I've become convinced that restaurants don't have a loyalty problem.
They have a memory problem.
That realization didn't come from one conversation. It came from three. Over the past month I found myself talking with Ryan Volberg from Guestologie , listening to a keynote from restaurant marketer 🍔🍟🍕🎙 David "Rev" Ciancio , and exchanging ideas with Jasper Svenson , CEO of Serv Technologies . None of them were trying to solve the same problem. Ryan was talking about guest recognition inside the restaurant. Jasper was talking about giving the drive-thru something it has never really had before: memory. Rev was talking about restaurant marketing.
Three different conversations.
Three different businesses.
One conclusion.
Restaurants have become exceptionally good at collecting customer data while remaining surprisingly forgetful when the customer actually shows up.
Once I saw it, I started seeing it everywhere.
Restaurants have incredible memories. They know exactly how many tomatoes are sitting in the walk-in. They know food cost to the penny. They know labor percentages before the dinner rush starts. They know ticket times, inventory counts, sales mix, voids, discounts, and which fryer starts making concerning noises every Thursday afternoon. Every restaurant also has at least one report nobody has willingly opened in months, yet everyone agrees is absolutely essential to the success of civilization.
Then one of the restaurant's best customers walks through the front door.
"Hi! Is this your first time with us?"
We've built an industry capable of tracking every tomato while occasionally misplacing Steve.
Ryan told me a story that has been living rent-free in my head ever since. He and his wife had a standing Friday night date at the same restaurant. By his estimate, they'd been there around fifty times. Fifty visits. At that point you're no longer trying out a restaurant. You're paying part of the electric bill. One evening the hostess greeted them warmly and asked if it was their first visit.
She wasn't rude.
She wasn't inattentive.
She wasn't bad at hospitality.
She had no way of knowing.
That's the part I couldn't shake.
Nobody failed.
The system failed.
The restaurant industry loves talking about loyalty, but I think we've been asking the wrong question. We spend an enormous amount of time trying to create loyal guests when maybe we should be asking how to recognize the loyal guests we already have.
VIPs don't appear by accident. Compare your 3-visit guests to your 5-visit guests, and your 5-visit guests to your 10-visit guests. Loyalty leaves clues long before it becomes obvious.
That distinction sounds small until you look at where restaurants invest their energy.
We're addicted to acquisition.
We launch limited-time offers, buy social ads, optimize search rankings, chase influencers, debate TikTok trends, and spend countless hours trying to manufacture the next viral moment. None of those things are bad. Most of them work. Restaurants need new guests, and attracting them has always been part of the job.
The problem begins when acquisition becomes the strategy instead of one piece of the strategy.
Rev Ciancio shared a statistic during his keynote that changes the conversation. Depending on the concept, somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of first-time guests never come back. Most marketers hear that number and immediately ask how to increase second visits.
Rev suggested asking a different question.
Instead of trying to change everyone who visits once, study the people who already chose you. Compare your ten-visit guests with your five-visit guests. Compare your five-visit guests with your three-visit guests. Somewhere inside those differences are the behaviors that create regulars. Those are patterns you can influence because they already exist.
Ryan arrived at the same destination from the operational side of the business. Restaurants lose roughly thirty-six percent of their guests every year. Nearly half of American diners changed their favorite restaurant during the last twelve months. Favorite restaurant. Not the place they stopped because it was next to the highway. The place where birthdays happen. The place where they recommend friends. The place that became part of their routine.
Across the industry, that's about $188 billion changing addresses every year. The revenue isn't disappearing. It's finding another restaurant that gave people a reason to come back.
Then Jasper filled in the last piece of the puzzle.
He pointed out that for many quick-service brands, the drive-thru represents the majority of revenue. It's also the place with the shortest memory. A guest can drive through three mornings a week, order the same breakfast every Friday for years, and still arrive at the speaker as a complete stranger. Every visit starts from zero because the drive-thru has never really had an identity layer. It remembers the order. It doesn't remember the person.
That observation changes how you think about loyalty.
We keep using the words loyalty and rewards as though they're interchangeable.
They aren't.
Rewards influence transactions.
Recognition builds relationships.
A free appetizer might earn another visit. Recognition changes how someone feels about coming back. Ryan referenced research showing that status; the feeling of being known is one of the strongest drivers of loyalty. Better yet, it costs almost nothing. Greeting someone by name is cheaper than giving away dessert, and people remember it far longer.
When you step back, all three conversations point toward the same future.
Restaurants don't need more customer information.
They need better customer memory.
There's an important difference.
Most brands already have enough data to understand who their best guests are. They have loyalty systems, reservation platforms, point-of-sale data, online ordering, mobile apps, and CRM platforms. The challenge isn't collecting another field in another database. The challenge is making that information useful in the five seconds that matter most.
Recognition isn't a perk. It's a growth strategy. Whether it's fine dining, the drive-thru, or anywhere in between, VIP means one thing: Very Important for Profits.
When the guest walks through the front door.
Or pulls up to the speaker.
Hospitality has never been about proving how much you know about someone. It's about making them feel known.
That's why I don't think the next evolution of restaurant loyalty is another points program.
It's recognition.
It's making the experience feel like it has a memory.
Technology doesn't create hospitality any more than a piano creates music. Put the greatest concert piano in the world in my living room and all you're getting is a very expensive place to stack mail. The instrument matters, but it still depends on the person sitting in front of it.
The best restaurant technology works the same way.
It doesn't replace a great cashier, host, server, or manager.
It gives them a better memory.
The restaurants that separate themselves over the next decade won't necessarily have the biggest advertising budgets or the funniest social media accounts. They'll be the ones that make guests feel recognized without asking the guests to do more work. They'll remember relationships with the same precision they already remember inventory.
Because here's the irony I can't get out of my head.
Most restaurants know exactly how many tomatoes are sitting in the cooler.
The next generation of great restaurants will know that Ryan just walked through the front door.
And they'll know he's probably going to order the ribeye.
I'll bet on the restaurant that remembers Ryan.
