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Ask the experts: Have digital menu boards reached critical mass?

Digital signage is becoming increasingly common in both quick service and fast casual restaurants, so for this month's "Ask the experts" feature, we asked Jeff Pinc, director of food services for Panasonic, 'Have digital menu boards reached critical mass?'

October 5, 2015 by Christopher Hall

Digital signage is becoming increasingly common in both quick service and fast casual restaurants, as digital menu boards, as order confirmation and promotion boards and even in the drive-thru.

So for this month's "Ask the experts" feature, we asked Jeff Pinc, director of food services for Panasonic System Communications Co. of North America, "Have digital menu boards reached critical mass?"

Here's what he had to say:

Q: Are digital menu boards, or digital signage in restaurants, reaching critical mass?

Pinc: I would say I think it depends on the way you look at digital signage. If you're talking about in a traditional QSR market space — behind the counter, up on the ceiling, in the inside of the building — I would say there's still room for growth. But a lot of the major brands have already started down that path, some of them are well down that path. But there [are] still some brands that have not adopted indoor digital menu boards, so it has not reached critical mass. There's still quite a bit of room for growth.

I'll tell you, even beyond a traditional quick service or fast casual, we're seeing some interest for a table-service environment. But I'm not saying that they're adopting. If you look at a brand, like T.G.I. Fridays, when you walk into the entrance way, generally many of them have some sort of poster hanging that's advertising either their frequent diner program or any kind of specials they're running. We're seeing interest in just a traditional marketing display in a table-service environment. So, I would say inside, we have not reached critical mass, we've got pretty wide adoption in the QSR, but not full adoption, so there's still room to grow. Same with fast casual.

Where we aren't seeing a ton of adoption, where it's not even close to critical mass, is in the outdoor digital drive-thru. A lot of that is just because there just hasn't been a real total solution out there for the market. There's no question that it's a little bit more expensive to put outdoor digital in place versus indoor digital, because you need either a display that's either protected against the environment, or you need an enclosure. And both of those are just not an inexpensive solution in comparison.

Q: So there's still room to grow. Why do you think that it hasn't reached total adoption yet?

Pinc: It's more than likely expense or priorities ... in IT funding, in IT spending. So why hasn't every brand adopted? I think it's a little of that. It's priorities and budgets. And I'll tell you, the interesting thing that I've seen occur over the last, say, year, is many of these major brands have hired and created a position called "Chief Digital Officer." You might see that, for some that of these brands that don't have a Chief Digital Officer, it may not be a priority. But anybody that does, it's a priority.

The other component of this too is every brand ultimately has to do two things: They have to be able to take an order any way a consumer wants to give it to them and they almost now have to take any [kind of] payment a consumer wants to offer. So I think, from a digital perspective, the brands are going to have to invest all around, outdoor, indoor, kiosk, self-ordering through somebody's Android or Apple device, online. You name it, they're going to have to take an order and be able to market to them every way so in the end I think really what the brands are looking for is just a bunch of connected screens.

Q: And outdoor? Can you expand on that and talk about cost, or does it tie into the same factors of being able to order from a phone or online before they even show up?

Pinc: Everybody's rethinking the drive-thru right now. It's an interesting time. How does the driver interface with a mobile order? And so everybody's talking about the drive-thru of the future, drive-thru 2.0, and that's definitely creating a digital environment. So you're going to have a traditional person come through the drive-thru and order like they do today but I think all the brands do want to have a digital presence out there I mean it just makes sense. It's so much easier to manage from an enterprise perspective in terms of changing menu items or pricing or even menu item availability or marking limited-time offers or using digital to your advantage when it comes to promoting high inventory items or low inventory items. So everybody sort of sees the value proposition around outdoor digital.

I'll tell you, when we're talking about drive-thru 2.0, the other thing that the brands are wanting to do right now is how do you interact and engage with a customer who wants place an order over their cellphone or their smartphone, and enable them to pick up that order through the drive-thru. So you're going to see a lot of brands [experimenting] with either license plate recognition or I've even heard of a drive-thru solution that uses your toll tag to identify you as a customer. And then of course you've probably heard of beacons, which is probably going to be the widest adoption you'll see. Sort of identifying that the customer has shown up and to fire their food, because in the QSR space you don't want to fire that food too soon or you're not going to have a quality product.