How L'Osteria is Leading the Future of Restaurants with Digitalization

Welcome to yet another insightful episode of the Food Service Growth Show. Your ultimate destination for all things restaurant management and digitalization! This episode is all about restaurant digitalization.

In this episode, we're joined by Peter Schimpl, VP of Digital & IT at L'Osteria, a prominent German brand with 150+ outlets. Get ready as Carl and Peter unravel the mysteries of restaurant digitalization and discover how L'Osteria is spearheading the future of restaurants with its innovative digitalization strategies.

Together, they will discuss... 
✅  What Elements Constitute The L'Osteria Digital Ecosystem Strategy?
✅  The Fundamental Pillars Of The Restaurant Ecosystem
✅  What Strategies Increase Confidence in Data Ownership?
✅  What Factors Are Shaping The Future Of Digitization?
✅  How Does L'Osteria Achieve Buy-In from Its Franchise Partners?
✅  What Ensures System Flexibility In Franchises Across Diverse Markets?
✅  Why Inventory Management Is Mission Critical for L'Osteria?
✅  What Is The Link Between Data Transparency and Accountability? 
✅  Lessons From McDonald's Approach to Digitalization
✅  How Will Food Service Evolve In the Next 5 Years?

As the food service industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace, restaurant management has become increasingly reliant on digitalization to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. 

In this insightful conversation, Carl and Peter delve into various aspects of digitalization and its impact on the restaurant industry. They explore the intricacies of L'Osteria's digital ecosystem strategy, shedding light on the fundamental pillars that underpin its success. From enhancing data ownership confidence to adapting to diverse market needs, L'Osteria has set a benchmark for digital excellence in restaurant management.

But what exactly drives this digital transformation? Peter shares valuable insights into the factors shaping the future of digitization. He emphasizes the importance of buy-in from franchise partners and ensuring system flexibility across different markets. With a focus on inventory management as a mission-critical component, L'Osteria demonstrates its commitment to efficiency and accountability.

Furthermore, the discussion touches upon the crucial link between data transparency and accountability, drawing inspiration from industry giants like McDonald's and their approach to digitalization. 

As the landscape of food service continues to evolve, Carl and Peter speculate on the future trends and innovations that will shape the next five years in the industry.

Subscribe to our channel as we explore the latest trends, insights, and best practices in restaurant management and digitalization. 

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Transcript

0:00

Hello, I'm Carl Jacobs and I'm co founder and CEO of Apicbase. At Apicbase, we are building the world's best food and beverage management platform. But in this podcast series, it's all about finding answers on how to grow and scale your food service business. I'm talking to numerous experts and industry professionals who are passionate about building a healthy food service industry. Join me on this fascinating journey of entrepreneurship in food. Hello and welcome back to the food service growth show. Here is another episode and today I have Peter Schimpl with me. He's the VP of Digital and It of L'Osteria. It's a German, or mainly German chain. Welcome, Peter. Thank you. Thank you for having me today. It's a pleasure to have you actually, in the preparations for this podcast already quite some interesting things were mentioned, so I'm happy to have you. But as always, the first question is please, can you please briefly introduce yourself so that people know who is Peter Schimpl, where is he coming from and what is your job at L'Osteria? Yes, my name is Peter. So I'm 58 years old, father of a proud father of a son, and I'm 30 plus years now in the industry. So I started in the industry at McDonald's, where I started as programmer, as McDonald's for the PoS system and for the back office systems and made my way through. And then I led the McDonald's IT for the German market and ten smaller markets around Germany for at least 15 years and decided then to become an entrepreneur. Since at McDonald's I learned to love innovation, technology innovation. And I worked together with my colleagues then in France to introduce self-order kiosk and digital menu boards to the German, Austrian, Polish, Russian market. And then I worked as a freelancer for one year. And as L'Osteria since they need a little bit support on how to digitalize, how to set up digitalization, as this was one of three pillars where they defined growth. And after I was there to one year as consultant, they asked me whether I not whether I like to lead the department and to start digitalization or to continue with digitalization at L'Osteria. There I am for almost one and a half years right now in the official position in one and a half years in the consulting position at L'Osteria. All right. And for the people that don't know L'Osteria, can you