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Need a little help ordering your next lunch? Starting Friday, fast-casual dining chain Just Salad will roll out a new mobile ordering feature it calls Salad AI, which relies on OpenAIs GPT-4o model to generate text and personalize recommendations that match a customers culinary preferences. Salad AI allows customers to select their dietary restrictions, nutrient priorities, and desired flavor recommendations and within 15 seconds, the AI-powered tool will generate four order ideas. Its a really powerful tool to navigate hundreds of thousands of potential combinations, says Nick Kenner, founder and CEO at Just Salad, in an interview with Fast Company. We felt super confident that the customer wants help. Salad AI will be available at all of Just Salads nearly 100 restaurant locations throughout the Northeast, Florida, and the metro Chicago area. The technology will also be added to the web version on desktop computers a little later this year. The inspiration for Salad AI came about a year ago when Kenner was discussing a personal desire to eat more vegan food, which also incorporated a lot of protein. I said it would be great if AI could tell me what to get on the Just Salad menu, recalls Kenner. And I brought that to our CTO [Matt Silverman] and he said, We can make that happen. The first of three prompt screens asks customers to select on preferences including vegan, avoid gluten, or minimize carbon footprint. Then, nutrient needs like high protein, low calorie, and low sugar are offered. The final step asks about cravings like sweetness, spice, and savory. In a demonstration, Fast Company opted for a vegan, high fiber, spicy salad bowl and the top recommendation was a spicy vegan fiesta that included kale, almonds, sweet potatoes, corn, and a cilantro lime vinaigrette. [Photo: Just Salad] Menu discovery, especially in high SKU restaurant categories like salads, is quite relevant for this [technology], says Mark Abraham, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group who has helped advise restaurant clients deliver more personalized customer experiences. Abraham says that a large chunk of investments in generative and predictive AI in the restaurant sector tend to focus on the employee and back-office operations. These use cases can make scheduling, hiring, and communication easier for employees, helpful for the industry as it faces a persistent labor shortage. AI can also help chains forecast future demand trends and to manage their inventory. But the last piece, which isnt as far along, are the customer-facing use cases. Already, predictive AI is being used to help make accurate, personalized recommendations for add-on items in mobile apps popularized by chains like Starbucks and McDonalds. We have seen up to an 8% lift in sales for customers who are getting those personalized offers, says Abraham of the power of predictive AI and machine learning. Inflation and the pressure on menu prices has led to a dip in demand, with overall spending at restaurants dropping 1.2% between December 2023 and 2024 according to trade group the National Restaurant Association. One way restaurants are looking to become more efficient is through automation, adding more self-checkout kiosks and incorporating robotics to churn out more orders at chains like Sweetgreen. What it does not replace is human connection, creativity, and innovation, says Fred LeFranc, founder and CEO at restaurant consulting firm Results Thru Strategy. A few major restaurant chains have honed in on the use of AI-powered voice assistants to take orders from customers at the drive-thru. Wendys in 2023 partnered with Google Cloud to launch FreshAI, tested first in Ohio and since expanded to a few dozen additional locations. But a similar effort at McDonalds, which worked with IBM, led to consumer backlash online because the AI-powered tool was getting orders wrong. McDonalds pulled the plug on the experiment last summer. Just Salad says it too explored AI in the drive-thru, but wasnt sold on the consumer experience. For now, it is sticking with humans processing those orders, though the chain will continue to evaluate those technologies as they evolve. Salad AI, Kenner says, also comes with a lot of freedom that allows customers to have the final say on their order. Even after the tool recommends a few customized salads, diners can make modifications before they buy. Its not intrusive, it is an optional step, says Kenner. It is like a professional assisting you in how to navigate our menu and find what you want.
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E-Commerce
Ive never been a big fan of winter. These postholiday months have always seemed like a seasonal waiting room, a dark stretch of time to be endured until nature ushers me into spring. But not this year. Ive come to understand that if I want January and February to be good to me, I need to be good to them. Recasting my typical winter state of mind to establish a new seasonal holiday, I blended the words boredom and doldrums into a different expression for a different experience: Doordom. Treating this new holiday as I do my traditional favorites means discovering seasonally relevant ways to decorate and celebrate. The garland greens and colored lights of December have given way to streams of silver foil swags, aglow with white lights, lanterns with forest motifs, and flickering flame birch log candles, all on battery timers so my loft remains twinkly despite the darkness outside my city windows. My winter programming My TV queue is filled with cozy British mysteriesthe episodic equivalent of having a fireplaceand Nordic Noir. If you are going to sink into winter, here is your inspiration. Tuning into the YouTube channel Street Style Stockholm, I drink coffee and watch people wearing well-designed winter coats and bold accessories walk along a posh shopping avenue. Where I once interpreted the Swedish proverb, There is no such thing as bad weather; there is only bad clothing, to mean choosing seasonal pieces that prepare us for the outdoors, I now believe it isnt just about temperature. It is also about the way our winter clothing makes us feel. Although my wardrobe core might still be in the dark shades (what I call the urban bruise palette), I did buy new colorful outerwear to present a more cheerful self to the world. It’s working! Much of my other seasonal behavior is highly ritualized: It isnt summer until I make Frogmore Stew, the Low Country shrimp boil used to mark my friend Rolands birthday. Fall starts the day I reawaken my cast iron Dutch ovens and get to braising again. and it cant possibly be Christmas without my annual box of tamales sent by a generous Texan. To observe Doordom in this same small but meaningful way, I am tinkering with recipes to find that one perfect seasonal defining meal: Right now, it looks like Moroccan tagine is the dish du jour. Dry January? No thanks I know there are folks who also ritualize this time of the year for other purposes, like cleansing toxins or dry January. I understand the impulse, but seasonal challenges are not for me. Sustaining wintery mental health means putting fewer demands on myself: I dont want to make this time of the year any harder than nature already does. Instead, my Doordom holiday honors little everyday luxuries: I like to join neighbors in our local pub and lick whipped cream off an Irish coffee while we watch the snow come down and spend cold afternoons at my favorite trattoria with a bowl of Bolognese and a good book. Decluttering is another popular mainstream winter ritual, and I am using that same seasonal practice to clean up the mess in my mind. After writing down all my random concerns and distractionssome personal, many politicalI put the paper in a ziplock bag and place it in my refrigerators freezer compartment. I will thaw my worries out later, keep whats still fresh and discard whats expired. In the meantime, with enough mental white space to make room for ideas, I am still experimenting with other comforting practices to mark my new holiday season, learning what I want to look forward to next winter. So, welcome to Doordom, my way of celebrating the bleakestyet potentially the besttime of the year.
