Upcoming Alpha: Drive Thru improvements

[Hadley]

Hi Square Sellers! 

I'm Hadley, a Product Manager on our F&B team. I'm looking for any sellers who offer Drive Thru as a channel at their restaurants. Over the next two quarters, we're looking to add additional functionality, focused on making drive thru workflows faster and easier. 

We're looking for sellers who are open to getting early access and testing some of these features as well as working with our product team to provide feedback on the workflows generally. This will be a very small, limited group that would have frequent touch points with myself, our design, and engineering teams. 

If you offer drive thru or are planning to add in the future, please let me know. Thank you. 

[CinderBistro]

I love the idea. We don't offer drive thru service at our current location but intend to at our next location. It'll likely be spring time before we're ready though.

[Hadley]

Thank you for the offer, @CinderBistro . I'll let you know if there's anything you can help with here. 

[Bbwt]

I’d love to learn more! We have a drive through that opened within the last 2 months 

[Hadley]

Excellent, I'll add you to our list! Which of your locations is that at? Also do you have a digital menu board in place at the location already? If so, what hardware did you go with? 

[Bbwt]

I don't utilize any digital signage. The location is "boo bears WT" 

[Hadley]

Got it thanks. Is digital signage something you'd be interested in for the future?

Also feel free to share your current ordering through payment workflows or any feedback you have about how it works today. 

[Bbwt]

Yeah I’ve thought about digital signage, I haven’t really looked into it

We’re currently doing our orders at the window where they wait for it to be made. 

I’m testing some ideas to put a QR code in the line for those willing to order themselves 

[ThatPitaGuy]

It’s cool that square is thinking about other features but they need to fix the “work flows” of their already existing products, I.e, KDS. As most owners do, it’s time to not put all eggs in one basket and move to a different KDS company.

[Hadley]

Thanks for the feedback @ThatPitaGuy . Part of these improvements for DT will include some updates to KDS but if there's anything specific you are looking for on KDS, please let me know and I'll make sure the broader team is aware. 

[2Hot2HandleBBQ]

We stopped using KDS because we never could get the system to show our kitchen team how many of an item if we set items up as being able to "add on" something to the order.  Example:  a brisket with fries would only show a brisket was needed, not that a fry was also needed which made our fry cook unaware of what items they needed to drop.

[Hadley]

Have you tried using our new Combos feature? Its currently in beta but should GA at the start of September and I think would help with this. 

[CinderBistro]

Not to be a Debbie Downer but... last I looked at the Combos Feature, it's not yet suitable for most real world restaurant use cases. It's a start but, until my previous feedback is incorporated, we can't start using it. The feature has a lot of potential and we look forward to using it in the future.

[Hadley]

Remind me, what was the feedback you had that prevented you from using? 

[2Hot2HandleBBQ]

It doesn't look like the Combos feature is what will work for us as the customer has choices on what they want to add on.  Thanks for letting me know about it, I have a couple of other trucks who may like to know about this feature.

[Hadley]

You can limit it so theres no customer choice. There's several ways to configure. 

[CinderBistro]

The reason you're experiencing this is the way you have your POS setup. We allow our guests to choose sides to add to sandwiches or entrees and these details are printed on the kitchen tickets. The guest (or server) first choose the item (e.g. Brisket Plate) and then chooses up to two sides (which are modifiers) to add to the order. The kitchen then see the Brisket Plate in black ink with the sides in red ink.

[2Hot2HandleBBQ]

I will have to look into it again because I do have everything set up as modifiers so I must have something else not turned on correctly.

[ThatPitaGuy]

Thanks Hadley! The big one is not being able to choose what to print. Say I have 15 items on a ticket including sandwiches, salad, fries. I only need to tickets for the sandwiches and the other 10 or so tickets are wasted. The feature should be hit the print option and then highlight which menu items you want to print so there is no wasted labels. Fresh KDS which I used for years offer this functionality. The other is having an added item on a ticket that’s already popped on KDS shows in a separate tile instead of being added to the already popped tile.

[CinderBistro]

Assuming you have your different types of items assigned to different categories, all you need to do is choose which categories are assigned to the printer profiles associated with the corresponding prep area/station.

[ThatPitaGuy]

We have 3 KDS, main line where the sandwiches are wrapped and salads are made but the KDS shows the whole order. That’s the only KDS I have a sticky label printed connected to. I have one on the fry station that only pops what goes in the fryer and the grill station that pops everything beside sides. The grill needs to pop salads because if a salad gets grilled chicken/steak, they need to know what to drop. As far as I know, I can’t tell the label printer what items to print and what not to