summarise the concept and the idea behind the chain? Yes. L'Osteria was founded in 1999. So we celebrate 25 years of L'Osteria this year in Nuremberg from two guys called Friedemann Findeis and Klaus Rader. And Klaus Rader was one of the youngest franchisees at McDonald's. And it was a little bit more an accident when they founded L'Osteria, since this was their base station restaurant in Nuremberg and the owner decided to go back to Italy. They say, you cannot let this go. This is full every day. You very good in. What are you doing? And then Klaus decided to buy the restaurant for cheap money, since he was going back to Italy. And when they started the restaurant, they had one challenge. So all the Italian chefs left. And Friedemann did not know how to cook fish and meat and things like this since he was coming from McDonald's. So then it was born pizza and pasta, and that's we were for today's and pizza and pasta. He could do very good. And it was, and this is was born. And Klaus was had the spirit of McDonald's, so he understood how important it is to systemize, to make things, to make rules and things like this. And so they started slowly. The expansion and L'Osteria is now around 170 plus restaurants. We will be 200 plus by the end of this year. We plan to open 30 plus this year restaurants. 40 plus in 2025 and 50 plus in 2026. So very challenging. And at the moment, we have about 7000 employees and we're in nine markets, most European markets. We are being so very good story. Very growing. We grow in about double digits every year, in sales as well. So very successful. Thanks, God. Very successful. And expansion will go on in Europe. Oh, that's a fantastic story. And it's actually interesting to hear that the founders came from McDonald's or one of them came from McDonald's. So what was process management then? Was it already, you know, part of the really initial days of L'Osteria? Or was this something that was added later on? No, it was at the beginning, in the first restaurant, since they had to survive in the first restaurant. So they had no clue about how to do Italian restaurants, how to do full service and things like this. And Friedemann always told me, he was always calling Klaus, and Klaus is saying how it's going. He was sitting in his McDonald's and called Friedemann or Friedemann called Klaus how is going and I'm running out. The restaurant is full. But Klaus is only hearing, restaurant is full, I'm fine. And then they started the idea to expand it. And then they needed to have processes in place, they needed to have rules in place, they needed to have systems in place to make it bigger. And of course, the DNA of McDonald's from Klaus and Friedemann helped them both to systemize L'Osteria and to start or to build the base from where we are right now. All right, so in your introduction you mentioned that you were leading the digitalization at the moment in L'Osteria. How big is your team? The team is quite small. We're about ten people. We will be getting a little bit more this year since we focus this year a little bit more on data. Pretty small team. And why this is small since we focus on standard software. So it's more to adapt to standards out of the software, not customising the software to our standards. And this is one of the challenges we always face. So if you do customization and reach the 80 plus percent to try, since the last 20% is the hardest one, and if you go for this, you need a bigger IT department. You need to make sure that you have developers, you make sure, as long as you're able to go with the standard, with the industry strandards that's provided by the software, you can drive this with a relatively small group of people and fight this challenge every day that of course operations likes to have their 100%, their styles. And you have to say, okay, no, this is standard. We go to the standard and for this reason we have a small team of ten people running the whole IT for the head offices and for all of the restaurants. All right. Very interesting actually to hear that you are going with, let's say, the standard software. But before we go there, when they asked you one and a half years ago to lead that department, how do you start such an assignment? How do you go about from the idea to digitise and to improve on that matter to where you are today and what is the plan that you actually presented to the founders or the boards in order to go digital? Yeah, it's a very interesting question since the first thing where I'm a strong believer in digitalization, don't do digitalization on a project. Build a digitalization strategy first. Build an ecosystem, build a target where you like to be. So we built about three or four bubbles, we said for the restaurants, BI, and then on this we built smaller bubbles where we said, okay, this is our digitalization strategy. We call this L'Osteria digital ecosystem. Otherwise, if you not build an ecosystem first or a strategy how to digitalize, you will digitalize islands, but they will not fit together and you will not have I should overview for this reason. We call it our bubble chart where we had red bubbles, a lot of red bubbles at the beginning and a lot of