Bringing a Unified Experience to the Modern Restaurant

There’s an old saying that goes, “You can’t do it all and do it well.” And generally, that seems to hold true.   

But what happens when you take “it all” and make it just one thing? Or at least, have “it all” work together so well that the experience becomes unified?

If you have followed PAR Technology over the past several months, you may have heard about the company moving towards building a Unified Experience of all facets of the modern restaurant experience.

A Unified Experience in the restaurant landscape refers to having all of the technology needed to support a modern restaurant seamlessly integrating to offer a frictionless experience for all parties involved (i.e., restaurant, employees, guest).

Today’s consumers expect faster, better, and overall more convenient experiences in any type of commercial transaction, and nowhere has this been more apparent than in the food-service industry. More and more technology companies have entered the picture to solve for various expectations of consumers, and related needs from the businesses.

But merely throwing new technology and products at a restaurant doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. Open APIs and integrations among multiples systems and companies leaves a restaurant vulnerable to an issue with a single product or provider derailing the restaurant’s entire operation.

PAR’s CEO Savneet Singh, had this to say about the shifting focal points of restaurant executives –
“Restaurants are becoming technology companies. In the last few years nearly every restaurant organization has moved to enable online ordering, kiosk ordering, mobile solutions, loyalty campaigns and more to respond to the growing expectation of their customer base. This explosion in software at the restaurant has left the CIO of that restaurant challenged. While every new product installed solves a particular need, each additional product must be manually integrated a set of other manually integrated products, creating an incredible high risk and fragile environment.”

So how does today’s CIO de-risk their use of advancing technology? The ideal way would be to use a single restaurant technology partner to provide all of the software and hardware necessary for the modern restaurant; point of sale, back office, loyalty programs, mobile apps, drive-thru and FOH/BOH hardware, and payment processing. The problem was that until very recently, no restaurant technology could provide all of those components.

PAR Technology is the first, and one of the few companies in any industry to provide a complete unified experience.  And that is exactly what PAR Technology is doing, by being the first organization to offer brands everything they need under one roof.

When thinking about a Unified Experience in the arena of restaurants, there’s a specific piece of technology that brings everything together; the point of sale. PAR Brink POS brings data from Menu (online ordering), Data Central (back-office), Punchh (loyalty/mobile apps) and in-house payment processing together into a central location. 

Brink was the first cloud-based POS founded in 2008 and not originally a PAR product. By the time Brink was acquired by PAR in 2014, the rampant advancement of technology, open APIs and software integrations had moved many enterprise restaurants to begin functioning more like technology providers, with mid-market and SMBs following.

Brink was one of the first point-of-sale systems to allow operators to connect to additional pieces of technology provided by various companies, and PAR continues to allow such third-party integrations today to accommodate the needs of its various customers.

However, it is only in recent months (late 2022) that PAR completed the acquisition of MENU online ordering to now offer all of the technology needed for Unified Experience in house. And although these are the early days of Unified Experiences, the responses and adoption have been nothing but exciting.

What’s next for Unified Experience? Follow @partechnology on LinkedIn, for upcoming case studies on PAR customers that are among the first to offer a truly unified experience in their restaurants. Check out the impressive results they’re generating or see for yourself with a Free Demo.