October 28, 2025
Flybuy’s 2nd annual Restaurant Forum brought together industry leaders from around the country to focus on the evolving restaurant landscape. Throughout the two-day forum, sessions dove into key topics such as order accuracy, restaurant operations, and digital guest experiences. The event served as a platform for collaboration and fresh ideas, and the Flybuy team showcased how their innovative restaurant solutions can further streamline operations, boost team efficiency and create a more connected, personalized dining experience.
Guest Speaker
The Forum kicked off with valuable insights from Chad Moutray, SVP of Industry Research & Knowledge and Chief Economist at the National Restaurant Association. Moutray set the stage with a thoughtful discussion on the broader economic outlook, highlighting the labor market, political and geopolitical risks, and ongoing cost pressures impacting restaurants. He closed with his predictions for 2026 and what they could mean for the industry’s growth and resilience.
Flybuy Platform Enhancements & Innovations
Smart Fire™
A huge headache in restaurant operations is timing: when to fire the order so it’s ready the second the customer arrives. Flybuy’s Smart Fire™ uses real-time customer location data to automatically fire an order to the kitchen at the optimal moment to ensure the freshest food. This technology ensures orders are fired in the sequence that customers are going to arrive (First-Arrived, First-Out – FAFO) versus when the orders were placed (First-In, First-Out – FIFO).
The system corrects the major flaws of default firing. Traditional methods fire orders far too early, with over 50% of all orders being fired 10 minutes or more before the customer arrives! Smart Fire adjusts this, firing intelligently, minutes before customer arrival to ensure fresh food.
Order Accuracy
Order accuracy is a critical competitive advantage right now for restaurants. Your customers don’t just expect their order to be correct – they demand it, and the penalty for error is severe: over 50% of customers won’t return after a single wrong order. For a typical QSR, a 3.5% error rate can cost an estimated $166,000 annually per store in refunds and lost business.
Flybuy is developing tools to measure revenue loss, prevent errors, save costs, build customer trust, and turn accuracy into a significant profit driver.
Digital Guest Experiences
In today’s restaurant landscape, delivering hyper-personalized and relevant interactions isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential for staying competitive and keeping guests coming back. That’s why we’re excited to roll out a new suite of marketing tools designed to help restaurateurs connect with guests in fresh, engaging ways: from gamified couponing and dynamic location-based campaigns, to promotions woven throughout the pickup journey.
Flybuy is also introducing features like a digital order-ready board, enhanced order visibility on the staff dashboard, real-time order status tracking, and expanded customer feedback forms within the Flybuy Web Flow and SDK. Together, these updates make it easier than ever for restaurants to deliver smooth, personalized, and accurate experiences from order to pickup.
AI-Driven Restaurant Tools
Using Flybuy’s location engine, the next generation of restaurant efficiency is here. Moving beyond basic GPS to predict customer arrival with unprecedented accuracy, the system uses four key components:
- Flybuy’s ETAi® (Contextual ETA) uses Machine Learning to incorporate real-world variables (store volume, parking congestion, roadwork, etc) that traditional navigation ignores. This delivers a huge boost in ETA accuracy, improving predictions by about 50 seconds on average.
- Probabilistic Event Triggering (PET) provides just-in-time events in the last few minutes of a customer’s journey before arrival.
- Estimated Time to Ready (ETR) provides a time range for when an order is expected to be ready based on historical data, giving customers confidence on when their order will be ready so they don’t arrive too early (wait longer) or too late (cold food).
- Course Correct® now includes a new “pit stop” feature. If a customer’s journey is paused, for example, if they’ve stopped for gas, Flybuy will automatically generate a system event.
The 2025 Flybuy Restaurant Forum underscored the power of innovation, collaboration, and data-driven technology in shaping the future of the restaurant industry. From economic insights and operational breakthroughs to new AI-driven tools, the conversations throughout the event reflected a shared commitment to improving accuracy, efficiency, and the guest experience. As Flybuy continues to expand its platform and push the boundaries of what’s possible, one thing is clear: the future of restaurant operations is smarter, faster, and more connected than ever.
Brands Attended:
