In this Weekly Wrap, we’re looking at the rise of entree priced desserts, ICE and the food chain, Starbucks abandoning mobile-only stores, and more.
The Shift From Mobile Order Only
The Headline: “Starbucks is discontinuing mobile order and pickup-only stores”
The Source: Nations Restaurant News
What You Need to Know:
Starbucks is doubling down on bringing back the third place as in-store customers remain a top priority for the company. The Seattle-based coffee chain will begin sunsetting its mobile order and pickup-only stores, which were first introduced in 2019, CEO Brian Niccol said during Tuesday’s earnings call for the third quarter ended June 29, 2025.
Instead, Starbucks will be focusing on implementing two new store prototypes that are off-premises-focused but not exclusively pickup-only. The new standalone prototype, which will open in 2026, has 32 seats, a drive-thru, and approximately a 30% lower cost to build. An urban small format version with approximately 10 seats is under construction in New York City and will open in the next few months, Niccol said.
“We found the [mobile order and pickup] format to be overly transactional and lacking the warmth and human connection that defines our brand. We have a strong digital offering and believe we can deliver the same level of convenience through our community coffee houses with a superior mobile order and pay experience.”
Starbucks is simultaneously rolling out “Smart Queue” technology, an advanced order sequencing algorithm that is designed to ensure consistent and timely service in Starbucks stores across channels. This new algorithmic approach has led to a “double-digit improvement in café orders handed off in under four minutes, with 80% of in-cafe orders now meeting that target,” Niccol added.
Our Take:
When I first started going to Starbucks some 20 odd years ago there was something delightful, and at the time, new, “what’s your name for the order?” Even though somehow my name was written as Navin instead of David, it was a thoughtful personal touch.
But Starbucks lost its way. Then came the pandemic, and they leaned into mobile ordering and ease-of-use tech. In doing so, they llost what made Starbucks a household name. Let's be honest, coffee isn’t the reason it became the icon of the coffee world.
For a fleeting moment during the pandemic, they were ahead of the game, but only because of global circumstances. People came back to drinking and eating out, and the soul of the space was gone. Starbucks’ customer traffic and sales dropped.
The impersonality of their service turned away their core audience.
As time goes on and technology advances at breakneck speed, Starbucks is a warning of all the dangers of leaning too far into tech. People still crave personal interaction, and spaces need to feel warm. Unless the identity of the business is solely based on technology, and customers go there for that reason, don’t let the human touch get lost.
Chipotle’s AI Hiring Spree
The Headline: “Chipotle’s AI hiring tool is helping it find new workers 75% faster”
The Source: CNBC
What You Need to Know:
Chipotle added an AI-powered platform to its hiring process that it dubbed “Ava Cado.” The platform, created by AI HR firm Paradox, is essentially a conversational chatbot that interacts with job candidates, answers questions about the company and the job, collects information about them, and ultimately can schedule interviews with human hiring managers. It can also converse in English, Spanish, French, and German.
Chipotle chief human resources officer Ilene Eskenazi said the company’s growth plan was a factor in the decision to use the AI hiring technology. With projections for about 300 new restaurants opening each year with an average of 30 employees per location, the company estimates it will have somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 new hires per year, on top of other positions opening up at existing Chipotles.
Making sure there is no friction in that process is key. Prior to rolling out Ava Cado, Chipotle managers were tasked with scheduling all of the interviews, both from people who applied online as well as during hiring events or when people came in seeking employment. That led to a lot of administrative work for managers.
Since introducing the AI chatbot, Eskenazi said Chipotle’s number of applicants “has increased dramatically” and the company is also seeing about an 85% application completion rate. Ava Cado helps the job candidate by populating the application with the information they provide, cutting down the average time it takes to complete an application to around eight minutes.
There are also potential concerns about the security of applicant data when interacting with AI recruiters — earlier this month, Paradox reported that a security vulnerability was detected by researchers, potentially exposing applicant names, email addresses and contact info.
Our Take:
I recently spoke with a friend who oversees 26 restaurants, with plans to open 3 more this year. Normally, when I talk to operators opening venues, the discussion tends to turn to construction delays, the price of raw materials, city permitting issues, or health and liquor license approvals. This conversation did not go in that direction.
“At one property, I only have 3 of 8 managers hired, at another space, I have 2 of 7 hired. I’m doing 4 to 6 interviews a day, and maybe one in every 50 works out. We haven’t even gotten to the point of hiring hourly staff yet. It’s not good, mind you, I have a recruiting team that vets everyone before they even get to me.”
It’s for this reason that companies like Chipotle are leaning into AI to begin the hiring process. It’s a game-changer for large operators, especially when it comes to hourly employees and multi-unit operators. It can speed things up and help with filtering candidates. Right now, though, I don’t think it applies to small operators and definitely should not be used for management-level positions—apologies to my friend desperately searching for managers. For small operators, I’m not sure it makes sense yet.
