‘No one wants to change anything here’
Restaurateurs obsessed with cost, risk management
TORONTO — Menus that bring dishes to life with a flash of a phone and virtual reality headsets that train servers have caught on elsewhere in the world, but it will take a shift in attitude and price before Canadian restaurants adopt them, say technology experts.
They’ve noticed Canada’s food industry is ripe for robotics, artificial intelligence and augmented and virtual reality, but few restaurants have tried them because owners tend to take a “conservative” approach to technology. Their remarks came at the Restaurants Canada Show in Toronto, where companies showed off robots that make sushi, a device that scans food to determine its ingredients and nutritional content, and tablets that use artificial intelligence to sort and input customer orders.
They can be slow to pop up in the Canadian market because restaurateurs are obsessed with risk management, said Dmytro Kostik, the Ukrainian founder of Kodisoft, a company behind an interactive restaurant table.
“Systems they have used in Europe or the Middle East or in Japan for 10 years, which they integrate in a few months, take three years (in Canada) just for integration,” he said. “No one wants to change anything here.”
The Canadian market is only now getting its first taste of Kodisoft’s interactive table that can be used to order food, play games and advertisements, and eventually, could lend itself to AR and VR applications. It has long been popular in Asia and the Middle East, but is only just being launched in Canada.
Part of the reason why the restaurant industry around the world is slow to adoption of technology is because it is driven by margins, said Alan Smithson, the founder of Toronto-based technology innovation company MetaVRse. Restaurants Canada data says the average pre-tax profit margin for a restaurateur was only 4.2 per cent in 2016.
In a report the organization released in February, 70 per cent of restaurants surveyed cited cost of implementation as the main reason why they have not adopted new technology. Many also raised concerns about the training and repairs that come along with technology.