It's Baton Rouge: Out To Lunch

In every society on earth, for probably millions of years, humans have come up with communal methods of eating that reflect their particular human condition. In our world we’ve married eating with capitalism. We’ve devised a method of paying  other people to prepare meals for us in spaces we call restaurants. As our communities have gotten bigger and restaurants have proliferated, the competition among them has gotten more serious and – as it is when any market gets saturated with competitive choice -  prices come down to attract customers. Keeping a restaurant open requires more than just the ability to cook good food. For example, the biggest restaurant chains in the world, if you ask a food critic, have the worst food. In this kind of topsy-turvy business, what do you do to keep a restaurant profitable? Do you stick with quality and hope you find an appreciative market? Or do you turn to big data, AI and IT systems designed for the restaurant business? Stephanie Riegel puts this