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E-Commerce
Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. TikTok is fighting for its life in the U.S. over concerns about its parent companys relationship to the government of China. But TikTok has also just enjoyed one of the best branding weeks ever, as its potential demise has been treated as a national emergency. That sounds like hyperbole, but as youve no doubt heard, the president of the United States has literally intervened to pluck the popular video platform from its deathbedfor now, at least. Protecting this vital component of the internets attention-suck and dubious-trend infrastructure might not seem like a top government, or even societal, priority. But in the days leading up to a possible TikTok ban, Americans dependence on this virality machine went massively viral. Content creators and influencers said goodbye and posted teary videos. Fans shared serious and jokey goodbyes of their own. Brands and ad agencies lamented the loss; as one marketer moaned, Theres no substitute. The platforms wide-ranging cultural impacts were enumerated in the past tense. The New York Times asserted that TikTok had changed the way we cook, and publishers warned of an impending vacuum for bookselling. The frantic search for a replacement made an unlikely hit of a Mandarin-language app called RedNote. Rivals YouTube and Instagram angled to capitalize on the platforms demise. Even Kevin OLearythe Shark Tank guymanaged to drum up attention for claiming he might buy TikTok. Concerns about espionage were waved away with sarcastic Goodbye to my Chinese spy memes. More than a collective obituary, the outpouring amounted to an endless series of advance eulogies in honor of an entity that we, apparently, could never truly replace. It was, in short, a PR bonanza for TikTok. This has been quite a turnabout. While clearly popular, with 170 million users, TikTok owner ByteDance has long been painted by detractors as a potential tool of the Chinese government, for collecting data on or even influencing its audience. During his first term as president, Donald Trump called for banning TikTok unless it found a U.S. buyer. The Biden administration later voiced similar concerns, and backed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed by Congress with wide bipartisan support. The upshot was that ByteDance had to find a buyer by January 19, or it would become illegal for key service providers including Apple, Google, and Oracle to distribute or support the app, effectively killing it in the U.S. The platform fought this all the way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously upheld the act, seeming to seal TikToks fate. But as the pro-TikTok outcry swelled, the political appetite for actually shutting it down seemed to wobble, and the company took full advantage. Two days before the shutdown deadline, it blamed the Biden White House for failing to offer clarity and assurance to TikTok service providers to buy more time to find a solution, declaring that unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called this a stunt, insisting there was no reason for action before the second Trump administration took office: TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them. That night, TikTok video feeds stopped working, replaced with a pop-up message blaming a law banning the app but adding: President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok. And indeed the next morning, Trumpwho, let’s not forget, had set the whole TikTok ban idea in motion in 2020promised to stall the new laws enforcement to work out a deal. The platform was operating again within hours. (Apple and Google have yet to make it available again in their app stores, however.) According to Similarweb, by the end of the day, it hit a record 106.8 million active daily users, well above its pre-ban average. The legality of this maneuver is murky at best, and the Wall Street Journal has called it an illegal amnesty. Nevertheless, its safe to say that the narrative around TikTok has changed decisively. Trump now professes a warm spot in my heart for the platform, which he says helped him win over younger voters. And in a somewhat surprising and oddly timed chain of events, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met with Trump last month at Mar-a-Lago, later received an invitation to his inauguration, and was seated front and center next to America’s Big Tech CEOs. Still, the details of whatever Trump has in mind beyond the 75-day extension are vague, and the app could die again; foreign policy hawks are complaining about placating China, and some TikTok creators may not want to be part of a platform too-associated with Trump. In what sounds like a negotiating feint, the president is now suggesting the United States government itself should own like half of TikTok, which he says could be worth hundreds of billions, but would have no value without its U.S. audience. (Again, the legality of such an arrangement is questionable.) Meanwhile, the TikTok faithful have been rewarded for their vocal support, the TikTok Shop sales barely missed a step, and hardly anybody seems worried about the app as an espionage toolleast of all Trump, who dismissed the importance of a geopolitical rival spying on young kids watching crazy videos. Rumors of potential buyers include MrBeast and Elon Musk. And within a day or two of its resurrection, TikTok had spawned a fresh health trend that involves pouring castor oil in your navel. Yup, back to normal.
Category:
E-Commerce
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