plus outlets. What’s the time? How do you go about it?

Peter: So our time frame, what we might not do now is, for example, the POS system. We changed it from the decision which supplier we used to the last restaurant applied with the new system was about nine months, nine months. So the rollout took about four months. What we say is we cannot allow ourselves to have ever forever running IT projects. So nobody will go with you if you say it’s 15, 18, 20, 24 months. So we have to deliver the first results within six months. So this was always our goal with all digitization projects, for example loyalty. We started loyalty in April, March. We made a decision and rolled it out in August. Yeah. To most of the stores. We did the same for the POS system. We aim the same right now for business intelligence. We have a project called Lost Three Operating System, which we’re rolling out. So we made the decision on the supplier on Friday and we need to be in the stores at the latest of September. So this is our challenge. So if you do something to provide for the customers, my internal customers like restaurants with a result even if it’s not 100% within six months. And this is what I said at the beginning, it’s very important to stick to standards, since if you start doing customization on this and taking some things here, you will never do it within six months. So you have to stick as delivered, with the tools to be sure that you can do it.

Carl: And how do you manage the buy in of your, your internal customers then? Because I can imagine that sometimes they say again, another project.

Peter: Yeah. We have about. Yeah. At the moment we have 30. We have 46 restaurants with joint ventures where we own at least 50%. We have 36 restaurants with about 15 franchise partners, and we own 61 restaurants. So for the 61 restaurants, I have to go to the COO and say, okay, let’s do it for the joint venture. I have to go to the CEO and the CFO since they own 50%. So it has to make sense. But the most important ones and the good ones are the franchise partners since they have to pay for it.

Yeah. And these are the first ones. I go with ideas and things and discuss them with them. We have a panel called Franchise Leadership Council that three people are in and they play very openly, and these are the first ones since the easy ones are the company stores. Yeah. And they challenge me. And this is the most important part that you get challenged too.

They said, oh that’s too expensive. We cannot do this one. We don’t like it like you did it this way. For this reason, I always used to go to the franchise first since they challenged me on every aspect of the solution, and then I built it for them and then I went to the easy one for rollout. I do it the opposite way. I do the tests and the rollout. I start with the company stores, go to the joint venture, and last I go to the franchisees.

All right. And then do the franchisees have the power to potentially, you know, A stopper project that says that. They say, no, we don’t believe in this. Let’s not do this. So you don’t do this for the entire operation?

Peter: Yes. Sometimes. Yes. If it’s. If it’s a system standard, if it’s defined as a system standard, they cannot opt out. But if it’s an optional solution, then they can of course say, we’re opting out as a solution. We do not take it. And then maybe my business case does not work anymore. or they have a different solution, like a reservation shift. And if they say we have a reservation system, it’s a standard system if you’d like to. So the system standard says you have to have an electronic reservation system on the website. But if they say we don’t like yours, it’s too expensive. It does not deliver. So they can have a different one. and the challenge we have is, to always have the best on the market, since we like to have 100% and ours, and to make sure that we are good enough that they buy our solutions.

And, how do you then, make sure that, you know, I now hear a little bit of potential that they can, you know, decide, decide for themselves which system they use. But, especially because you’re in nine markets, that also means that the systems you work with should be available in these nine markets. So you only go for, let’s say, a global system, or do you have systems that do the same thing, but are different providers in different markets?

Peter: Yes, especially where we have different things. We try to get as much and we have as well. And when we open the market in Poland this year, we like to have our system. Last year was last year, we’d like to have our system, but sometimes we cannot. Like we have no pos. Pos in Poland needs a special fiscalization.

Carl: Ah, yeah. Yeah.

Peter: But then there you.

Carl: Had to go to a different solution.

Peter: Yeah. And then we go together with the franchise partner to say, okay, what can we do with the solution? So we said, okay, we’d like to have it on the cloud. We don’t like servers in the restaurants. It needs to be on the browser. It needs to be available. We need to have open APIs to get the data out of the system, and we help them select the right one. but we always try. And with the new owner, with the McMinn family, maybe we have about then two standards, where we can say, okay, one of these should work in the other. But we continue working with our partners on, on software to say, okay, we need to go in this market, but sometimes software like specially POS systems with Fiscalization or labor scheduling system, which is very different to each market, what scheduling rules and things like this. We have to give it to the franchisee to say, we expect you to have one. We support you selecting one, but we cannot give you ours since it’s not working. Whatever in the Swiss market, Austrian market, Polish market.

Carl: Yeah! That is a common issue with personnel planning and resources that all countries have different rules and laws and not everybody can comply with them. That’s something we hear quite often. Let me move into another field, because in the beginning, you mentioned, one of the bubbles is the restaurant and the point of sales we’ve touched upon. But you also mentioned inventory management as being an important one. Can you elaborate a little bit why you think it’s an important topic?

