The final foodservice frontier
This mobile shift has taken digital ordering to its final foodservice frontier: the majority of the restaurant industry represented by coffee and fast food brands. Many thought that digital ordering for coffee — an extremely perishable product — was crazy in digital ordering's early days. Not so today: Starbucks just rolled out its "Mobile Order & Pay" initiative in 20 more states, following successful market tests in Portland and Seattle. In the spirit of the observed exponential growth curve of technology, some suggest that the mobile-led digital ordering of today will propel digital ordering to over 50 percent of all transactions at non-pizza restaurants by 2022 - that is, in half the time that it took pizza restaurants to reach 50 percent digital.