Restaurant delivery has become essential for food businesses across the country, yet many struggle with inefficiency, errors, and rising costs that eat away at already thin profit margins. Thibault Le Conte has spent the past five years in the trenches with restaurant owners, helping them overcome these challenges through strategic technology implementation. His approach focuses on practical solutions that reduce errors, cut operational costs, and give restaurants a competitive edge in the crowded delivery marketplace.
Increasing Reliability Through System Integration
The first challenge most restaurants face comes from managing multiple delivery platforms. Thibault points out a common scene in many kitchens: “Any restaurant, as soon as they want to deal with their online deliveries, will have usually an iPad or a tablet per delivery service. So, one for Uber Eats, one for DoorDash, one for Grubhub.” This approach creates immediate problems. Staff must constantly monitor these devices, accept orders, and manually input this information into the restaurant’s point-of-sale system and kitchen displays. Each manual step introduces potential errors.
“By using software where everything is seamlessly integrated, you’re not going to rely on your employee, you’re not going to have human errors, it’s also going to be faster,” Thibault explains. The benefits extend to order accuracy too. “When someone wants an item with extra cheese, sometimes an employee could forget to input that. By having everything talking the same language and being streamlined, it’s going to arrive correctly.”
Slashing Labor Costs with Smart Technology
Money matters in restaurants where margins are notoriously tight. Thibault’s second key point addresses the financial drain of managing delivery platforms. “These days you pay someone 15, 20, maybe even 22 dollars an hour to manage your online deliveries,” he notes. “When you use software to replace this person, the software is going to typically cost around 100 dollars a month, maybe 60 bucks, maybe 150, but that’s it.”
The math makes a compelling case. An employee working just 20 hours weekly at $20/hour costs $1,600 monthly. Replacing those functions with software priced at $100 monthly creates significant savings. Beyond raw costs, there are hidden benefits too. “You won’t have to hire a person like that, train them and also manage their work,” Thibault adds. “You’re insanely more competitive in terms of pricing there because you just reduce your payroll.”
Gaining a Competitive Edge Through Menu Management
The third area where technology creates advantages is menu management across platforms. Without integrated systems, maintaining consistency becomes nearly impossible. “When you have different systems not talking the same language, not thinking together, you will have typically a dashboard on UberEats, another one on DoorDash, another one on Grubhub,” Thibault explains. This fragmentation leads to practical problems: “You’re supposed to have the same menu everywhere, but it’s very hard to keep that in sync.” The inconsistencies create real business issues. “You could have Diet Coke on DoorDash that is at $3. You could have it on Uber Eats maybe marked as unavailable when you have it in stock, just because someone didn’t update the menu.”
Visual presentation matters too. “Pictures are extremely important when you’re doing online ordering because people buy with their eyes,” Thibault emphasizes. “By centralizing all this technology, particularly the menu management and syncing that flawlessly between all the platforms that you use, your menu is going to be perfectly in sync.” Few restaurants manage this well, creating opportunity. “You will have a huge competitive advantage because very few people are able to do that without a centralized system.”
Thibault’s experience with restaurant delivery operations reveals how the right technology can transform struggling operations into streamlined profit centers. “By embracing all these technology integrations, restaurants can really improve their delivery operations,” he summarizes. “They will be more reliable, they will be more cost effective, and they will be ahead of their competition.” For restaurant owners tired of delivery headaches, the message is clear: technology integration isn’t just about keeping up – it’s about getting ahead.
Follow Thibault Le Conte on LinkedIn for more insights on optimizing restaurant delivery operations.
