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Fast food giant Yum Brands has worked for years to distance itself from third-party tech partners. Last week, it made the ultimate power move: a development deal with Nvidia, a tech giant consistently ranked among the most valuable companies in the world. We want to own the intellectual property. We want to own the technology, Yum Brands chief digital and technology officer Joe Park told the Wall Street Journal. Thats a shift in our strategy as we think about AI. In other words: Yum knows its strength and wants full control over its own data. The company will build more services for its 61,000 restaurants with Nvidias tech with the goal of quickly processing and understanding critical information about store-level performance and giving managers personalized action plans. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/expedite_logo.jpg","headline":"Expedite","description":"Restaurant technology and the big ideas shaping the future of hospitality, by Kristen Hawley. To learn more visit expedite.news","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.expedite.news","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} Yum Brands owns fast food powerhouses Taco Bell and KFC along with delivery stalwart Pizza Hut and its more recent acquisition, a less-known burger concept called Habit Burger. It says it’s Nvidias first restaurant partner, an important distinction in what could become a restaurant-tech land grab. The restaurant industry has been historically slow to deploy new tech, but seems to be excited about AI. According to data from the National Restaurant Association, about a third of restaurant operators plan to invest in AI for operations this yeara significant increase from the year before. Of course, Park is quick to tell the WSJ, all of this new tech wont replace human workers. Instead, he says, theyll be trained on a different form of service and hospitality than I think weve seen in the past. (This is a common refrain from industry execs who promise employees will augment new tech, freed up to provide additional human connection inside restaurants. In tandem, the execs celebrate the efficiency and reduced labor costs that tech brings to their operations.) Yum hasnt been shy about its desire to use tech to win. In 2023, it shared an aggressive sales target, albeit without a timeline: It wants all of its sales to come through digital channels. Digital ordering carries a host of benefits, including a restaurants ability to collect real-time data. Additionally, consumers tend to spend more when they place orders digitally thanks to smart upsells and better order accuracy. Its made some progress toward that goal. In 2024, the companys system-wide digital sales were up 15%, representing over half of sales. In the fourth quarter alone, it processed $9 billion in digital sales. Given the huge growth potential (and massive amount of money involved), Yum is right to hold its own ordering data close. Its a lesson the company may have learned the hard way. In 2018, Yum signed an exclusive deal with Grubhub, the onetime national leader in online ordering and delivery. Grubhub would power delivery at both Taco Bell and KFC, and Yum invested $200 million in Grubhub, a 3% stake. The deal flamed out rather spectacularly just two years later. Yum, realizing the delivery tailwind thanks to the onset of the pandemic, started working with competing delivery services like Uber Eats, which Grubhub said violated the terms of their agreement. In hindsight, this was Yums first big digital flex: Were too big and powerful to be constrained by your platform, it seemed to say. When Grubhub moved to increase the fees it charged Yums restaurants, Yum sued Grubhub for breach of contract, eventually offloading its investment for a reported $208 million. The Nvidia deal, on paper at least, should accelerate Yums next transition. To start, it will use the tech to add voice AI to its drive-thrus and phone lines, targeting a relatively modest 500 restaurants in the second quarter of this year. Eventually, Park says, theyll use the tech to optimize all ordering channels, including the companys mobile apps, and home in on in-store productivity and accuracy with Nvidia-powered computer vision. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/expedite_logo.jpg","headline":"Expedite","description":"Restaurant technology and the big ideas shaping the future of hospitality, by Kristen Hawley. To learn more visit expedite.news","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.expedite.news","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} Kristen Hawley
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E-Commerce
The wildfires that blazed through Los Angeles earlier this year, some of the fastest-spreading fires on record, underscored the risk of living in homes known to be at high risk for future fires. One national homebuilder, KB Home, believes that risk can be reduced by building a wildfire-resilient neighborhood.Dixon Trail, a community of 64 homes under construction in Escondido, California, near San Diego, will be the first neighborhood to earn the new Wildfire Prepared Neighborhood standard developed by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS). [Image: KB Home]Each individual home will meet the Wildfire Prepared Home Plus certification, an IBHS designation that requires the homes to meet specific material and design standards, including Class A fire-rated roofs, noncombustible gutters, ember- and flame-resistant vents and all-metal fence systems. The town of Paradise, California, which lost 90% of its homes during a 2018 fire, passed a law requiring all homes meet this standard.The entire development is being designed with a holistic vision to reduce fire risks. Homes will be spaced 10 feet apart, with trees, bushes, and other landscaping distanced from structures to reduce the chances fires will start or spread. Wider streets will run through the neighborhood, creating fire breaks between homes and allowing for quicker evacuations.This is the first neighborhood that cohesively is meeting not just individual property attributes, but is paying attention to fire pathways, and fences and other kinds of landscaping between structures that can become pathways for fires, said Roy Wright, CEO of IBHS.Last year, roughly 1,200 homes in California earned the Wildfire Prepared Home designation, mostly through retrofits to add more fire