CREATE by Informa brought together restaurant owners, operators, and industry leaders for three days of hard data and harder-won lessons. Three common themes emerged in conversations with the next generation of restaurant leaders: know your guests, know your numbers, and know your pace of growth.
1. Know your guests
Guests still want a person, not a screen. Technomic's research found that consumers, including Gen Z, still prefer ordering through a staff member over a kiosk, and nearly half find AI-assisted drive-through unappealing. The largest service gap in the data, 11 points, was order accuracy between staff-ordered and kiosk-ordered transactions.
Self-order tech can still work. Pepper Lunch's full kiosk rollout improved guest sentiment by about 30%, but only because it paired the kiosk with a new Hospitality Host role to walk first-time guests through it. The founders behind the New York sandwich concept Counter Service want their kitchen technology to disappear entirely: it forecasts ingredient and staffing needs and quietly prompts staff so they can stay present with guests.
- If you've added or are considering kiosks or QR ordering, pair the rollout with a person whose job is to help first-timers use it, at least for the first few weeks.
- Where does order accuracy drop, staff-taken orders or self-order? A gap usually points to a menu or UI clarity problem, not a tech problem.
- Ask your team directly where tech is adding friction for guests versus removing work from staff. Those are two different wins, and only one of them should shape your next purchase.
Value has shifted too. It's not just about being cheap, today it's more about guests knowing exactly what they're getting for their money. At The Price Is Right, panelists from Beyond Juicery + Eatery, Dave's Hot Chicken, and Tijuana Flats described deliberate pricing ladders: a low, guest-friendly entry price to overcome a too-expensive perception, then multi-pack or add-on options that let guests build up their own order. Dave's Hot Chicken's viral Hot Mozz launched at $2.99 to get guests to try it, then used tiered multi-pack pricing to boost attachment without feeling like a discount.
Loyalty programs and discounting are two different tools. Loyalty perks should give guests something they can't get anywhere else, not just a cheaper version of the same product, or guests learn to wait for a deal.
- A pricing ladder works for any menu: one item guests see as a steal, a couple of mid-tier options, one or two higher-margin upgrades. Your POS reporting can show which price points guests actually gravitate toward before you commit menu-wide.
- Loyalty perks and discounts should solve different problems on paper. If they don't, guests will always wait for the deal.
Loyalty rarely comes from one big initiative. It's built from small, consistent details: Homestate's branded tape labeling every to-go item's contents, Pepper Lunch's carefully chosen bathroom signage and background music, L&L Hawaiian BBQ's insistence that a franchisee known for remembering regulars is worth more than any marketing campaign. All three brands treat guest feedback as a habit, not a project. Homestate has someone respond to every review, good or bad, weekly. Pepper Lunch used review and social-listening data to catch something surprising: guests across every region thought the brand had gotten too expensive, when guests simply didn't understand what they were getting for the price. Fixing the message and trimming add-on prices drove a 30-point swing in sentiment.
- What's the one small, detail guests notice that your restaurant can own? Packaging, signage, a server habit?
- Review responses work best as a weekly habit, not a when-you-have-time task. Assign it to one person so it doesn't fall through.
- If guests seem to think you're pricier than you are, check your messaging before you touch your margin. The problem is often what the menu communicates, not what it charges.
2. Know your numbers
Technomic reported that system-wide traffic is recovering from a broad decline that ran through last spring, and sales are holding up mostly because check averages keep climbing, not because more guests are walking in. Menu price inflation, still around 3.4%, continues to outpace grocery inflation and wage growth, and consumer confidence remains near pandemic-era lows. Independent restaurants absorbed the bulk of last year's net closures, tens of thousands of locations, even as chains added units on net.
For owners, that means growth isn't a given right now, and every dollar of price you take has to be justified by something a guest can feel. Forgiveness for a bad order, a slow table, or a confusing price increase is lower than it's ever been. When prices need to move, do it item by item against real traffic data. One franchise system that raised prices broadly saw an immediate hit to traffic, while a data-driven, quarterly, item-level process kept traffic intact and protected margin.
- Is a soft month really seasonal, or is it fewer covers versus fewer repeat guests? SpotOn Reporting can tell you which, and that changes what you do about it.
- Model your next price increase against a slow week and a busy week separately. A price hike guests don't notice on a Tuesday can feel very different on a Saturday.
- Raise prices item by item, not menu-wide. Your sales mix data will show which items have room to move without hurting volume.
- Cash flow trouble and traffic trouble are not the same problem. Waiting on card deposits, a seasonal dip, and a one-time expense each need a different fix.
The same discipline applies to AI. The AI in Action panel's best ideas were narrow: one founder built an automated workflow that creates a calendar reminder, generates an invoice, and sends a team alert the moment a catering order comes in, because a missed catering order is a customer relationship you rarely get back. Another used AI-assisted scheduling checks to cut schedule variance from 15% down to 3-5%. One operator keeps total AI spend around $1,000 to $1,200 a month.
- Start with your single most annoying recurring task, missed catering orders, manual weekly reports, schedule conflicts, and solve that one thing before adding anything else. SpotOn's Profit Assist is built for exactly this kind of recurring problem: it flags P&L savings opportunities automatically instead of asking you to dig for them.
- Set a real budget ceiling for any AI tool before you start, and hold to it.
- A weak process fails just as fast with AI as without it. Keep a human check on anything that touches payroll, compliance, or guest-facing pricing.
3. Grow at a pace you can sustain
Across nearly every session, from the Hot Concepts winners to the multi-brand operators at The Portfolio Playbook to the founders at CreaTED Talks, the same warning surfaced in different words: growth for its own sake is a trap. One founder, reflecting on years of building and losing restaurant concepts, put it plainly: speed isn't your friend in this business, and constraints protect your people.
Restaurant consultant Chef Brian Duffy opened the CreaTED Talks by comparing bad management to a party with no address: giving instructions without explaining the reasoning just leaves people lost. His advice: run daily staff tastings, explain every ingredient's story, and make sure staff understand why a dish or drink is built the way it is. Teams that understand the reasoning sell with more confidence and catch fewer small mistakes that erode a guest's experience.
Menu strategy showed the same discipline. At The Guest Signal, brands including Mendocino Farms described a fewer, bigger, better approach to limited-time offers: fewer items, each solving a real guest need instead of chasing a trend. One brand deleted a menu item that made up less than 2% of sales, only to discover it drove nearly an entire loyal guest segment's visits, and never fully recovered those guests even after bringing it back.
- A five-minute pre-shift huddle explaining the reason behind one menu item or ingredient choice builds more confidence than a longer training session. That confidence in the "why" shows up in upsells.
- Check whether a low-selling item is quietly driving visits from your most loyal guests before you cut it. Sales mix reporting can catch this before you lose those guests for good.
- Confirm demand with your own data before opening a new location or making plans for a new revenue stream.
- Staffing, food quality, and service consistency come first — new tech and offers come after. Tools like DayCheck or Rapid Fund can ease the cash flow pressure that tempts operators to grow too fast, but they don't replace getting the basics right.
- If you can't staff and train for it, it's not the right pace. Every new tool or menu addition should have to earn its place in your business.
The operators with real staying power grew only as fast as real guest demand justified, protected the fundamentals of food and service, and treated technology and pricing as tools to support that experience, not shortcuts around it.
For independent owners navigating tight traffic, elevated costs, and a more selective guest, that's the real takeaway from Create 2026: know your guests, know your numbers, and build at a pace you can actually sustain.