connections, but now you see them bubbles turning green. So we put this one and everybody can see what is our strategy and we work against the strategy and not on the islands, it's not urgencies and not on. So if everything is urgent, nothing is urgent, but you know that there is some urgency coming out to have the strategy in place and work against the strategy, keeps us focused on projects, keeps us focused on the way we like to go. And this was the first thing we did together with operations to build our digitalization strategy. And we call the strategy the digital ecosystem. L'Osteria digital ecosystem. And now we work since two years against the dots in the ecosystem we defined. Can you tell a bit about these bubbles or these pillars in your ecosystem, which are the ones that you are filling in, which are the ones that are the first ones you needed to tackle? What's the structure behind it? Yeah, the first one was restaurant systems. So restaurant systems was itself the biggest bubble. Since our money comes from the restaurants, we focus on the restaurant, get good service out in restaurants. There's a lot of bubbles, from inventory management to POS system to people system to a lot of bubbles we have to tackle first. The biggest challenge we had at the beginning was the POS system. We had to replace the POS system, since this was the biggest project we had. So you have to replace the POS system by innovative new one, which is supporting full service. Then we built the bubble called CRM. The challenge we had or the challenge, not the challenge we had. The challenge usually in the restaurant industry is that we don't know anything about our customers. So in the past, you did not need to know. So they come in, eat pizza, if you know them and they, you're fine. But now with marketing. Marketing needs to target the customers that they need to know that you need to know which channels they're using, how often they come, what they eating, what they don't like, and things like this. And we was challenged by marketing to do this. In our marketing, our head of marketing comes from Montblanc and Tomaszabo. So of course, if you buy a pan for $500, you leave your data there. So but if you buy a pizza for $13, maybe not. But he challenged us, he said one of the bubbles need to be CRM. And then we had the third bubble was analytics. So can I ask quickly about the CRM bubble? This is really about customer loyalty. It's like catching your customer and making sure he returns. Is that the end goal of CRM? The end goal is loyalty is one of the tools we are using to understand our customer better. But there's other tools like Webshop and they order for delivery or pickup. We get data from them. When they come in or do the newsletter, we got data from them. So and we said, okay, customer relationship management is so important in the future. It's not the important thing today, but it may be an advantage in two to three years if you know your customer better than anybody else. Yes, yes, yes. It was the reason we had this as big pillar on our side beside systems. And the third big bubble, what we had was analytics, data, since all these systems is generating data. But the challenge we had, if you generate data, you don't have information. So we have to transform data into information. And this was the third bubble. If we have this customer relationship, if we have the restaurant systems, if we have the back office systems right, we generate a huge amount of data. And then we have to build up analytics and BI for this data to be smarter than we was before. And is this something that you want to do in house or is this also something that you want to do with standard tools in the market? Well, this is a challenge question since we did it not in house, we use standard tools for the last couple of years, since there was no team to build data. You don't have data engine, you have data scientists. But we're more and more coming to the conclusion that we need to own our data. And this is, and of course, everybody tells you, if I buy, for example, Apicbase and I have my recipes in, of course I own the data, these are my recipes. But this is not what we mean. Owning the data is meaning where they coming from, how they transformed into information. Maybe you aggregate them, you do calculations on them. So the level is we need to understand where they're coming from, exactly how they coming from. What are the data points provided, for example by Apicbase or Lightspeed, our POS, we could use for the analytics. Secondly, we need to see which data points we are using and how we need aggregations for it. And the third one is KPI's. Clearly KPI. We need to identify and know our KPI's. So I give an example. In the food industry, it's usually have comparable restaurants. If you open 30, 40, 50 restaurants a year and you make a comparison against last year, of course you better since you open 30 restaurants. But you have to calculate this out. And this means comparable. So if you say comparable and the KPI of comparable can be different, our owner Mike wins at comparable 13 months. We say comparable twelve months. So you need to have a clear definition of your KPI to trust your KPI. So if you don't have a clear definition, what is net sales, what is productivity on members, what are cost of sales, theoretical food cost, all this stuff. If you're not clear in your definitions on the KPI, you cannot trust the KPI's you see, and this is what we say, own your data is to have full control from the source, know what is possible to get on information, from the transformation to the analytics. And we think that this, in the future, this will be. Need to be in our hands. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What we see, especially in larger chains, is that you indeed work with standard software to solve the day to day operational or problems, let's say inventory management, all of these things. And that you then kind of pull in all of that data into a data lake and that you built your own business intelligence on top of that in power BI, or any other tool that is out there. So you are on the knobs, on the buttons to make sure that you get the right data in the right place and that you can use them throughout the whole organisation, both from operational point of view, all the way up to the board level, basically, then that makes total sense, actually. So very interesting, actually, to hear you talk about these three big bubbles and about the different segments that you are digitising. Is there also a timeframe that you have defined for yourself, like in 2025, 26, 2030 whenever we need to be fully digitised? Yes, there is a time frame, but how we. I could show you the picture. So the bubbles, we did not have fixed lines or really straight bubbles. So why we are using this? So we think this is a living organism, it's a breathing system. So you cannot. It will never end, unfortunately for digitalization, fortunately for us as well, it will never end. But we call it a breathing system. Some things will. Some bubbles will come in, some will disappear, some will get different connections than they have before. There's a lot of examples how to do it. Tax increasing, fiscalization, regulations which need to be adopted, or new things like artificial intelligence we have to take a look at. Maybe they help us in the kitchen, maybe they help us in the back office, maybe they just help us in formulating emails or newsletters or something else to the customers. And we started to do AI right now in marketing for translation to the nine markets where we in. So it's not done anymore by translator, it's done automatically. Even the voices are translated. And this is for this reason we think, yes, we will get better, we will more green bubbles, but new bubbles will appear. And this is. And we call it we like to have it in a breathing. We like to keep it breathing, extended and shrink it down if not needed and adopted where needed. So yes, hopefully we will done the smaller bubbles, tick it off, but there will come new bubbles at any time. Yes. Yeah, that's unfortunate with digitization it is a never ending story. But let us zoom in then into a few of those bubbles that you already did or you are doing. What is the timeframe? If you take for example, the point of sales, the change from one point of sales to another in 150 plus outlets, what's the time? How do you go about? So our timeframe, what we write do not now is for example, the POS system. We changed it from the decision which supplier we using to the last restaurant applied with the new system was about nine months. Nine months, that's fast. Completely rollout took about four months. What we say is we cannot allow ourselves to have forever running IT project. So nobody will go with you if you say it's 15-18-20-24 months. So we have to deliver the first results within six months. So this was always our goal with all digitalization projects. For example, loyalty. We started loyalty in April, March. We made a decision and rolled it out in August to most stores. We did the same for the POS system. We aim the same right now for business intelligence. We have a project called L'Osteria operating system which we're rolling out. So did the decision on the supplier on Friday and we need to be live in the stores on September, latest September. So this is our challenge. So if you do something, provide the customers, my internal customers like restaurants with a result, even if it's not 100%, within six months. And this is what I said at the beginning, it's very important to stick on standards. If you start customization of this and taking here some things, you will never do it within six months. So you have to stick as delivered with the tools to be sure that you are able to do it. And how do you manage the buy in of your internal customers then? Because I can imagine that sometimes they say again, another project. Yeah, we have about, yeah, at the moment we have third, we have 46 restaurants with joint venture where we own at least 50%. We have 36 restaurants with about 15 franchise partners and we own 61 restaurants. So for the 61 restaurants I have to go to COO and say, okay, let's do it. For the joint venture, I have to go to COO and the CFO since they own 50%. So it has to make sense. But the most important ones and the good ones are the franchise partners