resistant features. This is the first ground-up neighborhood to aim for this additional neighborhood-level certification, which will be awarded when its finished. Theres real risk in the region for fire; the chaparral on the foothills surrounding the development can easily ignite in the right conditions. Housing shortages in western states like California have pushed more and more development toward whats called the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where new development comes up against undeveloped land. Roughly 11.2 million Californians, a quarter of the states population, live in the WUI today, which has substantially higher risks of fires than metro areas. The IBHS, which works in service of the insurance industry, arrives at its recommendations via exhaustive testing and research. The group has studied fire and storm risk for years, including the recent Palisades and Eaton Fires. The organization even has a 90-acre test site in South Carolina where it builds and then blasts apart homes, recreating Category 3 hurricanes and wildfires to test the latest in material safety and building codes. The materials recommended for Wildfire Prepared Home Plus were tested at the South Carolina site, and reflected learnings from what kind of homes tend to survive catastrophic wildfires. [Image: KB Home]KB Home began constructing Dixon Trail last June, said Jacob Atalla, KB Homes Vice President of Sustainability and Innovation. The first homes have been finished, going for roughly $1 million (the median single-family home sale in Escondido last year was $825,000, per Redfin). Its a small part of KB Homes overall production in 2024; the company earned nearly $7 billion in revenue, with more than 6,500 homes under construction, including a sizable number in western states with higher fire risks.[Image: KB Home]This price was set knowing that we are already building these homes to be wildfire prepared, so we didnt add a premium top of it, said Atalla.He expects this project to serve as a testing lab, helping the company figure out how to source materials for these kinds of homes in the future and scale up production of more wildfire resistant products. Initially marketed as a neighborhood with mountain views and oversized lots, the new messaging around wildfire risk reflects the sentiment shift since L.A.s devastating January fires. The certifications will likely reduce the insurance costs for new homeowners, said Atalla and Wright, and lower the total cost of ownership over time. Neither, however, could provide more specifics about the amount of savings, claiming the insurance process is complex and every carrier has their own methodology. Californias home insurance market has become increasingly challenging for homeowners, with rapidly spiking premiums and carriers dropping coverage or leaving the market altogether. Thats why savings on insurance is good business for KB and other homebuilders; in the companys 2024 annual report, it notes wildfire risk and increasing insurance costs as a risk factor, noting that consumers facing higher premiums may decide not to pursue purchasing a home or may cancel a home sales contract with us. Wriht says approximately 10 different neighborhoods in California, either through retrofits or new construction, are looking to gain the Wildfire Prepared Neighborhood designation.This Dixon Trail development is the first, but it will not be the last. I promise you, he said. There are plenty of people watching this who intend to emulate it.
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E-Commerce
Back in January, Kohls announced that it would be closing 27 of its stores across America in order to help the company control costs and increase operational efficiency. At the time, Kohls described the closing locations as underperforming and said the closures will occur by April 2025. And now it looks like Kohls remains on track for that by April deadline. As first noticed by USA Today, the 27 stores that Kohls had previously announced would be closing now list their last day of operation as this Saturday, March 29, on Kohls store locator tool. For example, the store locator listing for the Kohls located at 1116 1st Street in Napa, California, now lists, in bright red letters, This store will be closing soon. Our last day of business at this location will be Saturday, March 29th. Other closing locations also show the same message. The listing for the Napa store goes on to reveal that its store hours for the last day of its operation will be from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. After that, the store will shut its doors to customers for good. Kohls store closures 2025 full list The 27 Kohls stores that are closing are spread across 15 states, with California being hit the hardest with 10 stores closing there. After the stores are closed on Saturday, Kohls will still operate over 1,120 locations across the country. Announcing the closures in January, Kohls CEO Tom Kingsbury said, “We always take these decisions very seriously. As we continue to build on our long-term growth strategy, it is important that we also take difficult but necessary actions to support the health and future of our business for our customers and our teams.” The full list of store closures is below. Alabama Spanish Fort – 21000 Town Center Ave. Arkansas Little Rock West – 13909 Chenal Pkwy. California Balboa (San Diego) – 5505 Balboa Ave. Encinitas – 134 N El Camino Real Fremont – 43782 Christy St. Mountain View – 350 Showers Dr. Napa – 1116 1st St. Pleasanton – 4525 Rosewood Dr. Point West (Sacramento) – 1896 Arden Way San Rafael – 5010 Northgate Dr. San Luis Obispo – 205 Madonna Rd. Westchester – 8739 S Sepulveda Blvd. Colorado Arapahoe Crossing (Aurora) – 6584 S Parker Rd. Georgia Duluth – 2050 W Liddell Rd. Idaho Boise – 400 N Milwaukee St. Illinois Plainfield – 11860 S Route 59 Spring Hill (West Dundee) – 3000 Spring Hill Ring Rd. Massachusetts Stoughton – 501 Technology Center Dr. New Jersey East Windsor – 72 Princeton Hightstown Rd. Ohio Blue Ash – 4150 Hunt Rd. Forest Park (Cincinnati) – 100 Cincinnati Mills Dr. Oregon Portland Gateway – 10010 NE Halsey St. Pennsylvania Pottstown – 351 W Schuylkill Rd. Texas North Dallas – 18224 Preston Rd. Utah Riverton – 13319 S 3600 W Ste 13LOT Virginia Herndon – 2100 Centreville Rd. Williamsburg – 100 Gristmill Plz
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E-Commerce
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