Food revolution gives us a taste of the future

ELI GREENBLAT
January 8, 2018
The Australian

A robot navigating the streets of Hamburg to deliver a pizza, drones flying in the skies above Whangaparaoa, Auckland, with a payload of piping hot garlic bread and an Uber Eats rider swishing through Sydney strapped to a McDonald’s cheeseburger.
Robots, drones and online delivery services: a mouth-watering glimpse of what could become standard in the very near future as technology fuses with food retailing to fuel the “food digitisation” revolution.
Everybody is tinkering with the technology, from pizza chains to chocolatiers and all the way up the corporate food chain to Australia’s second-biggest supermarket chain, Coles. Its online division is still a small part of the business but its fastest-growing.
The changes mean, for example, that the age-old tradition of taking the family into a McDonald’s restaurant may soon look “so last century” as the meteoric rise of on-demand food services like Uber Eats and Deliveroo, combined with innovative technologies, shakes up the world’s biggest fast food giant.
Though they’re not yet capable of asking “would you like fries with that?”, digital kiosks now dominate McDonald’s stores in Australia, thanks to the company spending the past 18 months investing in the technology and rolling them out in its restaurants.
Mark Wheeler, McDonald’s director of digital, says digital kiosks are now being used in 90 per cent of restaurants in Australia.
“It’s been the biggest piece of work we’ve done over the past few years,” he told The Australian. “We want our customers to just be able to focus on the great-tasting food and not the ordering.
“The way consumers are ordering is changing. I can see in five years’ time not having a front counter, so you’d order through a self-order kiosk, through mobile, or a host with a tablet.”
The company also expects to ramp up delivery, something it previously had dipped its toes into but is now fully engaged with, with Uber Eats offering McDonald’s meals across the country.
Since launching in Australia nearly two years ago, Uber Eats is now in 12 cities, with 24/7 service in inner Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide.
“With more than 30 cuisine types available, Australians are discovering how easy and reliable it is to get the food you want — whether it’s a salad or a Big Mac — delivered to your home, office or even the park,’’ said Jodie Auster, Uber Eats general manager, Australia and New Zealand.
“By having the app at your fingertips, consumers are able to decide on what they’re going to have for dinner on their way home from work, with their meal usually arriving in under 30 minutes to their doorstep. Our technology is changing the way Australians consume food by offering more choice, in more places, every day.”
Others are also experimenting. Woolworths is working with Google to allow customers to use Google Home to create their shopping lists.
Australia’s biggest pizza chain Domino’s has a robot that now delivers pizzas at its chain in Germany and it recently completed its first trial of drone delivery in New Zealand. In case you are wondering, the maiden drone flight carried a Peri-Peri chicken pizza and a chicken and cranberry pizza.
Domino’s group chief digital & technology officer, Michael Gillespie, said this digital movement would only work if it delivered real value and core benefits to consumers, rather than just a tech gimmick.
Domino’s pizza tracker, which allows customers to track their pizza delivery on a map in real time, has proved an instant success. “If you can give someone a better experience and they can be in control of it, they can control their time, so imagine if you had friends coming over and you wanted to see where the orders are … you can tell your friends now what street the delivery driver is or what stage it is at.
“Then you can make informed decisions, even if you are ordering for yourself: do I go and pick it up now? Do I have time to put on a load of washing? Can I see the end of my show?”
Coles boss John Durkan told The Australian the supermarket invested heavily more than five years ago to revamp its entire online platform, and will need to do so again soon to stay ahead of the tech pack.
“It is an area that we spend a fair amount of time thinking about and also an area where we spend time investing in,’’ Mr Durkan said.
For Coles shoppers it means new mobile apps that streamline shopping by offering “predetermined” shopping lists based on previous purchases and aisle-friendly shopping lists to ensure the fastest route through the store.
“And it is only going to get bigger — everyone knows that — and you can just see it with the kids of today in terms of how they use their devices that this will be a thing of the future.’’
However, Mr Durkan doesn’t see this heavy digital presence replacing physical shopping, particularly for fresh food, with robots unable to distinguish an under-ripe avocado from a ripe one ready to be smashed over an expensive cafe breakfast.
“Australia is a different market in how people want to touch and feel their fruit and veg and see their meat, and fresh bread.
“There is that underlying innate part of Australian DNA and culture that people want to do that — more than other countries I have been to and seen.’