Restaurant technology often creates more problems than it solves, with complicated interfaces and disconnected systems frustrating business owners who just want to serve great food. Thibault Le Conte, founder of OrderOut, recognized this challenge and built a solution that simplifies rather than complicates restaurant operations. His platform bridges the gap between multiple delivery services while maintaining the human touch that hospitality requires.
Simplifying Technology for Restaurant Success: How OrderOut is Changing the Game
Walk into most restaurants today and you’ll see a counter cluttered with tablets from different delivery services. Each one needs charging, updating, and constant attention. Le Conte watched this chaos unfold in Miami and knew there had to be a better way.
Designing Tools Everyone Can Use
OrderOut started with a basic truth about the restaurant industry. “A lot of people in the hospitality industry are not super technology friendly,” Le Conte explains. His team spends serious time making sure their product doesn’t intimidate people who just want to cook and serve food. The solution? Cut the text. “We write very little text, so we don’t really need to translate the user interface,” he says. OrderOut serves restaurants with Spanish-speaking staff, English speakers, and Chinese establishments. Instead of creating complicated translations, they designed everything with pictures and simple interactions that work regardless of language.
Streamlining Restaurant Menu Management
Anyone who’s tried to update a restaurant menu online knows the pain. Forty items means endless scrolling, nested categories, modifier groups, and pricing variations for pickup versus delivery. It’s a nightmare that most restaurant owners avoid until they absolutely can’t. Le Conte’s team borrowed from ChatGPT’s approach to solve this. “Having a user interface where you say, ‘Hey, I want to increase by $1 all my sauce for the burgers,’ makes perfect sense to type it this way,” he explains. “It feels natural versus going to every burger and changing the sauce one by one.” Simple commands replace hours of clicking through menus.
OrderOut doesn’t try to replace Uber Eats, GrubHub, or DoorDash. Instead, it connects them all through one system. This matters because restaurant owners often have no idea what’s happening across their different delivery platforms. “As a business owner who is in the restaurant, in the kitchen, they are not really online a lot,” Le Conte points out. “They may not know that their GrubHub store is closed, but their Uber Eats store is open. Maybe the DoorDash one has the wrong menu.” OrderOut keeps everything synchronized and sends alerts when something goes wrong.
Preventing Tablet Issues in Restaurants
Le Conte’s lightbulb moment came from watching restaurants struggle with basic logistics. After moving from New York to Miami, he couldn’t believe how many tablets cluttered every restaurant counter. But the real problem was simpler than anyone expected. “A lot of employees were removing the tablet USB cable to charge their phone,” he discovered. “The tablet ran out of battery, so your store gets paused.” Restaurants lost orders because someone needed to charge their phone and unplugged a delivery tablet. “You would never think about that,” Le Conte says, but it happened constantly.
OrderOut’s commitment to artificial intelligence shows in their expenses. “A year ago, OpenAI wasn’t a cost for us, and now OpenAI is our second biggest software expense,” he reveals. Their AI costs now exceed marketing, email services, and most other software expenses combined. This investment pays off in features that would be “very painful to do manually” but become simple with AI assistance. Restaurant owners get better menus, accurate pricing, and consistent information across all platforms without the usual headaches. Le Conte expects AI expenses to surpass even their cloud hosting costs within two years. For a company that started by eliminating unnecessary complexity, this heavy investment in smart automation makes perfect sense. OrderOut proves that restaurant technology doesn’t need to be complicated to be powerful. Sometimes the best solution is just getting rid of all those tablets.
Connect with Thibault Le Conte on LinkedIn to explore more about simplifying restaurant technology.
