AWARDS

2021 Top Women in Restaurant Technology Awards

MASTERMINDS BEHIND THE BIGGEST AND MOST SUCCESSFUL RESTAURANT TECHNOLOGY ADDITIONS AT FAZOLI’S, JERSEY MIKE’S AND QDOBA ARE AMONG THE FIFTH ANNUAL

CLASS OF AWARD HONOREES. BY ANNA WOLFE

Hospitality Technology’s Top Women in Restaurant Technology Awards, now in its fifth year, recognize women who are making their mark in a male-dominated industry. In the coming weeks we will be profiling each of the 10 honorees in-depth on hospitalitytech.com/topwomen21. Here is a preview of this year’s class of honorees, which include women from both restaurant brands and technology solution providers.

transformation, innovation, and creativity for the restaurant industry,” says Kathy Alacaras, who joined Eureka as Director of IT in early 2020. She spearheaded the launch of the restaurant’s first online ordering platform and a new contactless ordering service model.

Safety and necessity drove consumers to embrace online ordering, but consumer demand for convenience will make online ordering part of everyday life.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT Johanna Miner

IT Manager for Fazoli’s System Management

In 2020, Johanna Miner was instrumental in Fazoli’s strategic shift to drive-thru. In less than seven days, she implemented drivethru tablets and launched curbside. After utilizing drive-thru timers and adjusting oven temps and airflow, all without compromising on quality, the brand saw record low drive-thru service times.

Miner also managed and led the launch of Fazoli’s virtual brands. All these initiatives allowed the brand to continue providing outstanding customer service and added to the brand’s overall success.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Jerilyn Quintanilla

Director Restaurant Systems at Qdoba Restaurants

2020 was a huge year for Qdoba. Quintanilla and her team implemented an entirely new website and mobile app. This was critical to complete integration with third-party delivery partners and to launch curbside chainwide. Qdoba also rolled out EMV, which was planned in 2020 but accelerated due to COVID-19.

This rollout provided not only a touchless experience, but also increased security and reduced PCI scope. Quintanilla and her team also completed the successful rollout of a POS upgrade and kitchen display systems.

INNOVATOR

Kathy Alcaras

Director of IT, Eureka Restaurant Group “2020 was definitely the year of

INNOVATOR

Tana Davila

Chief Marketing Officer for P.F. Chang’s

Chief Marketing Officer Tana Davila continues to lead and refine the strategic roadmap for off-premises dining that she started seven years ago. Off-premises has grown during her tenure by +$220M.

Davila says she’s most proud of the digital technology investment choices she has made at P.F. Chang’s. “Thanks to our consumer insights, we recognized where the marketplace was headed earlier than many of our peers. We’ve built a datadriven digital ecosystem and online ordering engine that has propelled growth for our business and created a positive experience for our guests,” she explains.

INNOVATOR

Robyn Kesler

Sr. Director of IT at Tupelo Honey Café

At Tupelo Honey Café, Robyn Kessler has orchestrated several impactful objectives in 2020 including a 2-week pivot to launch takeout and curbside.

“We have since realized that as opposed to the 3% takeout business that we generated preCOVID, we have the capacity to earn 30% in the post-COVID environment,” Kessler explains. In addition to takeout/curbside, Kessler changed Tupelo Honey Café’s payment platform to offer contactless payment. Originally a safety measure, it now improves turn times by 10%. Plus, she led an entire back-office system replacement that improved cost of goods by nearly 2%.

INNOVATOR

Sakshi Tulsian

Co-Founder, POSist Technologies

Sakshi Tulsian oversees the revenue growth and leads all the global goto-market efforts for this cloud-based POS software company. She also has been a key contributor in building the technology roadmap. In the past year, POSist launched three key solutions to assist restaurants: a QR code ordering solution, online ordering for restaurants and cloud kitchens to enable the direct-to-consumer channel, and the POSist Marketplace, which offers 150+ integrations with a single-click activation.

In the future, Tulsian expects to see more cloud kitchens as restaurants continue to launch virtual, delivery-only brands. Direct-to-consumer channels including websites, social media and messaging platforms that allow restaurants to set up their own digital storefront will become more mainstream; these allow restaurants more control over the guest experience and open new revenue streams.

INNOVATOR

Mingming Zhang

Head of data science at Wisely

Mingming Zhang is responsible for Wisely’s suite of algorithms that accurately predict the wait times at thousands of restaurants and for its proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) software that annotates the sentiment of aggregated online customer reviews for Wisely’s restaurant partners.

Zhang is passionate about NLP technology and sees it as the future in not only retail but also in restaurants. For example, Amazon is “able to extract information from interactions with you and help you find what you’ll like,” says Zhang. “The future will be about personalized guest experience to make life more tailored to your unique preferences — such a system truly makes everyone’s life better, for the customer and the business.”

RISING STAR

Brandy Anderson

Vice President of Operations, Valyant AI

At Valyant AI, a company that allows drive-thrus to take orders using only artificial intelligence, Brandy Anderson manages Valyant AI’s platform for transcribing audio to train its speech-to-text models. Improving the platform’s capabilities allows Valyant AI to achieve high accuracy − even in a noisy drivethru environment.

Anderson is passionate about using technology to help people. “I love working in a field that’s endlessly interesting and challenging and has the potential for creating widespread and positive impacts,” Anderson says. “Especially in the restaurant industry, I think there is a lot we can do to make things better for employees and for customers.”

RISING STAR

Sheryl Hoskins

GM of Global Hospitality, LightspeedPOS

During 2020, Sheryl Hoskins was able to quickly pivot the company with new technology innovations, maintain employee morale, and then lead Upserve through an acquisition by LightspeedPOS.

Hoskins, who is now the GM of Global Hospitality of LightspeedPOS, started her career in technology, software technology that is, at General Electric. “I have always had a passion for helping communities through technology, particularly small businesses,” Hoskins says.

RISING STAR

Victoria McCormick

Database Administrator at Jersey Mike’s Subs

Vikki McCormick’s coworkers say she touches every aspect of the company including the loyalty program, POS, mobile app and even fundraising. Plus, she is credited with building the database architecture that is the backbone of Jersey Mike’s.

From a very early age, McCormick had an interest in as well as role models in technology. “My mom used to build mainframes and was the first woman in tech that I admired,” she says. “I enjoy solving problems by building high-tech solutions.” HT