Up next in my series of conversations from this year’s National Restaurant Association Show is Playa Bowls CMO Tim Hackbardt. The industry vet is relatively new to the role (official announcement was just two days ago), but brought over three-plus decades of experience, including leadership spots at Del Taco, Inspire Brands, and BJ’s Restaurants.
I asked Hackbardt the same three questions posed to Savory’s Clay Dover around innovation and the future of operations. Naturally, we went down different paths, starting with AI and working up to drones, and the impact of GLP-1.
Here was our conversation:
Tell us a restaurant innovation that’s actually helping?
I don’t know that it’s helping fully yet, but, of course, there’s a lot of AI in the back office. Really understanding all that data and drilling down into it. That’s helping a lot of people. I don’t get into that area as much myself.
So, are you using it for marketing?
I use a little bit of AI. I use it as a thought partner. I’ll have some ideas, whether it be around products or advertising, or even writing copy. You get to where it’s, oh my gosh, my copy is 85 percent how I want it. But it needs to be a little bit better. Well, I can ask AI a couple of different questions and get closer to something that’s pretty cool.
Usually, it’s a word I’ll pick out of the response, not what the AI actually produces. But it’s like, oh, there’s a word and that word can really help tell the story that we’re trying to tell.
That’s more of how I deploy it—as a thought partner to craft a story or communication to the consumer, especially in our world at Playa Bowls where we’re offering a lot of pretty unique ingredients. Everything we do has to have a functional and beneficial part to it. Some of those things are a little bit new, like spirulina. How can I condense that down to a couple of words and explain it to the customer quickly so it becomes familiar and not threatening to them?
Are you using it for segmentation or anything along those lines?
You still have to have your hands on that. That’s going to be a combination of data that you have internally, or from your loyalty platform and consumers that you know. And then data that you can go out and get another third-party partner. It can be credit card data or something else. Then, how do you merge all that together? How can AI help you do that and do it faster?
But you have to do trial and error to get it to work. Then you can run analysis fast every time.
OK, other side of the question. An innovation that you’re skeptical about.
Well, a lot of AI. People just put AI on their company name and that’s going to make me pretty skeptical. One that is becoming less skeptical, though, is robotics. I was very skeptical at first. It wasn’t affordable. But that’s starting to change now.
What are you seeing?
Just a few minutes ago, I saw a pretty good pizza topper. It was a cool thing. It had a couple of different cylinders you could put different sauces in it. I always thought pizza was such a manual labor business. And there are parts of that that can be automated, especially saucing.
But back on the skeptical piece …
I just think a lot of things that we were skeptical of are starting to come true. One being drone delivery. That’s real now. And very efficient.
I just always wonder how market-specific they’ll be given the airspace.
There will have to be some kind of control so there’s not too many of them up at the same time. But it is real now. They have it figured out. It’s happening.
Final question. The crystal ball fast forward. What are we talking about next year when we sit down?
I actually don’t think the restaurant industry is talking about GLP-1 enough. I’m trying to keep up on it. It just keeps growing and growing. Now, we’re in pill form. It’s going to be so much easier to take. And then, the drug companies will find a better way to keep people on it for longer in lower doses—things that are already happening. They’ll get better at that.
I’m a big Wall Street Journal guy. I still get the paper delivered on my lawn every day.
Good for you. Everyone should still get print (hint …)
The most recent report is that 20 percent of all households in the United States have at least one person on GLP-1. I mean, that is dramatic. And that’s not like a diet fad. It’s a real thing. Everything has really changed. You see pizza just caving in sales. It’s hitting fast food and everything else.
So, I don’t think those guys reacting. Pizza a little tougher. But fast food should react and I don’t really see them doing that a lot. And I think it’s a huge impact. How many times can you have something hit 10, 15, 20 percent of the entire restaurant consumer base? That’s gigantic.
With a product that makes you eat less.
Right. Usually, with a diet fad, an Atkins or what have you, that’s generally about a three-year lifecycle. It only gets up to about 7 percent of the entire population. That’s not going to happen this time. It’s going to become cheaper. The drug companies are going to learn from all the data. They’re going to enhance the technology around side effects or ways to do it.
It’s just going to get better.
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