since they have to pay for it. And these are the first one. I go with ideas and things and discuss with them. We have a panel called franchise leadership council. Three people are in and they play very openly. And these are the first ones since the easy ones are the company stores. Yeah. And they challenge me. And this is the most important part, that you get challenged And they said, yeah. Oh, that's too expensive. We cannot do this one. We don't like it. Like you did it this way. For this reason, I always used to go to the franchise first since they challenged me on every aspect of the solution. And then I build it for them and then I go the easy one for rollout. I do it the opposite way. I do the tests and the rollout. I start with the company stores, go to the joint venture, and last I go to the franchisees. All right, all right. And then do the franchisees have the power to potentially, you know, stop a project that say that. They say, no, we don't believe in this, let's not do this. So you don't do this for the entire operation? Yes, sometimes, yes. If it's, if it's a system standard, if it's defined as system standard, they cannot opt out. But if it's an optional solution, then they can of course say we're opting out as a solution, we don't take it. And then maybe my business case does not work anymore. Or they have a different solution like reservation system. If they say we have a reservation system, it's a standard system if you like to. So the system standards that you have to have an electronic reservation system on the website. But if they say we don't like yours, it's too expensive, it does not deliver, so they can have a different one. And the challenge we have is to have always the best on the market since we like to have 100% on ours and to make sure that we are good enough that they buy our solutions. Yeah. All right. And how do you then make sure that, you know, now I hear a little bit of potential that they can, you know, decide for themselves which system they use. But especially because you're nine markets, that also means that the systems you work with should be available in these nine markets. So you only go for, let's say, global systems or do you have systems that the same thing but are different providers in different markets? Yes, especially where we have different things, we try to get as much and we have as well. When we opened the market in Poland this year, we like to have our system. Last year it was last year, we like to have our system, but sometimes we cannot. Like we have no POS since POS and Poland needs a special fiscalization. Yeah, but then you had to go to a different solution. Yeah, and then we go together with the franchise partner to say, okay, what can we do with the solution? So we said okay, we'd like to have it on the cloud. We don't like servers in the restaurants, it needs to be on the browser, it needs to be availability. We need to have open APIs to get the data out of the system and we help them select the right one. But we always try. And with the new owner, with the Macmill family, maybe we have about then two standards where we can say, okay, one of these should work in the different. But we continue working with our partners on software to say, okay, we need to go in this market, but sometimes software like specially POS system with fiscalization or labour scheduling system, which is very different to each market. What are scheduling rules and things like this. We have to give it to the franchisee to say, we expect you to have one, we support you selecting one, but we cannot give you ours since it's not working. Whatever in the Swiss market, Austrian market, Polish market. Yeah, that is a common issue with personnel planning and human resources, that all countries have different rules and laws and not everybody can comply to them. That's something we hear quite often. Let me move into another field, because in the beginning you mentioned one of the bubbles is the restaurant and the point of sales we've touched upon. But you also mentioned inventory management as being an important one. Can you elaborate a little bit why you think it's an important topic? Yes, inventory management is one of our most important topics. The reason it's not about inventory. The reason is about creating data we don't have right now. At the moment we have our cost of sales. Cost of sales are built from whatever theoretical, which is the recipe gives me the theoretical cost. Then you have theoretical usage, which is coming from the POS and then you do the inventory to compare theoretical, practic, what is the difference? And if you have a big company with 170 restaurants, you have whatever waste of millions of Euro. You have food cost, which is different from restaurant to restaurant. One restaurant has whatever 25%, the other restaurant 18. I hope not but. It's maybe good but we don't know whether 18 is really good. 18? I thought you were saying 8 0. But one eight if we don't know it's good since it made me look good, but maybe the quality is not there. So he has not the right amount of slices on the pizza and things like this. And inventory management helps us really to generate data, to generate