Peter: Yes, inventory management is one of our most important topics. The reason it’s not about inventory, it’s the reason is about creating data we don’t have right now. It’s at the moment we have our cost of sales. Cost of sales are built from whatever theoretical method. The recipe gives us the theoretical cost. Then you have theoretical usage which is coming from the POS, and then you do the inventory to compare theoretical theory to practice. And then what is the difference? And if you have a big company with 170 restaurants, you have wasted millions of euros. You have food cost, which is different from restaurant to restaurant. One restaurant has whatever, 25%, the other restaurant 80.

Carl: So I hope not. But it’s.

Peter: Maybe good, but we don’t know where 18 is good for.

Carl: 18. I thought you were saying 88 zero.

Peter: But one eight if we don’t know, it’s good since it made me look good. But maybe the quality is not there. So he does not have the right amount of slices on the pizza and things like this. And inventory management helps us really to generate data to generate data points. We can measure to give us certainty on the data. So at the moment we don’t have a real certainty on the data. We think we know since we got an inventory every month mainly for finance. But we need three inventories. Yeah, we need the daily inventory to see what is stolen. We need a weekly inventory to see what to order. And we need a monthly inventory for finance.

Carl: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: We need to have the theoretical usage and the recipes are out of the POS system. And for us it’s more to learn, more to create the data, create our data information to make the right decisions or to. She said, Prepare the right decisions by the executives. If we see that there is an increase in food cost, if we see there is, the recipes do not work. If we test two things like brunch and things like this, and the cost of sales does not work. This can lead to wrong strategic decisions for the whole company if we do not have a data part out of inventory management. So inventory management is for me. Getting data, receiving data. It’s not about the inventory management itself, but what for me is important to get the data out and to motivate the people to put the data right in, since this is a challenging part, since they at the moment they look at the delivery note and they say, okay, tick off, everything is okay. Now I ask them, please enter it into the system.

Carl: Yeah! So that’s it.

Peter: Entered over the system to do inventory. At the moment they do it monthly. If I say I need a daily inventory I need a weekly. Please do it. And this is the challenge of the important inventory system. Since I have to confirm the managers out in the restaurants. To do it right I get the right data for it.

And how do you manage that change? What. What are the things that you are doing to make sure that they do this?

Peter: It’s transparent. So they give us the data, we give them back transparency, we give them back power. And this is all about the lost area operating system. What we’re building right now. Give them power back. So they give us the data. We give them the power back to make the right decisions. And this is all about the lottery operating system. It’s divided into people and especially people. Then the cost of food, we call it product. These five pages and we show them exactly the way we show them. This is dual to your rank whatever, 24 within your bucket. It. We give them the power to make us. What are the four things you do together for the next month to get this better? Your cost of sales, your productivity on the people. And there’s a lot of KPIs, and we like to give them the power back that they can see. What happens if I enter data right? Then I get the right KPIs, that I get the right information. I can make very good decisions on my restaurant business. This is how we try to get them, with the lottery operating system.

And there’s all aspects. There’s an overview on the restaurants, there’s a sales part, there is a people part, there’s a product part, there is a cost part. We call it OC as a controllable cost, where they can manage and we give them sheets where we outline all the data they have and they can make, then decide on their restaurant what is the best to do for next month. What are the three things you like to focus on next month? And even with the lottery operating system, we try to get it to the assistant level. It’s not only the manager of the restaurant, we like to get it to the assistant as well, since the assistant will be the manager of the future and they are not used to working with data right now. This is a buzzword we are always using as well as a data driven company. But this is very important. They need to learn to work against data and not out of gut feeling. So that’s that.

Carl: Big challenge.

Peter: In the data to make the right decision based on data and not on no, no deal. We could sell it a little bit more since I hope the weather will be better. And, we need to help them to give them the right data. And if they provide us the data, we provide them the best decision based they can have.

All right. Very interesting actually. It’s very intriguing. I have two more questions for you. The first one is, going back to your time at McDonald’s. I mean McDonald’s is such a big organization worldwide. Wherever you go, you basically eat the same hamburger. Can you tell us a little bit about what can a restaurant chain, a smaller restaurant chain, learn from such a big giant as McDonald’s, from a, from a digitization perspective and how they use data?

Peter: Mcdonald’s focused a lot on digitalization. And you have to acknowledge McDonald’s has a five year advance of, of all the other brands. So what McDonald’s did, they invested and they were brave enough to introduce digitalization. That was the first one introducing electronic payment. That was the first one introducing self-order kiosks. They were the first ones introducing the drive. There was the first one introducing digital menu boards. There was the first one introducing AI into the digital world. So when I think about what you can learn about McDonald’s, be brave. It’s easy. You cannot. So.

