1936 – Revolutionizing the Restaurant Industry through Innovative Technology Solutions with PAR Technology Corporation’s Savneet Singh

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1:06With us right now, it is Savneed Singh. Savneed, you are the CEO of Partech. Partech is found on the web at partech.com. That's P-A-R-T-E-C-H.com. Savneed, it's great to have you. Thank you for having me. I dare say everyone listening to this podcast has likely used, I'm going to guess, most people listening to our podcast have likely used your technology and they may not even be aware. Would you mind explaining exactly what Partech does, who you work with, and why we've probably seen your work? Absolutely. So we sell software, hardware, and services to fast-growing or large restaurant chains.

1:48So you'll find our technology at the point of sale system of brands like Sweetgreen, Kava, all the way up to Burger King. And then we sell loyalty and online ordering solutions. So everything from the engine that powers a Taco Bell app to smaller organizations that are launching online ordering systems. So we like to think of ourselves as a unified solution of technology for these emerging brands or these very, very large brands. You know, and there's some really exciting things that have happened just in terms of the consumer experience when it comes to getting what they want, getting what they want quickly, right?

2:27Keeping expenses and costs down. And like I said, just overall creating a better customer experience. Would you mind maybe just sharing a few thoughts on, you know, kind of Partex's impact in this world? Yeah, I think, you know, restaurants play a key role in society. They feed us, they feed our kids, they help create these meals and moments that we remember for the rest of our lives. And restaurants have had to go through a rapid set of transformation over the last few years with the pandemic. But even before that, they were dealing with things like Amazon, DoorDash, you know, delivery meal kits, grocery stores becoming restaurants.

3:08And so what our technology has done is allow them to build what we think are closer meals and moments. Our technology really brings them closer to their customers. We like to our mission is to bring consumers closer to the brands, meals and moments they love. And the idea really is, how do you have technology become ambient such that you as a guest of that restaurant feel like the technology is present, but not as a wedge between you and your guests? So when you walk into a restaurant, I always imagine a situation where I walk, I sit at the table, and they already know I'm a dad. I got three kids.

3:41I'm going to want a kid's meal. My wife's going to want a vegan thing. I'm going to want this thing. I don't have to ever pull out my wallet. It's a beautiful experience. And so we're not there yet, but what our technology really does is help restaurants compete in this world where they're competing against these very, very large tech companies, but also they're helping their guests get the food where and when they want it. So whether that means a mobile app that says, hey, I want to order delivery to my house, whether it means that that restaurant needs help dealing with their Uber Eats and DoorDash orders, or literally if it's as simple as, hey, I need to find a better payment system because I'm getting ripped off of my vendor, we kind of provide it all for them.

4:12But in reality, we think the technology should be aiding in that relationship between the end guest and the brand that they love, and we should really not be seen. And I'm wondering, Subneed, if you can give me your impression. I'm sure you keep really close watch on this, and that is consumer sentiment. So I think one thing that we've seen in terms of self-checkouts, there's been a little bit of blowback, I'd say, in the consumer world on the self-checkout world. Any observations there? Because again, I think the idea and what it seems like is how to provide this as an option for consumers to make those who are looking for it to make that process more seamless.

4:53But I'm sure you're keeping eyes and ears on how consumers are responding to all of this. I would love your insights on this. I'll give a personal opinion and some objective perspective. You know, I think your phone is really going to be the kiosk, the self-checkout of the future. And, you know, in the end, our phones are as powerful as the devices in those kiosks or at the register and give us more control over that experience. You don't feel the stress of somebody behind you. You're not taking out a credit card. And really, we've got to transition to the experience where you are walking to a store and you can place your order on your phone, pick up your food or sit down at a table order.

5:30And it still feels like you had that amazing restaurant experience. Today, I would say we're, you know, I think the market's quite bifurcated. You have Europe where kiosks are a way of life. You go into a McDonald's internationally and you have this amazing kiosk experience. You place your order, you can pick it up or it's brought to the table of your choice. And it works well. And it's actually the way it's been operating for, you know, over a decade. In the U.S., we have this push to kiosk now. And I think that's being driven by two things. I think one is restaurants are trying to fight back on wage inflation.

6:03You have California raising the minimum wage. You have all sorts of other rules. And restaurants in general are just trying to figure out ways to be more cost effective. And fortunately or unfortunately, it leads to more disintermediation of that employee. And so you have got this push for cost savings. And so you'll put a kiosk. The other reason that I think restaurants like to have potentially kiosks or tablet ordering, whatever you may, is that it can help them increase their turns. When you've got two registers of great lines, you lose some of those people. when you've got four or five kiosks, you kind of always, you can take in more orders.

