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,