Four up-and-coming trends in the restaurant business

Cupcakes from Teacosy are sold alongside angel figurines and furniture.

As technology advances and business concepts evolve, an increasing number of F&B entrepreneurs and service solution providers are thinking out-of-the-box and making life easier for customers.

By innovating, F&B entrepreneurs enjoy reduced overheads, better customer service and additional revenue. Customers feel more satisfied too. In this article, we chart four recent trends in the F&B industry that have dramatically improved how businesses are run.

If you’re a restaurateur or cafe owner, do look at these trends and consider implementing them in your business.

Managing orders wirelessly

The wireless paging system from Food Icon.

Customers often struggle to get the attention of busy waitresses. Staff also find the handling of order tickets a struggle at times.

To solve these problems, food eateries are adopting new wireless communication devices from companies like Food Icon to make the ordering process a breeze. Swensen’s and Aston Express are some of its customers.

One of its products, Wi-Serve, is a paging service that allows restaurant operators to quickly and easily contact their patrons. It can be used to inform customers when an order is ready to be collected or when a table is available.

Consisting of one transmitter with many handheld coaster pagers, restaurant operators can enter the pager number into the transmitter and press ‘send’, allowing patrons to receive the alert on their coaster pagers immediately.

Says Vincent Shi, co-founder of the company: “The increasingly tight labour market is a strain on the F&B industry. Paging technology can help F&B operators improve productivity and efficiency in spite of limited manpower.”

“Matured countries such as Japan and Korea which encountered manpower shortage many years before Singapore, are heavily reliant on paging technology in their F&B industry.”

F&B outlets are no longer just selling food