6:34So there's a lot of reasons why kiosks I think will work, but I think it's really going to be a bridge between a kiosk that's a big device that you spend five, 10,$20,$30 ,000 on to, hey, my consumers are just ordering on their phones and that phone acts like my point of sale terminal. So I think we're there and there's certainly blowback. I mean, there are some consumers, you see it actually just this last week when the new California wage hikes went in, a bunch of restaurants went to kiosk only and there was a ton of blowback because most people don't like that experience still. It's still very hard for them.

7:04They didn't grow up like that or they didn't have issues, whether it's visual impairment or hearing impairment. There's just all sorts of things we have to think through. And so it's just like QR code ordering. It's just like mobile phone ordering. It's not for everybody. And so as a vendor to restaurants, I think a lot of what we're trying to help them find is it's not gonna be everything for everybody. There's not gonna be one magic tool, whether it's a kiosk, a phone, a human being that works for everybody. And so we're still trying to figure out what it's gonna balance out to. But there's definitely some blowback, but there's also some people that just say, I get it.

7:32You can't afford the labor anymore. This is what I'm going to do. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, we're talking about completely changing or upending how people do business. And sometimes these things just take time for consumers to adjust. And again, you're going to have a segment who are going to be your early adapters. They're cool. They've been waiting for this long and hard. And then you have your, you know, more traditional consumers that they love the experience of ordering from a human and talking about their order or whatever, that's fine, right? So what would you say would be the biggest challenges?

8:07And I think you've already mentioned or alluded to this, but if we think about this entire world, maybe not so much challenges, but areas to watch where you think that there's going to be some significant advancements. Certainly, I'm thinking about how AI starts to play in this and how AI can provide, again, an even better experience, what are you kind of like, if you're looking in your crystal ball, or you kind of know what's on your roadmap, or you know, generally, like, listen, this is kind of an inevitability. What are some of these things that we can look for in the future? I think it's inevitable that we will have more robots or something like a robot in the kitchen, in the preparation and fulfillment of your food.

8:49I think that's going to happen for two simplistic reasons. One, obviously, there's a cost element. Robots can work 24 seven, they don't need breaks, They don't complain. They kind of do what you want. And they tend to do the same thing over and over again without a margin of error. So there's going to be this sort of push that's going to happen. You see certain brands trying it with burgers and fries. That's going to be a trend of the future. So, you know, robotic, you know, salad chains are using robotic robots to build salads now. Like there's going to be that trend there. The other part is like, I think from a safety element, oddly, like for stuff that's programmatic, like a salad or fries, we as humans, you know, in many ways think it's going to be safer have a robot make it than a human being who might not wash their hands or whatever.

9:27And so there's going to be some of this, but you kind of have this push towards robotics that are going to happen. We are very far away from it. There are so few chains that have made this work yet, but to me, that's going to be inevitable. It's safer, it's faster, it's cleaner, it's more efficient. All the things, the same reason I think that you barely have people working the lines at airports anymore. It's just going to be, you just can't stop it. That's the way we're going to go. So that's one thing. The second part I think is, it sounds simplistic, but But you are going to see AI impact how restaurants work on staffing their labor, buying their food, their guest sentiment.

10:00Today, the challenge of restaurants is they have too much data. They have too many products. And so it doesn't connect together. It doesn't unify. And so that smart data to make actions doesn't exist yet. So I think the trend in AI is really going to be, let me help you make sense of all this data that you have so that you can be more efficient with the operations, make better menus that your guests like, track your supply chain, so on and so forth. So to me, those are two things I just think are inevitable. These aren't going to be ifs. It's just a matter of when. Yeah. You know, one thing that I, and again, I really love a well-done, large visual display of a menu, like where there's some subtle animation or there's some dynamic aspect to what I'm looking at.

10:45But that to me, it just feels so much more exciting as a consumer to see that and experience that. rather than, you know, just kind of like the old pegboard where you've got the, you know, the words kind of like punched in up there. And I'm seeing a lot of really cool stuff there that, again, I just think it creates a sense of atmosphere in addition to just being, you know, having some operational advantages. Totally. And that's even generational though, because there's some, there's some funny studies of, you know, Gen Zers don't like that. They just like look on their phone for the, you know, like, And it's good to be, like I said, it's such a hard challenge running a restaurant because you got to service you and I who like that experience of like, maybe it's like a Las Vegas experience or maybe something about it.