You have already no digitalization. It cannot be worth it can only be better. And if you have, if you allow the people to digitalize. Since the important thing we need to learn from ignorance is if you look at McDonald’s is if McDonald’s does it, it’s innovation. It’s sometimes become standard and then it becomes a disadvantage for you if you don’t have it. Yeah, I don’t think smaller chains like Lotteria don’t need to be on the edge of innovation. That’s what McDonald’s can do. A Burger King can do, the big ones can do. But we need to find out. Okay, what are the things they are doing will be expected standard from the customer in the next one and two years. Like electronic payment. If I see a lot of small restaurants, they don’t accept electronic payment, especially in Germany. I don’t see them in the Netherlands or in the UK, but in Germany you see a lot of restaurants that also don’t accept credit cards. Yeah. And I think this will be a disadvantage if you don’t have it now.

And, for fast food or for quick service restaurants will be the self-order kiosks that people expect to have to see one. And for our industry, it will be, I would say electronic, reservations, online ordering pickup. And of course, payment at the table and ordering at the table. This will be the one we are focusing on right now for the people to give them back their time, they don’t have to wait on the waiter so they can’t check out directly on the table.

Reorder directly on the table. but I say it’s not. It’s not hard. There’s a lot of tools right now and you can start easily. You can start cheap. Don’t be afraid to do it. It will be, it cannot be worse than it is without digitalization. Yeah.

And, I hear. I heard you briefly managing. You know, L’Osteria doesn’t need to be on the edge of innovation, so leave that to the bigger ones. But, if this is this, let’s say, true over the whole line, let’s say is do you leave the real innovation to the world players, or how do you see that.

Peter: The real no, we don’t leave it to them, but we select, I think wisely. We try to select wisely on the tip. So if you start too early, you have very high costs for the product, which is not stable on the market right now.

Carl: Yeah.

Peter: So it was if you take the highest process on the computer, on the laptop, you pay a huge amount of money for the laptop for an increase of speed. So we like to get to this tipping point where we say, okay, it’s an innovation, but it’s affordable. It’s an innovation. You can’t select out of 2 or 3 customers. It’s an innovation. But we have stable products out there. We can choose for digitalization. Yeah. and this is more it’s not against innovation. Sometimes we have to lead the market, especially food service. So we selected a POS system, Lightspeed, which is fully cloud based and on the blockchain.

Carl: Yeah.

Peter: Why did we do this? So it was there, it was stable, it was developed, and we could reduce complexity in the infrastructure and the restaurants completely. We get rid of all the servers. Now we have only switches and two routers in the restaurant balance. the, the balance, the traffic. But in the end, this is so much that you can gain if you choose digitalization or innovation at the right of the tipping point where the price is going down, the stability is going up.

Yeah. Interesting. My last question is also one I ask all my guests, and it’s the question about trends. Where do you see the food service industry evolving and what are the things that we need to keep an eye on for the next, let’s say 2 to 3 years.

Peter: Oh, this is a hard one. So the food service industry, I believe if they focus on their strengths that we have in full service right now, do not. Go crazy with QSR compared to QSR. Get in your. Get in your lane. Stay in your lane, then. You have a lot of chances. Right now, I think what we need to work on is really on the data to get our data right, since the environment will be tougher and then think solutions like Apicbase, like Lightspeed, where you get data out will become more important. And I think digitalization is now common ground. It’s expected by the customers, by the guests. And I think if you use it wisely over the next couple, one, two, three years, you can get a lot out of it if it’s self-checkout, even for full service.

We see tips going up for our servers, which means the servers get better. We see that the electronic payment we see is self-checkout. We are testing right now in France. So from day one we introduced but not customers, but even we had 30% where they paid directly on the table to code. and of course, the awareness and social media is a very important part for us since if you only increase the Google rating or we call it, the score, if you scale the score from 4.18 to 4.27. It gives a huge amount of boost to customers. So don’t let go of these channels. Take care. and use the tools well out there and take a look at what the customers expect from you.

Carl: Okay. Fantastic. Peter, this was a very, very interesting episode. Thank you very much for your time. And, thank you also to all of our audience, tune in and if you want to hear more about the food service industry, just check out our website at thefoodservicegrowth.show , where you can find, even more episodes all about scaling your food service business. Peter, thank you very much. And see you next time.

Peter: Bye. Thank you. Bye bye.

Guest & Host

Peter Schimpl

VP of Digital & IT
L’Osteria

Carl Jacobs

Co-founder & CEO
Apicbase

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