TECHNOLOGY
6 tech observations from the 2025 Restaurant Show There seemed to be more technology than ever at the Show this year, and we tried to make sense of it all after three days spent roaming the floor
The Tech Pavilion was buzzing during the show. | Photo by Joe Guszkowski
BY JOE GUSZKOWSKI SENIOR EDITOR RESTAURANT BUSINESS
not quite ready for primetime, al- though we did speak to a burger chain that is testing automated grills. One challenge for restaurants will be adapting their operations to accommodate the bots. High hopes for AI There was a growing sense of ex- citement among both operators and vendors about AI’s potential. “AI is inventing a new frontier for our industry, in every facet of what we do,” said Sean Feeney, co-found- er of Grovehouse Hospitality in New York City. Today, Grovehouse is using AI to generate newsletters and social media posts. But in the future, Fee- ney sees it doing much more. It will plot tables and create schedules. It will be smart enough to know which servers should work in which sec- tions. Most importantly, it will allow employees and managers to spend their time serving customers rather
And the field of voice AI companies is getting crowded quickly. The glut of tech has its pros and cons. The heightened competition should result in better products. But the growing number of options can be overwhelming for operators to navigate. More consolidation is likely on the horizon. More robots, but not always better ones There seemed to be more robots at the Show this year than last, which surprised us. Trump’s tariffs have created a lot of uncertainty for companies that sell hardware, and robot adoption in restaurants has been generally slow. But there were at least a dozen bots on the floor doing their thing. Or trying to. We saw a napkin-fold- ing robot struggling to pick up nap- kins, and a pizza-topping machine having some trouble booting up. It suggested that robots are still
I n many ways, the National Restaurant Association Show has become a technology exhibi- tion with some food sprinkled in for good measure. Here’s what we saw and heard at this year’s event at McCormick Place in Chicago, where there was plenty of enthusiasm about where restaurant tech is headed. There was more tech than ever So much so that it required extra space. For the first time in my sev - eral years of attending, the back wall of the North Hall was opened up to make room for hundreds of additional exhibitors, many of them tech-focused. A lot of the newcomers were from overseas. We noticed several POS vendors we’d never heard of.
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National Restaurant Association Show 2025
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