The past seven months have been a challenge, especially for full-service restaurants like Huddle House, which have been the hardest hit. Our sales and profit declines were crippling.

Michael Abt, CEO, Ascent Hospitality Management Huddle House and Perkins Restaurant & Bakery Buford, Ga.But my thinking is you can either wait for things to happen to you or you can innovate and think of a path forward, so we did the latter. We quickly pivoted to third-party delivery, which we’d implemented but hadn’t been promoting hard yet. That business has done well for us; we’ve seen huge sales increases across the board, and now more than 20% of our sales are being driven by online ordering and third-party delivery. Sadly, it’s not enough to make up for dining rooms that were 100% closed for months.

Delivery is not only going to stay, but it’s going to ramp up exponentially over the next five years; and the competition in the restaurant industry is going to be fierce, so we’ll be developing it more.

Because so much of our food is going to be consumed off-premises, we’re also working on the temperature of food going from the kitchen to the guest, and the best packaging to keep items hot. During COVID-19, we’ve also focused on a temporary menu with reduced offerings and fewer SKUs to simplify operations and cut staffing. That turned into a fullblown project to look at reducing the menu permanently.

I expect to see a lot more technology in the future. We’re implementing kitchen display systems to simplify operations. And we’re looking at tablets for servers and QR codes on the tables so guests can scan them to get the menu on their phone, since some guests don’t want to use a menu somebody else has had their hands over. Potentially, they could order right off their phones. But the menu’s always going to be there. The QR codes are more from a sensitivity standpoint for the guest, than a service, as some guests interpret QR codes as a safer approach to ordering than touching a menu.

In the future, I think we’ll see a tremendous upscaling of technology as it’s related to third-party delivery, efficiencies, logical menu ordering for the guest and reordering algorithms that help guests get through the ordering process quickly.

Going forward, we’re looking at incorporating more drive-thrus. During COVID-19, we’ve looked at the fact that QSRs were doing much better than we were because of the drive-thru and probably because of safety perceptions. We changed our prototype and added a pickup window you can drive up to, as well as a carryout window. There are now two access points, so customers don’t need to come inside. They’ll be incorporated into all new restaurants.

If we can add drive-up windows to half of our existing restaurants, that would be great.

In the immediate future, there are some brands that aren’t going to make it through COVID-19, unfortunately, and we see that as an opportunity to buy the brands, which will sometimes have real estate along with them. We’re looking to diversify outside full service and sometimes we’ll acquire property too.

The thing that keeps me up at night is labor. Huddle House is focused in the Southeast, which hasn’t seen the wave of $15 an hour wages yet. We have fairly low price points and compete with a lot of QSRs in our markets so increasing our wages by up to 80% is a big concern.