Digital platform sorts online restaurant menus by allergic ingredients
Key takeaways:
- EveryBite aims to roll the technology out to 250 restaurant brands by the end of the year.
- Food Allergy Research & Education has partnered with EveryBite to report on data produced by the platform.
Dining out can be scary for the 33 million people in the United States with a food allergy. Even when restaurants list allergic ingredients in their menus, the information may be out of date or hard to find.
EveryBite aims to change that dynamic. It is now working with 50 restaurant brands with more than 4,000 locations to implement its SmartMenu technology on their websites.
Restaurants like TGI Fridays enable diners to sort their online menus by allergen category, including the “big nine” allergens. Photo: TGI Fridays
“It’s a fully automated, interactive, self-personalized menu display,” Lucy Logan, president and cofounder of EveryBite, told Healio.
SmartMenus list everything these restaurants offer and include a search and filter bar with drop-down menus that help diners sort options based on whether they include any of the “big nine” allergens — wheat, dairy, eggs, fish, shellfish, soy, tree nut, peanut and sesame. By checking its boxes, diners can exclude dishes with these allergens from their menu selection choices.
“With one click, it tells me there are 149 matches that are free from dairy,” Logan said, citing the options on the Cracker Barrel website.
Another drop-down menu lets diners personalize dishes by specific ingredients, which vary by restaurant and cuisine, but may include items as varied as apples, bacon, cilantro, honey, quinoa, tofu or other foods that might not be part of the major allergen categories but still trigger reactions.
“What we’re really focused on is personalization,” F. Sid Conklin, CEO and cofounder of EveryBite, told Healio.
Other restaurants may include PDFs that include allergen information on their websites, Conklin said, “but it’s a frustrating user experience.” Or, he continued, diners would have to ask restaurant staff about allergic ingredients directly at the table.
SmartMenu is designed to streamline this process and make this information more accessible for diners and restaurants alike.
“When they change a menu or a recipe, it is instantly updated to the guest-facing display,” Conklin said.
“It’s a living, breathing, interactive menu, customized to each unique dietary requirement,” Logan added. “Because we have the individual ingredients, with that granular detail, we can help the diner make that allergen-specific, informed decision.”
“You basically allow the diner to express who they are,” Conklin said.
The system benefits restaurants as well as diners with allergies, Logan said.
“It has been, for many, many years, a stalemate position between restaurants and diners living with food allergies,” she said, adding that many restaurants may see diners with allergies as a nuisance due to the limitations on what they can order and the accommodations they require.
“If you look at the data, they’re not a nuisance audience, and in fact can be the restaurants’ most loyal customer, where they typically spend the most and frequent the most,” Logan said, noting that diners with allergies go to the same restaurants again and again because they know dishes are available there that suit their preferences.
“Let’s change that conversation,” Logan said. “Let’s change that narrative and say that these are people that want to eat at your restaurant.”
“The restaurant has to make money, and the diners have to be able to see what they’re consuming,” Conklin said. “We’re coming in to bring those two worlds together.”
Sung Poblete, PhD, RN, CEO of FARE (Food Allergy Research & Education), told Healio that dining out is “extremely challenging” for people with food allergy.
“We don’t have control over how the food is prepared in the kitchen. We don’t know if there’s going to be cross-contact,” Poblete said. “Every bite we take can be our last if our allergen somehow gets into our meal.”
Poblete agreed that this fear creates tension between diners and restaurants, prompting FARE to partner with EveryBite to help dispel it.
“The dynamic menu gives consumers more up-to-date information about what they’re eating. It’s more options to customize those choices to fit their needs, while giving restaurants insights into consumer behavior,” she said. “This is a game changer.”
Currently, EveryBite reports more than 150,000 monthly users, with 1.9 million menu interactions in just 9 months The platform includes a feedback tab, and the company has been hearing from grateful diners.
“We get emails from the diners saying, ‘Thank you!’” Logan said. “That’s been great for us to hear, that we’re building something that not only personalizes the menu at its most important layer – what we eat – but diners are finding enough value that they’re writing in to us!”
Diners also have been complimenting restaurants, asking questions and making suggestions via the feedback tab, Conklin said.
“That’s really important,” he said. “There’s a lot of variation between diners.”
Diners also can use SmartMenu to create profiles that include and store their preferences, creating a single personalized experience for every menu in EveryBite’s restaurant network. By signing into the SmartMenu system, allergen-free selections automatically would appear for each restaurant they browse.
Restaurants also are satisfied with the platform.
“They love it,” Logan said.
In addition to being a more efficient way of presenting menu ingredients than the PDFs that many restaurants use, Logan said, SmartMenu provides actionable information about diners and their dining habits.
“Restaurants don’t want more data. They want actionable insights,” Conklin said. “We take all those data and then we provide insights about who their customers are.”
For example, he said, restaurants can learn which allergens diners chose to avoid, what they ordered instead, and where and when they ordered it. Now, restaurants can promote individual dishes to specific diners in real time.
“Now it’s optimizing for that individual,” Conklin said.
EveryBite also will work with FARE to generate quarterly reports about these dining patterns so restaurants better know how to access this consumer demographic, Poblete said.
“This partnership with EveryBite is a way to measure and demonstrate that opportunity, creating a different dynamic between the food allergy community and the restaurant industry that will provide access to a new consumer group for restaurants while keeping the food allergy patient safer,” Poblete said.
Looking ahead, EveryBite is working toward adding 250 restaurant brands, that will activate approximately 25,000 locations to offer SmartMenu, and have about 1.5 million monthly diners by the end of the year.
Logan noted that 68% of consumers visit a restaurant’s website before visiting the restaurant itself, so SmartMenu enables these diners to plan ahead. Next, EveryBite will help restaurants bring the SmartMenu experience into their locations.
“We’re basically doing QR codes directly in the restaurant,” Conklin said. “That allows the diner to jump directly into their SmartMenu, so the diner can answer all these questions themselves without having to ask the front house staff.”
Logan said that this technology “is just the beginning,” too.
“There’s going to be so many other feature enhancements to personalize the dining experience, such as online ordering and AI dish recommendations,” she said. “Over a million people love what we’re doing already, and we’re just getting started.”
“Our community is value-added for the restaurant industry,” Poblete said. “We are a significant, loyal and underserved community group who frequents establishments, especially where we are made safe.”