Evolution in technology is spurring innovation for the restaurant industry, including ways to optimize revenue with carefully determined prices.
Known as dynamic pricing—aka surge pricing—it’s a strategy businesses employ to adjust costs to the customer. The prices can shift based on numerous factors, but often they’re tied to demand, the time of day or even a customer’s online search history.
While relatively new to the restaurant scene, dynamic pricing is not a new method, said Ashwin Kamlani, the CEO of dynamic pricing company Juicer. About 20 years ago, Kamlani was working in the hotel industry around the time dynamic pricing came into the picture through companies like Kayak, a travel booking site that uses algorithms to search and track prices. Kamlani said it was a period of rapid digitization for the industry, which is similar to what restaurants are going through now.
With that in mind, Kamlani launched Juicer in 2022, knowing that the data for dynamic pricing was available, but most restaurants didn’t know how to access it.
“The first thing we did was go out and talk to some restaurants, expecting to get the door slammed in our face,” Kamlani said. “We were pleasantly surprised that those groups were quite open to that idea. Restaurants have all of this data, but they don’t have data scientists or the technology.”
Another dynamic pricing company, Sauce, came on the scene a few years before Juicer. The company was founded in 2020 by a pair of engineers, Colin Webb and Nenye Anagbogu, who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
While they had a background in engineering, Webb said they saw an opportunity in the restaurant industry after working in the sector themselves and having friends who’ve opened their own eateries.
“We know first-hand how challenging it is to get these businesses off the ground and make them successful,” Webb said. “We also know it’s an industry where there’s people tremendously passionate about food or a brand, but when it comes to data or technology to help them sell in this online environment, they sometimes struggle to find time or resources.
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