The 21 Digital Disruptors Shaping Restaurants in 2022
Rom Krupp
Founder and CEO, OneDine
The year was 2018. Rom Krupp cleared the table and got dystopian for a moment. What if the restaurant industry never existed? Could a tech company approach food as an all-new sector? Krupp not only thought it was feasible, but fundamental to where consumers were taking restaurants. An industry built on guts was beginning to understand the value of data, as Krupp’s 2012-founded Marketing Vitals was proving out. But the next great disruption was unfurling within the structure of restaurants themselves. “The industry that we’re going to build will serve people food the way food is being served today,” says Krupp.
This was the starting point for OneDine, a company that’s web capabilities out into a lot of areas. At its center, though, it’s a platform that supercharges existing POS systems to enable contactless ordering and payment, to optimize labor, eliminate fraudulent chargebacks, and create a “triple-win for servers, managers, and guests alike,” the company says.
What Krupp, who has been in the business for 26 years, is recognized as having a lack of agility among POS devices.
As he explains it, “a ground-up rewrite of looking at the restaurant industry as a brand-new industry. Not one trying to adopt all of the things that have been adopted for the last 40 years.”
Krupp doesn’t believe restaurants need a brick-and-mortar tech stack anymore. Consider a project OneDine recently tackled. It completed a baseball stadium setup—23 concession stands, eight kiosks, 12 handhelds for VIP suites, 7,000 QR codes, and 180 pickup cubbies. But the key was OneDine did so without installing a single piece of software in the building. Everything runs from secure browsers.
“Cloud-based POS are not really cloud-based POS, they’re cloud-based databases,” says Krupp, “which means the POS is running locally but the database is running in the cloud; but there’s software running in the building. That means you have to upgrade it, version control it. We don’t. Even the software is running as a web service. So there’s nothing really deploying to the field. And that’s a brand-new way to look in the industry, which is you don’t need actual software to run the physical locations.”
OneDine early on created handheld tablets that interfaced with a merchant’s existing tech stack. It was a solution focused on labor and creating a contactless and efficient ordering and payment process for servers and diners. It established PCI and EMV compliance and eliminated fraudulent chargebacks.
However, this was just an opening shot. OneDine expanded to incorporate additional contactless payment technology, mobile menu browsing, and curbside order and payment options to help restaurants generate off-premises revenue. AI surveys, guest preference tracking, and offer management eventually made their way into OneDine’s 360-degree solution as well. It then expanded to accommodate multi-merchant venues (like malls), hotels, airports, retail establishments, and event venues, such as the stadium case.
In Krupp’s two-plus decades working with restaurants—he spent 16 years with Custom Business Solutions before Marketing Vitals—he’s seen the space evolve from POS’ infancy in 1996 to now. And what’s happened since, he says, is commerce has become increasingly decentralized. That began in the early 2000s as online ordering arrived. Krupp himself was involved in launching the integrated system for Jason’s Deli from the internet into the POS in 2000.
Restaurants quickly had different channels for online ordering and different ones for digital menus. It was an OK concept when that slice of business represented a “few percentage points here and there,” says Krupp. But in 2018, the world had morphed to 30–50 percent of sales for countless brands sector-wide.
So given how many transactions are now decentralized, the amount of effort it was taking operators to manage commerce ballooned into a massive, and often messy, undertaking.
“Because everything was still anchored in the POS systems,” says Krupp, “and the POS system was built to run the brick-and-mortar; they were never built to run kind of an Amazon concept. An ecommerce concept. Commerce is not only happening on multiple channels for you as a brand that you can control—commerce was also happening on channels you couldn’t control.”
Krupp is referencing streams like third-party marketplaces and Google ordering.
Again, going back to the idea of OneDine, Krupp says he didn’t look at the industry’s evolution only through the lens of labor. There were a bevy of solutions working to help restaurants maintain new channels and improve flow.
Krupp says efficiencies in throttling and quoting times, and just managing kitchens in general, flashed on the horizon. “When you have multiple commerce channels, POS, on-premises, off-premises, third-party, not only do you have six or seven vendors to do commerce, but how do they know to quote the delivery driver the right timing and not effect negatively the people who showed up in the building and
