Whether the Weather: Why Restaurant Brands Are Looking to Meteorology for Sales Boosts

The forecast is sunny with a chance of pizza. Pizza Hut is in the early stages of creating a custom A.I. platform that will analyze the weather to “surface relevant product recommendations,” according to a recent VentureBeat interview with Tristan Burns, global head of analytics at Pizza Hut, under the arm of Pizza Hut Digital Venture. Burns says Pizza Hut Digital Ventures will also “ingest customer behavior and a little bit about who customers are.”

These futuristic plans come after Pizza Hut’s parent company Yum! Brands announced earlier this year that it’s acquiring the A.I. and algorithmic analytics platform Kvantum — a tech company that consolidates data from social media and retailers, among other sources.

In 2019, McDonald’s spent $300 million on a similar startup named Dynamic Yield Ltd, which tailored the digital menu to time and location-related patterns. Dynamic Yield’s machine learning process enables McDonald’s to predict what customers want before they make up their minds by changing the display of items on the digital menu boards based on the time of day, wait time, purchase history, regional preferences and, like Pizza Hut, the weather.

After installing Dynamic Yield menu boards in more than 11,000 of its nearly 14,000 U.S. restaurants, McDonald's cut down its service times at the drive-thru window by nearly 30 seconds. The chain attributed much of that improvement to the Dynamic Yield technology’s automated upselling and also said the digital boards contributed to average check growth.

Although A.I. technology was already present in the food service segment prior to COVID-19, the impact of the lockdown made automated, frictionless restaurant experiences even more in-demand. Several QSR chains prioritized innovative drive-thru technologies like digital menu boards, automated ordering and even payments driven by facial recognition. Now, in response to an ongoing labor shortage, some restaurants are also turning to robotic automation as a solution.

Today, innovation is the name of the game in the restaurant industry, and while Pizza Hut was one of the first brands to offer online ordering back in the day, they have since been largely out-innovated by competitors. Now, as brands like Pizza Hut realize the power of tech-driven experiences, franchisors will likely continue to leverage data, analytics and A.I. in an attempt to know more about their customers than their competitors do.