data points we can measure to give us certainty on the data. So at the moment, we don't have a real certainty on the data. Think we know since we got an inventory every month, mainly for finance, but we need three inventories. We need the daily inventory to see what is stolen. We need a weekly inventory to see what to order, and we need a monthly inventory for finance. We need to have the theoretical usage and the recipes out of the POS system. And for us, it's more to learn more to create the data, create out of the information, to make the right decisions or prepare right decisions by the executives. If we see that there is an increase in food costs, if we see the recipes, does not work. If we test new things like brunch and things like this, and the cost of sales does not work, this can lead to wrong strategic decisions for the whole company. If we have not a data part out of inventory management. So, as a summary, inventory management is, for me, getting data, receiving data. It's not about the inventory management itself. But what for me is important to get the data out and to motivate the people to put the data right in. Since this is a challenging part, since they, at the moment, they look at the delivery note and they say, okay, tick off. Everything is okay. Now I ask them, please enter it to the system. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Enter it over system. Do inventory at the moment, they do it monthly. If I say I need a daily inventory, I need a weekly, please do it. And this is the challenge in part of inventory system. Since I have to confirm the managers out in the restaurants to do it right, that I get the right data for it. And how do you manage that change? What are the things that you are doing to make sure that they do this? It's transparency. So they give us the data, we give them back transparency, we give them back power. And this is all about the L'Osteria operating system, what we're building right now. Give them power back. So they give us the data, we give them the power back to make the right decisions. And this is all about the L'Osteria operating system. It's divided in people, and especially people. Then cost of food. We call the product. There's five pages. And we show them exactly the numbers. We show them. This is good numbers, you are not rank, number, whatever 24 within your bucket. And we give them the power to make us say, what are the four things we do together for the next month to get this number better. Your cost of sales, your productivity on the people. And there's a lot of KPI's and we like to give them the power back that they are able to see. What happens. If I enter data right, then I get the right KPI's that I get the right information. I can make very good decisions on my restaurant businesses. This is how we try to get them with the L'Osteria operating system. And there's, on all aspects, there's an overview on the restaurants, there's a sales part, there's a people part, there's a product part, there is a cost part. We call it OCC as a controllable cost where they can manage and we give them sheets where we outline all the data they have and they can make then decide on their restaurant. What is the best to do for next month. What is the three things, four things you like to focus on on next month. And even with the L'Osteria operating system, we try to get it to the assistant level. It's not only the manager of the restaurant, we like to get it to the assistant as well since the assistant will be the manager of the future and they not used to work with data right now. This is a buzzword we are always using as well as data driven company. But this is very important. They need to learn to work against data and not out of gut feeling. So that's a big challenge. To make the right decision based on data and not on I feel we cook a little bit more salad since I hope the weather will be better. And we need to help them to give them the right data. And if they provide us the data, we provide them the best decision based they can have. All right. Very interesting actually. It's very intriguing. I have two more questions for you. The first one is going back to your time at McDonald's. I mean, McDonald's is such a big organisation worldwide. Wherever you go, you basically eat the same hamburger. Can you, can you tell us a little bit about what can a restaurant chain, a smaller restaurant chain, learn from such a big giant as McDonald's from a digitization perspective and how they use data? McDonald's focused a lot in digitalization and you have to acknowledge McDonald's has a five year advance of all the other brands. So what McDonald's did, they invested and they was brave enough to introduce digitalization. They was the first one introducing electronic payment. They was the first one introducing self-order kiosks. They was the first one introducing drive. They was the first one introducing digital menu boards. They was the first one introducing AI into digital menu. So, and I think what, what you can learn about McDonald's. Be brave. Start. It's easy. You cannot. So you, you have already no digitalization. It cannot be worse. It can only be better. And if you, if you