Digital Restaurants and the Future of Food|Authors Meredith Sandland and Carl Orsbourn|DH119 - a podcast by Shawn Walchef

Delivering the Digital Restaurant teaches how to build a successful digital restaurant business that will survive and thrive into the future.
Authors Meredith Sandland (@meresandland) and Carl Orsbourn (@carlorsbourn) were guests on the Digital Hospitality podcast to discuss what they learned while writing their must-read restaurant business book, Delivering the Digital Restaurant Your Roadmap to the Future of Food.➤ ORDER THE BOOK: https://www.deliveringthedigitalrestaurant.com
➤ GET THE AUDIOBOOK ON AMAZONThree Takeaways From This Podcast Episode:
https://youtu.be/Wgqlw9npU28 
1. Monthly Services Make Daily Differences –There was a time when only corporate companies could afford access to digital innovations that optimized orders or operations. That time has passed. Regardless of your size or scale, consider implementing software or systems that might come with a monthly fee but will change your business for the better day after day.
 2. Your Competition is Your Community –
We are all in this together. By having conversations with the restaurants in your community and discussing trends in your industry, you can create a better food landscape for your city or neighborhood as a whole. 
3. There’s No Such Thing as Throwaway Content –With all the research that went into writing a book, Carl and Meredith still had 90 percent of their conversations scrapped from the final copy that hit Amazon. So, did they just discard it? Of course not! They will continue to share untold stories through their social platforms as should you.
 When Carl Orsbourn and Meredith Sandland began writing their book, Delivering the Digital Restaurant: Your Road Map to the Future of Food, they didn’t know how they’d finish it, but they knew why they had to.

“Our'why'is really about helping restaurants navigate this digital change,” beams Meredith Sandland on the Digital Hospitality podcast.


“We are incredibly passionate about the magnitude of this change and want to see everyone successfully get through it and thrive because they have figured out how to master it.”As alluded, that change is seeing restaurants of every size, shape and scale embrace evolving technology to better serve their customer base and grow their business.

For years, both Meredith Sandland and Carl Orsbourn have worked in different ends of the food industry, expanding brands such as Taco Bell and British Petroleum to a new world with new customers.“I was seeing the enormous level of change of better quality food in the gas station environment,” reflects Carl Orsbourn.


“There's so much change happening, so many exciting things that really are only at the front of where I think this industry is going.”
Meeting at ghost kitchen company Kitchen United, the co-workers turned co-authors were already on the cutting edge of where the food industry was headed in the 2020s. After years of working for big brands and joining forces at a start-up, both could see that change was imminent.However, no one knew just how much 2020 would expedite this dramatic digital shift.

“Everything that's happening is really an existential crisis for the restaurant industry,” Meredith Sandland shares. “We started the book back before the pandemic when we thought this would all take three to five years to play out. Of course, the pandemic accelerated all of that and laid bare the digital divide.”

 Digital Restaurants:
Because of the rapid change the restaurant industry faced due to the Coronavirus pandemic, restaurants either adapted or closed during the tough and evolving times.Even for those businesses that are still standing, it’s essential that they learn through their competition and peers to best adjust their strategy and tools for the good of the communities they serve.

“It is critical to figure this out together,” notes Meredith. “When I think in particular of our local independent restaurants,

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