What’s your digital game plan? Your digital strategy can help you elevate your brand far beyond the walls of your restaurant by enhancing your connections with existing guests and helping you attract new ones. What’s more, the restaurant brands that develop a digital strategy and support it with the infrastructure it needs are likely to open up a wide lead over competitors in the months ahead — while those that don’t are likely to see their guest engagement suffer. (For example, two brands with robust digital strategies, Domino’s and Panera, currently receive a large portion of their orders via digital — 60 percent and 25 percent, respectively.) That’s according to research shared at the recent Foodservice Technology Conference Trade Show in Orlando. To put the industry in perspective when it comes to digital, restaurants leading the pack in this area are spending 30 to 50 percent (and sometimes much more) of their marketing budgets on it. Of the digital tools restaurants are using to engage customers and generate data, the most important ones to focus on are the mobile app, loyalty program, online ordering capability and delivery strategy. It pays to play offense with digital as well, with restaurants actively using digital seeing 5 percent annual growth over the previous five-year period as opposed to 2 percent annual growth for brands using digital more defensively. That is making it important for restaurants to invest in technology platforms, hardware and software to support their digital strategy, though the proliferation of cloud-based services is helping to bring the overall costs of investment down. Just make sure your strategy considers the needs of your front-of-house and back-of-house operations, all while helping you keep your guests engaged.

At a time when third-party delivery is evolving in futuristic ways — like delivery by robot, or, if Uber’s three-year plans play out, by drone — it can be easy to neglect the most important elements of a delivered meal: food that tastes good and is safe to eat following its journey. The National Restaurant Association is taking steps to change that. It is assembling a group of food delivery services and restaurants to develop a code of best practices for keeping food safe during its delivery to the customer. Watch this space for more information when the practices are released.

When it comes to boosting your food safety record, technology might be your restaurant’s greatest ally. Consider the checklists you need to monitor and update, whether for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points compliance to employee training. As Food Safety Magazine reports, having the right digital platform to manage all of your restaurant’s checklists has wide-ranging benefits, allowing you to access multiple sources of information from one location, improving your efficiency and managerial control, and reducing fraud and waste. Of course, there are many options to choose from, but the best ones will let you log time and temperature data, maintain warming and cooling logs, integrate operational checklists on a single interface, conduct an audit, monitor your cleaning compliance, identify potential fraud, and enable you to use checklists as training tools. Make sure the app is easy to navigate and that it has features to help you detect and resolve problems, such as a dish lingering in the temperature danger zone for too long (a problem that brought Chipotle back into the news in recent weeks) or a checklist being completed in a questionable way (a digital checklist can hold employees accountable in ways a paper checklist cannot). It should also allow you to access data and reports remotely and notify you with a real-time alert if and when something goes wrong.

If your menu includes a lot of added sugar, take note: New research from KerryDigest found that consumers are worried about the levels of sugar, above other ingredients, in food and drinks. One-third of Americans connect sugar with weight gain, 71 percent scan ingredient labels for added sugar and 46 percent want to cut back on their consumption of sugar. Reducing the added sugar in your dishes – and promoting your efforts to guests – can go a long way in showing you’re conscious about health. If you need some sweetness but want to avoid adding artificial sweeteners or sugar per se, the research found that consumers responded best to natural sweeteners like stevia, honey, monk fruit and maple syrup.