Our Vision of Restaurants In 2030

We present one vision of the future of restaurants.

How Would You Like Your Steak Grown?

A recent article about a Singapore-based company growing shrimp and other crustaceans in the lab, got us thinking about the restaurant of the future. Let's imagine it is 2030. What could the restaurant industry look like? Well if we simply extrapolate and build on current trends, here is one version of what we might see.

ORDERING

Virtual Restaurant Ordering

Most food will be cooked in central kitchens and delivered. The ordering process will take place though Virtual Reality headsets which will display detailed images of each dish, which can be ordered seamlessly simply by looking at digital menus and blinking twice to order. We have no idea if the development in digital smell technology will catch on though.

DELIVERY

Not Quite - But Driverless Cars and Drones WILL Deliver Your Food

This is an easy one. All meals will be delivered by a combination or drones, driverless cars, and small autonomous delivery robots. Fully articulated human-like robots will still be 10 years away.

FOOD

"Healthy" Lab Grown Food

Most of our food will be grown in "virtual farms'. That means they will be grown from cells in laboratories and engineered to smell and taste like food while being sustainable, and "healthy".

COOKING

Automated Kitchen Of The Future

We won't quite have the Star Trek food synthesizer, but kitchens will be highly automated. The large chains such as McDonald's will have vast central automated kitchens that can automatically accept digital orders, prepare, cook, package and place the meal in the basket of a drone or robot for delivery.

Nothing here is at all impossible or unreasonable. Whether the world will be a better off with this progress......well that's a much tougher question!

Denny's Delivery Doubles!

Denny's off-premise sales have more than doubled in 3 years.

Denny’s reported quarterly earnings this week and announced that off-premise sales have nearly doubled since the family diner chain launched Denny’s on Demand two years ago.

Off-premise sales accounted for 12% of total sales for the quarter, up from 7% when the company launched Denny’s on Demand in 2017.

“Delivery continues to drive the expansion of our off-premise business,” CEO John Miller told investors during a conference call. “These transactions continue to be incremental.”

Meanwhile, chilis, one of the last remaining chains not offering delivery, has decided to partner with an as yet undisclosed third-party delivery platform to offer delivery. CEO Wyman Roberts said the choice of at least one third-party delivery partner could come shortly.

“We clearly see the opportunity delivery could bring to our business,” he said of the pending decision for Chili’s.

Indian Food Popular In India!

Biryani deliveries catching up to burgers and pizza in India!

Chicken Biryani

I'm sorry. There is something about that headline that smacks of April 1st and yet we are a month past that date. I guess stereotypes are just that. Ideas that stick around but are not necessarily true. For example, for the past few years one of the most popular restaurant meals in England has been Chicken Tikka Masala. So much so that some people have referred to it as the national dish of England replacing fish and chips or bangers and mash (sausage and mash potato).

Now it turns out, that for delivery at least, biryani is replacing burgers and pizzas as the most popular food in India. A report by industry body FICCI and PWC, 'The changing landscape of the retail food service industry', which was released in December 2018, stated that ethnic cuisine is rising in the organised segment of India's food services market. "Over the last few years as food delivery apps, quick-service restaurants (QSRs) and take-away outlets have begun to dominate, biryani has emerged as an unlikely champion of India's fast food scene, unseating pizzas and burgers, which used to dominate standardized fast food kitchens. Who knew? Well now our well-informed readers know.

Apple Pie a la Mode

So Indian food is popular in England, and pizza and burgers are popular in India. At least Americans still love their Apple Pie....a la mode...as they say in France!