Process Automation in the Food Delivery Industry – A Case Study of Smashny Burger Restaurant

In recent years, the imagination of everyone has been captivated by pervasive automation, and the trend towards work efficiency will not bypass the gastronomy industry either. Events of the past few years have changed Poles' approach to eating out and have led to the popularization of ordering meals to homes. As a result, restaurateurs had to change their approach to logistics and planning. Companies Restimo and Wolt Drive come to the aid, integrating their systems to create a product that allows for more efficient order collection, which translates into faster restaurant meal deliveries to customers. We checked the system's operation at the Warsaw restaurant Smashny Burger.

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At the end of 2023, the Wolt and Restimo brands decided to integrate their systems, namely the order management app without rewriting to POS and Wolt Drive, an external courier service completing orders within 30 minutes. We can see the positive effects of this cooperation at Smashny Burger.

Smashny Burger popularized the trend of the “smashed sandwich” in Warsaw and combined it with modern business management in gastronomy. The restaurant introduced the option of ordering deliveries and activates customers through original promotions for burgers. As a result, employees daily receive orders placed online via the app, website, and also handle customers by phone and in person.

A company using so many channels for orders is perceived as flexible, with an approach focused on its customers' needs. How to ensure proper organization, prevent complaints, and maintain a constant number of orders in such a case? To maintain the highest service standards, it is necessary to systematically increase the team's size. While this works during peak hours, in the middle of the week, when the traffic in restaurants is much smaller, a manager might have difficulty ensuring work for some employees.

Managing a restaurant's biggest obstacle is having several sources for collecting orders - tablets with app orders, a website, and separate phone orders that need to be manually transcribed. I know from my own experience how automating order collection and courier service solutions can make a restaurateur's life easier, especially when it comes to planning daily team work - says Lucas Pollier, owner of the Warsaw restaurant Smashny Burger.

To streamline the restaurant's logistical processes and facilitate employees' work, Smashny Burger used Restimo - a delivery order management system - and Wolt Drive's external courier fleet.

The integrated system became the heart of the restaurant. Restimo is responsible for collecting orders from all channels in one place and real-time updates, e.g., unified menus across all online channels of the restaurant. Restimo significantly eases the entire process, where prices and dishes are updated in a single source system, which requires just a browser to operate. Wolt Drive provides an external courier fleet on-demand for orders placed through Smashny Burger's own channels.

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How does it work?

Imagine the restaurant is experiencing peak hours. Besides serving guests on-site, the location also receives “delivery” orders. It's almost as if two restaurants operated independently under one roof. One is served by waiters, and the other by drivers. The task of both groups of employees is to provide customers with the best experiences, as the brand they work for benefits. Efficient information exchange between the kitchen and those responsible for taking orders and issuing meals is essential for a gastronomic venue not to "drown" in orders at the time of the highest customer influx.

An increasing number of orders is associated with increased demand for courier work. For many managers, this is a significant logistical challenge. For restaurants, this means employing at least a few couriers during the week, increasing their numbers on weekends, when peak hours begin in many gastronomic businesses. Moreover, organizing courier work often means managing a vehicle fleet, preparing schedules, and supervising work to combine orders, monitor delivery times, and prepare substitutes for drivers. An external courier fleet allows not only to settle for individual delivery orders but also to minimize the risk of long delivery times and closing the delivery channel during peak hours - says Maciej Statkiewicz, Head of Wolt Drive.

For this reason, the Restimo and Wolt Drive brands decided to join forces, creating an integrated environment for managing orders in a gastronomic venue. Restimo allows collecting orders from several different sources on one tablet, including a restaurant's own channels or food delivery apps. In turn, a gastronomic point's manager can choose and adapt service for a given order, assigning the task to their own drivers if available, or using Wolt Drive services. It allows flexible management of delivery orders because, as a result of integration with Restimo, a restaurant does not have to rewrite orders between different systems. The service staff, upon receiving an online order, selects the preparation time (depending on the traffic in the location) and reserves the arrival of the driver.

Such a solution allows maintaining greater flexibility with a constant team size. The restaurant no longer has to extend the waiting time for order pickup, as there is always a chance to use the support of an external courier fleet. This way, the company avoids downtime and maintains a continuous supply, which positively impacts the brand's image among customers in the long term.

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Benefits and Savings Achieved Through the Integration of Restimo and Wolt Drive

Thanks to the automatic transmission of order data from Restimo to Wolt Drive, a restaurant can reduce the order preparation time by an average of 1.5 minutes. For venues handling an average of 15 orders per day (450 per month), this translates to a total monthly saving of 11 hours and 15 minutes, and as much as 135 hours annually. If we convert this into the average hourly wage of an employee at 25 PLN gross, the annual savings amount to 3,375 PLN.

Another significant benefit is the elimination of errors in entering customer contact details and addresses. On average, as many as 1 in 20 orders contain errors in contact information, leading to the loss of the order and associated costs. Using an integrated system leads to the elimination of manual data entry and related errors. For the restaurant in the above example, where the average order value is 50 PLN, this results in a cost of lost orders amounting to 1,125 PLN per month and as much as 13,500 PLN annually.

‍Savings are one thing, but the owners of Smashny Burger highlight increased customer satisfaction as one of the main benefits of integrating Restimo and Wolt Drive. Thanks to efficient order organization, customers are more likely to use the venue's services again, frequently leave positive reviews, and recommend the restaurant to friends. This translates into lower marketing costs and the cost of acquiring new customers – says Arek Bielecki, co-founder of Restimo.

We encourage the use of the calculator, which allows restaurant owners to calculate the total savings resulting from using integrated systems.

Companies wishing to join the program can test it during a two-week free trial period and also take advantage of a promotional offer for the Restimo subscription at 99 PLN for the first two months. Meanwhile, Wolt offers that for the first 4 weeks, the fee for each delivery via Wolt Drive will be only one zloty.