Bread-bowl icon Panera tests AI drive-thrus as labor shortages weigh on fast food

Smart soup... Panera’s serving up broccoli-cheddar bread bowls with a side of AI. Yesterday two Panera locations in upstate New York started testing an artificial-intelligence bot called "Tori," which takes drive-thru orders and interacts with customers.

• The voice-order tech is from OpenCity, a startup last valued at $27M. Panera is assessing Tori's accuracy and ability to cut wait times.
• If customers dig Tori, Panera could expand it to more restaurants. FYI: nearly half of its 2K locations have drive-thru lanes.
• Tori makes moves: OpenCity said Tori’s being used in more than two dozen restaurants, including a Popeyes in Louisiana.

From Tori to taco elevators... Fast-foodies have invested heavily in drive-thru tech since the pandemic. While lockdowns are over, takeaway sales have stayed elevated: prepandemic, less than 70% of fast-food sales came from drive-thrus. Now it’s more than 90%.

• Need for speed: Taco Bell opened a table-free restaurant last month with taco-delivering "vertical lifts." Chipotle’s adding more digital-order Chipotlanes, and McD's is working with IBM to automate drive-thrus.
• Need for peeps: Food service and hospitality companies led July job gains as they scrambled to hire, but were still 1.2M positions short of prepandemic headcount.