Raghav Poddar was studying computer science at Columbia University when he became intrigued by the challenges restaurant owners faced maintaining an online presence. Poddar, a self-described “foodie” — who didn’t have much time to cook meals — was a heavy user of food delivery and pickup services in New York City.
“Many restaurants don’t really have an online presence, but they do have the opportunity to create more dishes and cuisines that are representative of their community,” Poddar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “There may be a broader technology slowdown, but now more than ever, restaurants need to adopt and get good at technology to protect their margins and grow revenue.”
The importance of an online footprint in the restaurant industry – and quality at that – cannot be overstated. According to a recent survey, 77% of diners visit a restaurant’s website before dining or ordering from the establishment. Of that group, almost 70% are discouraged or otherwise deterred from visiting the restaurant because of the website.
Poddar came up with a solution in Superorder (formerly Forward Kitchens), a platform that provides websites, menus, photos and tools for order management, marketing, financial management and more to restaurants. Superorder today announced it has raised $10 million in a funding round led by Foundation Capital with participation from Y Combinator managing director Michael Seibel, Cruise co-founders Kyle Vogt and Daniel Kan, I2BF Global Ventures and others.
The core of Superorder’s mission is to help restaurants increase their revenue through off-premise dining, i.e. delivery and pick-up services. The pandemic has boosted the growth of off-site dining as restaurants have been forced to pivot; two-thirds of adults say they are ordering takeout from a restaurant more often than before the pandemic, Restaurant.org reports.
But Poddar argues that many restaurateurs, now burdened with digital management duties, are still leaving money on the table.
“The increased adoption of technology by restaurant owners does not solve the challenges of setting up, managing and understanding how this technology can be deployed,” he said. “A task as simple as changing hours on all delivery platforms (e.g. Grubhub, UberEats) for a day can take dozens of clicks and hours.”
Superorder is looking to streamline business by letting restaurants establish an online presence, including food delivery, where they can create multiple digital storefronts and associated financial and operational dashboards without having to connect with each delivery platform.
![Super order](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/64b59423caaa506dfecf43f1_IMG.png)
Image credits: Super order
Superorder also consults with restaurants and helps them launch ‘virtual restaurants’, or storefronts for various brands operating in their kitchens. Poddar says Superorder uses data science to identify high-demand dishes in a restaurant’s delivery radius and works with the restaurant to create menus and photos for that brand, which Superorder then lists on third-party delivery platforms.
It’s worth noting that virtual restaurants or “ghost kitchens,” a concept that has become increasingly popular during the pandemic, aren’t exactly seeing high success rates.
Restaurants often struggle with the costs of finding additional delivery personnel for their virtual restaurants, giving labor and marketing a location that is virtually invisible to the public. And some third-party delivery platforms have pushed back against virtual restaurants, accusing the restaurants that created them of spamming the platforms with repetitive listings and menus. Starting in March, UberEats will require virtual kitchens to maintain a high average rating — above 4.3 stars — and a low order cancellation rate.
But Superorder claims it is more thoughtful in its approach to creating virtual kitchens than its competitors. First, the platform uses generative AI to create menus and photos for each virtual restaurant listing, similar to tools offered by restaurant tech startups Swipeby and Lunchbox. Grubhub data shows that restaurants with images accompanying their menu items receive at least 70% more orders and 65% higher sales than restaurants without images.
Naturally, you’re wondering how similar the AI-generated images are to the actual menu items. Gross inaccuracies can leave restaurants on the hook for false advertising lawsuits. But Poddar pushes these concerns aside and proposes Superorder’s generative AI as a way for restaurants to provide images that are “close to” real food images, without having to hire a professional food photographer.
“Our competitors use the same brand in hundreds of restaurants, creating a ‘hundreds’ relationship, which prevents restaurants from controlling the quality, image and relationship of the brand with their customers,” Poddar said. “Superorder allows restaurants to build a website through a search interface by typing a search query like ‘Build a website for an Italian restaurant in New York’ and choosing a design template. And they can create compelling food images and well-written, creative menu descriptions and item names with a simple click.”
“Well-written” and “creative” is also up for debate, given the obvious rhetorical limitations of generative AI. I would be concerned about accuracy; After all, generative AI tends to invent facts.
Somewhat worryingly, it’s also not clear what powers Superorder’s generative AI features – that is, whether the AI models are developed in-house or using a third-party API. The former could be more error-prone; we have asked Superorder for clarification.
![Super order](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/64b65d55ad558e5a92b5ce81_autopilot.png)
Image credits: Super order
But other aspects of the Superorder platform seem undeniably useful, such as an order management module that aggregates orders from all third-party delivery platforms into a single window. Superorder also syncs menus across platforms while optimizing menu item prices for conversion rates and sales, automatically reconciling sales, taxes, commissions, marketing, and costs across platforms to identify errors (and hopefully not introduce new ones).
Superorder clearly has its fingers in a lot of pies – and therefore competes with many startups. Poddar sees Nextbit, Virtual Dining Concepts and Ordermark as Superorder’s main rivals, but you could argue the company is also competing against ghost kitchen companies like MadEats, CloudEats and Lunchbox – at least in the digital asset management space.
But New York City-based Superorder has been growing slowly but surely since emerging from Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 cohort. With a workforce of approximately 70 people, it now operates in more than 180 US cities, has more than 1,500 restaurant customers and has facilitated approximately 1.5 million orders to date.
There is also a lot of money in the market – more than enough to get by, you would assume. A recent report estimates that the online food delivery market will grow from $160 billion in 2022 to $483 billion in 2032.
Poddar says the plan is to use Superorder’s new round of funding to expand the company’s operations, sales and engineering teams.
“In addition to scaling customers, we will also expand our product offering to become the complete third-party operating system for restaurants,” Poddar said. “We are working to further expand the restaurant software stack and become the all-in-one software platform that gives restaurants the tools needed to increase delivery and takeout profitability.”