For Restaurants and Tech, the Focus Shifts from Volume to Refinement

Restaurant technology is a cycle. If you trail back pre-COVID, the industry was (rightfully) accused of lagging retail peers on adoption. It was a sector built on gut calls and intimate, personal knowledge of the customer. Another reality was many innovations launched during the pandemic weren’t inventions as much as sped-up reactions. The timeline was compressed on changes guests were already asking for. And that’s held into the future.

However, one of the other fallouts from this fire hose stretch of tech was brands rushed to turn on every switch they could to locate customers, resulting in fragmented tech stacks and solutions that often didn’t speak to one another. There was also a question of profitability beyond expanded reach. So the evolution has looked something like this: innovation to optimization to efficiency.

Where we are today, as Qu put it in its most recent State of Digital report, is a drive toward holistic, integrated tech.

There were six main trends identified from the survey—the company’s sixth yearly edition.

Shift from third- to first-party ordering
Consolidating tech systems to unlock efficiency and prepare for AI
Data-driven personalization to boost engage engagement
Kiosks continuing to ease labor strains
Smart kitchens to drive accuracy and productivity
Digital sales leveling off and brands shifting focus to profitability

On the first, it’s unsurprising given the increasing access to tools and capabilities to offer delivery and ordering through owned channels. Forty percent of brands said first-party digital ordering will drive the highest revenue growth in 2025.

Ordering channels prioritized for growth

First-party ordering: 40 percent
Catering: 24 percent
On-premises ordering: 14 percent
Drive-thru: 11 percent
Third-party ordering: 7 percent
Kiosk: 4 percent

Quick-serves and fast casuals ranked first-party online ordering as the top revenue growth opportunity. Following, quick service chains prioritized drive-thru and third-party ordering. For fast casuals, it was catering and on-premises ordering expansion.

As suggested, before some of the flashier tech solutions become true options, restaurants are working to consolidate systems and develop a foundation for scale.

“In the rush to ‘go digital,’ many brands built their tech stacks like a Jenga tower—unstable, ready to topple and blocking innovation,” Qu CEO Amir Hudda said in a statement. “With digital sales growth now stabilizing, restaurants must focus on dismantling these disconnected, legacy systems and adopting more modern, flexible approaches. The next phase of growth lies in using unified data to create more value for guests, improve staff efficiencies and drive lasting profitability.”

Here were the tech strategies driving operational efficiencies in 2025

Tech stack/systems consolidation: 64 percent
Improved online ordering strategies: 58 percent
Data orchestrations and analytics: 55 percent
Kiosks: 36 percent
Mobile order/pay (line busting): 31 percent
Kitchen fulfillment systems: 20 percent
AI-enabled ordering in drive-thru: 13 percent
AI-enabled phone ordering: 12 percent
AI-driven camera vision: 10 percent
Robotics: 5 percent

By segment, unifying systems appeared the clear opening step.

Top three priorities

Quick service

Tech stack and systems consolidation
Data orchestration and analytics
Kiosks

Fast casual

Tech stack and systems consolidation
Improved online ordering strategies
Data orchestration and analytics

Additionally, 87 percent of brands said unifying payments was important as they seek cost costings and a single view of the guest.

Importance of unified payments

Extremely important: 48 percent
Somewhat important: 39 percent
Not so important: 13 percent

What Qu’s report also uncovered was the continuation of what it called last year “loyalty 3.0.” This stemmed from the finding 80 percent of brands felt loyalty wasn’t working for them. They wanted to invest in strategies like experience engagement (45 percent), frictionless sign-up (39 percent), guest payment variety (28 percent), redemption innovation (27 percent), automated recognition (22 percent), and a new loyalty provider (17 percent).

More broadly, the path had to change from sign up and digital punch cards to earning customer favoritism through personalized, data-driven interactions capable of providing value at every touchpoint.

The vision is loyalty without unified data can’t reach guests the way restaurants need it to. This trend toward owning the guest relationship showed continuously in yearly reports. CDP and data investments, up 11 percent, were poised in Qu’s study to outpace loyalty investments, which were down 8 percent, year-over-year. Data platforms, it said, take on new importance “as loyalty has lost its way” with a focus on the few, but “data can be its savior when the two are paired together.” The end goal being to make the digital channel conform to overall brand standards, improve the guest relationship and guest lifetime value. Thirty-four percent of operators in the survey said they plan to invest in data platforms and strategies this year.