have, if you allow the people to digitalize, since the important thing we need to learn from McDonald's is if you look at McDonald's is if McDonald's does it, it's innovation. It sometimes becomes standard and then it becomes a disadvantage for you if you don't have it. Yeah. I don't think smaller chains like L'Osteria don't need to be on the edge of innovation. That's McDonald's can do, Burger King can do, the big ones can do. But we need to find out, okay, what of the things they are doing will be expected standard from the customer in the next one and two years, like electronic payment. I see a lot of small restaurants, they don't accept electronic payment, especially in Germany. I don't see them in Netherlands or in the UK. But in German, you see a lot of restaurants that also don't accept credit cards. And I think this will be in disadvantages if you don't have it now. And for fast food or if a quick service, restaurants will be the self order kiosks that people expect to have to see one. And for our industry, it will be, I'd say, electronic reservations, online ordering, pickup, and of course, payment at the table and ordering at the table. This will be the one we focusing on right now, that the people, to give them back their time, they don't have to wait on the waiter so they can check out directly on the table or reorder directly on the table. But I think it's not really hard. There's a lot of tools right now, and you can start easily, you can start cheap. Don't be afraid to do it. It cannot be worse than it is without digitization. Yeah. And I heard you briefly managing, you know, L'Osteria doesn't need to be on the edge of innovation, so leave that to the bigger ones. But is this, let's say, true over the whole line? Let's say, do you leave the real innovation to the world players or how do you see that? No, we don't leave it to them, but we select, I think, wisely. We try to select wisely on the tip. So if you start too early, you have very high costs for the product, which is not stable on the market right now. So it was, if you take the highest processor on the computer, on the laptop, you pay a huge amount of money for the laptop for minimum increase of speed. So we like to get in this tipping point where we said, okay, it's an innovation, but it's affordable, it's an innovation. You can select out of two or three customers. It's an innovation, but we have stable products out there we could choose for digitalization. And this is more. It's not against innovation. Sometimes we have to lead the market, especially food service. So we selected a POS system, Lightspeed, which is fully cloud based and on the blockchain. Why we did this. So it was there, it was stable, it was developed, and we could reduce complexity in the infrastructure, in the restaurants completely. We get rid of all the servers. Now we have only switches and two routers in the restaurant to balance the traffic. But at the end, this is so much what you can gain if you choose digitalization or innovation at the right on the tipping point, where the price is going down, the stability is going up. Yeah, interesting. My last question is also, one I ask all my guests, and it's the question about trends. It's where do you see the food service industry evolving, and what are the things that we need to keep an eye on for the next, let's say, two to three years? Oh, this is a hard one. So the food service industry, I believe if they focus on their strengths that we have in full service right now, do not go crazy with the QSR. Comparing to QSR, get in your lane, stay in your lane, then you have a lot of chances right now. I think what we need to work on is really on the data, to get our data right, since the environment will be tougher. And then think solutions like Apicbase, like Lightspeed, where you get data out, will become more important. And I think digitalization is now common ground. It's expected by the customers, by the guests, and I think if you use it wisely over the next couple, one, two, three years, you can get a lot out of it. If it's self checkout, even for full service, we see tips going up for our servers, which means the service get better. We see electronic payment, we see self checkout. We're testing right now in France. So from day one, we introduced, Bernard, told the customers, but even we had 30% where they paid directly on the table to co-occur. And of course, the awareness in social media is some very important power for us, since if you only increase the Google rating, or we call it the score, if you scale the score, from 4.18 to 4.27. It gives you a huge amount of boost in customers. So don't let go on this channel. Take care and use the tools out there and take a look at the what the customers expect from you. All right. Okay. Fantastic Peter, this was a very, very interesting episode. Thank you very much for your time. And thank you also to all of our audience to tune in. And if you want to hear more about food service industry, just check our website, the foodservicegrowthshow.com, where you can find even more episodes. All about scaling your food service business. Peter, thank you very much and see you next time. Bye. Thank you. Bye.