Crave Hospitality is giving other restaurants the chance to use the software behind its virtual food halls.
The Boise, Idaho-based company said this week it will license Crave Technology, its proprietary tech stack for restaurants, ghost kitchens and food halls.
It is gearing the product toward national and regional restaurant groups, who could use the fully integrated system to operate multiple brands from a single location; offer mobile, online and table ordering; run marketing campaigns; and manage self-delivery, among other things.
It is the same system that powers the company's delivery-focused Crave Collective food halls, where customers can order from multiple of its 18 concepts on a single ticket. That's a nice perk for guests, but it can get complicated for the restaurants; Crave's technology is designed to solve that by ensuring all items are ready at once.
Its first location opened in Boise in November 2020 and is generating $500,000 in monthly revenue, Crave said. Sixty-four percent of customers return more than three times, and average order value is "nearly double" that of third-party delivery marketplaces, it said. Crave plans to open four more locations this year and 10 in 2022.
“The success of our first Crave Collective became the foundation to build a next-generation software licensing business,” says Devin Wade, Crave co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “We saw how our fully-integrated platform could transform the off-premise experience, and we look forward to sharing this technology with operators looking for an opportunity to scale.”
The licensing initiative was helped along by a $7.3 million fundraise late last year led by venture capital firm StageDotO. And it has its first customer in chef and restaurateur Michael Mina, who has four concepts in the Boise location and will look to add the technology to his operations across the country.
“We were incredibly impressed by the company’s first Crave Collective and look forward to extending that experience to our guests through the use of their technology,” Mina said in a statement. “These systems meet our high expectations for food quality, hospitality, and internal operations and represent a game-changing improvement when it comes to order facilitation and delivery.”
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