“When brands unify their data, they can create more relevant and personalized experiences that keep guests coming back. Without real-time, connected data, loyalty programs are bound to fall short.” Hudda said.

Top technology investment areas

Loyalty and marketing: 39 percent
Mobile app: 39 percent
CDP/data lakes: 34 percent
Point of sale: 32 percent
Online ordering: 29 percent
Back-of-house systems: 23 percent
Kiosks: 20 percent
Digital menuboards: 20 percent

Category breakdown

Quick service

Point of sale: 15 percent
Mobile app: 12 percent
Back of house systems: 10 percent
Online ordering: 10 percent
CDP: 9 percent
Marketing/loyalty solutions: 7 percent
Kiosks: 6 percent
Unified commerce platform: 6 percent
LMS: 2 percent
Digital menuboard: 2 percent

Fast casual

Marketing/loyalty solutions: 15 percent
Mobile app: 13 percent
CDP: 12 percent
Online ordering: 10 percent
Point of sale: 9 percent
Digital menuboard: 8 percent
Back of house systems: 7 percent
Kiosks: 7 percent
LMS: 5 percent
Unified commerce platform: 5 percent

Investments in CDPs and CRMs rose in this year’s report. A clear indicator, Qu said, of restaurants’ efforts now to go from launching loyalty to focusing on its effectiveness. Loyalty for the sake of loyalty can be a loss leader if not combined with data-driven strategies that improve customer acquisition and capture a larger pool of guests, it said.

Tactics to better understand the guest

Loyalty programs: 77 percent
CRM: 52 percent
CDP: 45 percent
Marketing automation strategies: 36 percent
Acquire new marketing strategies: 29 percent
Offer management: 28 percent
Tokenize payments data: 24 percent
Curate and centralize data into one system: 12 percent

Shifting to the topic of kiosks, 62 percent of brands said they embrace them to help alleviate labor challenges and drive operational efficiencies. In 2023, 43 percent of brands said they planned to add them.

Now?

Do you plan to use kiosks in 2025?

Not using: 38 percent
Currently uses: 35 percent
Piloting: 20 percent
Launching: 7 percent

Naturally, kiosk growth was more pronounced in quick service than fast casual (80 to 52 percent implementation). Overall, quick-serves in the report leaned toward kiosk-driven solutions as a digital strategy while fast casuals raced toward direct guest relationship management options.

Do you plan to use kiosks in 2025?

Not using

Quick service: 19 percent
Fast casual: 42 percent

Launching in 2025

Quick service: 6 percent
Fast casual: 7 percent

Piloting in 2025

Quick service: 26 percent
Fast casual: 18 percent

Use them today

Quick service: 48 percent
Fast casual: 27 percent

Despite hastening deployment, there remain hesitations on outcomes and ROI for kiosks. The future, Qu said, will require a more intentional focus on revenue generation with strong promise for higher average order volumes than other channels (due to upsell potential).

In order, the biggest barriers were cost, operations disruption, brand alignment, time and resources, and integration.

As far as where the tech timeline heads from here, the report identified kitchens as an area overdue for modernization. Can restaurants address inefficiencies that impact guest experience?

Nearly 70 percent of enterprise restaurants in the survey said order accuracy was their biggest efficiency challenge (speed of service, staff productivity, food waste, and read times accuracy followed). That number was up from 64 percent last year.

The biggest digital Achilles’ heel—order accuracy.

Biggest challenges with digital ordering

Order accuracy: 48 percent
Ordering throttling/turning off systems: 34 percent
Food quality when delivered: 34 percent
Understanding data around order failures: 28 percent
Menus not syncing across technologies: 28 percent
Difficulty 86-ing items: 25 percent
Customer details not shared with restaurants: 24 percent
Integration with loyalty: 20 percent
Integration with point of sale: 20 percent
Balancing order volume on/off premises: 20 percent

Innovating for the future, as shared earlier, is coming from a different point of urgency. Digital growth has stabilized. The three year-view shows steady, yet modest expansion, with a 4 percent increase since 2022. Incremental gains and a stable ordering mix, Qu said, means restaurants can focus on owning the direct guest relationship and improving unit-level economics.

It also signals a shift from chasing volume to refining operations.

Fast casual brands proved to be stronger digital adopters, with one in 10 reporting 50 percent-plus digital sales mix. Fifty-seven percent of fast casuals and 23 percent of quick-serves boasted 26 percent and above digital sales.

Percent of sales from digital channels

Less than 26 percent