11:30You've got millennials who probably are in between and you got Gen Zers. Like, if it's not on my phone, I don't understand it. Share with me about, you know, your brand or Partech. Like where Partec has come from, you know, kind of where you've been and where you're going as a company. So we've got an interesting story. We're, you know, like I said, we're a young and dynamic company that's sort of been rebuilt, but we were actually founded almost 60 years ago on an Air Force base. Our original business was doing IT services and research for the U.S. Department of Defense, primarily the Air Force.

12:05So for 10 years, we did basically just IT work for the Department of Defense. And then in 1978, our founders invented the point of sale terminal. And then in 1982, our company went public off the success of McDonald's using that point of sale terminal and really going sole source so that if you had a McDonald's store, you were buying power equipment. And it is an amazing story in the sense that we were located in literally the middle of nowhere upstate New York. This is not a tech hub. This is not like a place you'll find any company like Barb. And so it was just kind of an amazing journey. We had a good run, I'd say, call it in the early to mid 80s.

12:40But then for 25 years, we really went the way of almost like a traditional manufacturing company in the United States. We got stuck selling just hardware and services to these large restaurant chains. And that became a tough, harder and harder business because, as we all know, software is a better business. Software drives the buying decision of hardware. And you were dealing with international competitors that had cheaper costs of labor and inputs and so on and so forth. And then anyways, in 2014, we made a smart acquisition of a software product that really has now become our core product. In 2018, I stepped into the company, you know, candidly, because we were going off the shelf, we were, you know, teetering on running out of money.

13:16You know, we it was it was a very bad situation. But a couple of us sort of got passionate and said, hey, if we can get through and not have to do bankruptcy and figure this out, restaurants are really at that moment in time where they're becoming tech companies, and they are ready to adopt software at a faster pace. And we think that our product, the point of sale could be that fulcrum could be that erp like system that everything's built off of and so we sort of jumped in and and um and kind of rebuilt the company since that time so we've got a ton of respect for the past and what we've done over the past 50 or 60 years uh but i'd say it's a very much a brand new company the last five or six years uh and so i always joke you know most of the people running the company today weren't alive when we went public you know 40 years ago uh and and and a lot of us sort of came from that kind of entrepreneurial startup world and so we're trying very hard to keep the cadence, the urgency under everybody.

14:06And, you know, we hope it continues. So how do, you know, who do, who is reaching out to PARTEC today to engage? Like, so in other words, like if there's someone listening and that really needs to grab a conversation or kind of investigate exactly the technology that you provide, who would that be? and how might they know that they're ready for you? We really work with sort of two constituencies. One is CIOs of restaurant chains. CIOs are generally in charge of the big tech purchases within a big restaurant. So that would be the point of sale, back office payments, things that really run within a restaurant.

14:45And then our second buyer persona is marketing officers, people who buy loyalty software. So if you're a big enterprise restaurant brand, you're coming to us and saying, hey, we want to build a new loyalty system and we'd love to look at your products. Or if you're a CIO, you might come to us and say, hey, I've been running the same point of sale software for 15 years. It's not modern. It's not in the cloud. It's not working. And I want to take out your product. Now, in reality, it's us calling them and saying, hey, let me tell you why you want to get off that old legacy thing you have. Let me tell you why our services are better, our products are better, what we can do with our products.

15:19But if they were to call us, it would be the CIO or CMO of a fast-growing or a very large restaurant chain. Yeah. So, Samit, the website that we've been talking about, it's partech.com, to our friend that's been listening to our conversation. What would you recommend they do next? And by the way, before we get into that, congratulations on your recent acquisitions as well. So it's exciting to see the growth that Partech is experiencing. Thank you. Yeah. we've had a you know an exciting round of it we sort of I think have gotten this cadence of trying to acquire a business once every year 18 months and for some reason we had two at the same time but you know we continue to to sort of push forward as far as just trying to learn about PAR I always tell people you know learn about who we are first and then let's talk about and then sort of see what we do we pride ourselves in having a unique culture we we run a little bit more decentralized than most organizations.

16:18We put a lot of trust in our emerging leaders, people who may not have any background, but who have high aptitude, high desire, high care, we will throw them into the deep end. And so we had a really amazing experience with that. And I think what I joined the most and what I think our team enjoys the most is giving people the opportunity to go build a career and not follow a GPS and take a big risk and try something new. So we really enjoyed that kind of development of our team along the way. Hmm. When somebody goes to partech.com, what would you recommend they do next? I would say go to our website, reach out to us on socials, and we'd love to talk to you.

16:55Yeah. Again, partech.com, P-A-R-T-E-C-H.com. Savneet Singh, thank you so much. Again, you're the CEO of Par Technology, your website, partech.com, P-A-R-T-E-C-H.com. Savneet, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

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