The platform also isn’t without its questions, particularly around the security of its data collection. For now, I’m in a “wait and see” camp, curious to see how AI develops. At best, it will help speed the hiring and onboarding process, but it will never replace the human factor in hiring decisions.
Entree Priced Desserts
The Headline: “The Final Frontier of Rising Menu Prices? $30 Dessert. Restaurants are supersizing dessert — with prices to match"
The Source: Eater
What You Need to Know:
Much like the $26 “boozeflation” cocktails that have now become standard around the city, entree-sized prices have come for the final frontier of the menu: desserts. It’s the $30 meringue with rhubarb at Sailor in Fort Greene or the $39 strawberry cobbler with chamomile ice cream at Stissing House, an upstate destination. But there’s more to it than just an outrageous price tag. As restaurants try to stay afloat amidst the rising cost of, well, everything, outsized, high-priced desserts have become a way to stand out.
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Increasingly, showstopping desserts that surprise and delight are just one more way to bring in more business, whether it’s tableside service or larger portions, and set a restaurant apart in a crowded dining landscape.
“I think it’s really hard for restaurants that don’t have pastry teams to produce really good, elevated pastry desserts,” says Wurtz. “I would almost rather not have dessert, because why send something out that you wouldn’t be proud of?”
Size isn’t always the differentiating factor in higher dessert prices. At the Dynamo Room in Midtown, a chocolate tart is $34.95 because of a caviar dollop. “It’s definitely a bit of a splurge, and the pairing is unusual by U.S. standards, but people order it and are pleasantly surprised,” says Jaime Young, co-founder at Sunday Hospitality.
Still, some chefs see the oversized hit of sweetness as a respite for everything going on in the world. “Desserts offer joy and pleasure, and a celebratory moment,” says Thomas of King restaurant.
Our Take:
I’m going to preface this entire take by stating that the New York City dining experience is a beast unlike the majority of cities in the United States. It has its own dining rules and, let's be honest, everything is more expensive. But this needs to be discussed, because NYC is also a trendsetter, and chefs and operators from across the globe go there for inspiration. So, it’s a foregone conclusion that we will see this trend in smaller markets, and in some larger markets, it’s already begun.
Generally, desserts fall a little under the pricing of an appetizer, and oftentimes, a table will order one dessert to share. When this happens, you have a table that is going to stay longer, but you’re not really extracting much more revenue. If you are in a busy place, that extra time a table stays to share one dessert equates to lost sales on another table, at least temporarily.
So, this idea of the extravagant dessert offers respite from this. It also provides something else: curiosity and the wow factor. On one hand, you have guests who may question, “What’s a $45 dessert look like?” and so they order it. On the other hand, many of these desserts carry a wow factor; they are extravagant to justify the price. It may be the ingredients, it may be the presentation—many times it’s both. Some of the earliest progenitors of the "extravagant dessert" were flambés, like bananas foster.
There’s a caveat: These items can be great tools, but they need to be used properly, in the right place, and with alternative items on the menu that aren’t egregiously expensive. Though it does allow you to price the other desserts slightly higher than your average dessert because any dessert looks cheap compared to a $30 dessert.
ICE and the Food Chain
The Headline: “ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?”
The Source: New York Times
What You Need to Know:
For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.
It had been almost three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory’s door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification — part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer.
Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations.
Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of “stealing American jobs.” But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 positions. Almost every one of the company’s new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant.
“It’s terrible for everyone,” Moreno said. “I’ve seen whole companies go under after a raid. The supply chain stalls. Beef prices go up. Consumers pay more.”
Our Take:
This is just one of the stories regarding what’s happening at the starting base of our food chain. It’s happening on farms that grow our food, at ranches that raise the livestock that provide milk, meat, and eggs.
I’m not going to get into the politics, ethics, or humanitarian consequences of what’s happening, but I will talk about the economic impact.
We would be foolish to think that this won’t affect the price of food in this country. As tariffs drive up the price of imported produce, labor issues and supply chain constraints will drive up the price of homegrown products. Restaurants have been strapped with inflation concerns since the pandemic. This will only exacerbate those pressures.
Another chokepoint since the pandemic has been labor, and while this article specifically discusses a very specific subset of the food production chain, the main target is the same subset of workers that powers a large chunk of the hospitality workforce: migrants. Contrary to what policymakers are saying, those being cut off from Medicaid will NOT be taking up these jobs.
The alarm bells are being rung on all fronts. We might not feel it in our purchase orders, or our payrolls yet, but there will come a point where it will. It might be a month, it might be six months. But if policy and enforcement continue, rest assured it will happen, and it will take a policy shift, as well as a significant amount of time, to correct.