The pandemic has made consumers particularly picky. Safety, speed, convenience and great-tasting, travel-friendly food that combines value and quality are all essential ingredients for success. And even as dining rooms reopened, the new norm persisted, and tricky challenges emerged including supply-chain breaks, labor shortages and virus variants.

As a result, restaurants strive to bring more to the table while spending and wasting less in a quest to manage margins with optimal efficiency. And what makes today’s ever-shifting competitive landscape even more challenging is the need to balance off-premises gains with rebuilding on-site traffic.