Latest / From Kitchen to C-Suite™ / PULSE! Today’s Hotel, Restaurant & Bar Industry News Deep Dive | 08/20/2026 Episode
Transcript
- Brad Peters: Welcome to Pulse, today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news. A deep dive from HRB Universal, navigating your industry. With insights from leaders, imagine standing outside in freezing twenty-eight degree weather, holding an iPad, trying to project genuine warmth and hospitality while handing a bag of waffle fries to a driver. All while a billion dollar algorithm calculates exactly how many seconds you have. Before your location is flagged as inefficient. ⁓ man, yeah. Welcome to Pulse Today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news deep dive brought to you by HRB Universal. We are delivering the critical updates, trend analyses, and operational intelligence you need to stay ahead in hospitality. It's great to be here because that opening image you just painted, I mean, it perfectly captures the friction we're seeing right now across the entire sector. It really does, yeah. We are watching this massive structural transformation. And ⁓ the industry is desperately trying to mandate this premium human connection, but they're doing it while actively, you know, dismantling the very infrastructure that supports the humans expected to provide that connection. Right. And that is exactly our mission for this deep dive today. We are tearing into a massive stack of sources to figure out how this industry is fundamentally restructuring itself. ⁓ literally in real time. Exactly. We've got the twenty twenty six projections from the National Restaurant Association. We've got mid year operator data from Restaurant 365, plus, you know, deep strategic reports from Alex Partners, KPMG, and EY. It's a lot of data. It's a ton. But we aren't just looking at spreadsheets today. We're crossing all that data with the reality on the ground. And Well, in the air, actually. Right, the airlines. Yeah, we're looking at labor disputes on Alaska Airlines, those viral working conditions of fast food chains, and ⁓ the the absolute upheaval being caused by the GLP one weight loss drug revolution. So we're covering hotels, restaurants, bars, and a little bit of sea store fluff in there too. Which is fascinating because the goal here is to map out the interconnected tensions. If you look at the industry from a distance, it just seems chaotic. Yeah, completely chaotic. But when you synthesize these reports, a very clear narrative emerges. You have this incredible demand for high touch service, and it's colliding with a corporate refusal to invest in labor. Right. And so you get this frantic rush to use artificial intelligence and real estate consolidation to bridge a gap that honestly might actually be unbridgeable. Okay, let's unpack this because to really understand where we are, we have to start with the core tension. And I'm calling it the service labor paradox. I like that. Right. Companies are aggressively demanding these high-touch premium experiences from their staff, but they are completely starving the workforce of the resources needed to deliver them. Yeah. So how do we get to a place where corporate expectations are just so divorced from reality? Well, to understand the mechanism behind that, you really have to look at how the pandemic permanently rewired corporate financial models. Okay. Think back to the early 2020s. Survival mode became the baseline, right? ⁓ absolutely. Skeleton crews everywhere. Exactly. Restaurants, airlines, they ran on absolute skeleton crews. They simplified their menus, they reduced touch points, and they just minimized overhead to keep the lights on. Just to survive. Right. But here is the critical part. As demand returned and as revenue targets started growing again, corporate finance departments looked at those minimal labor models and ⁓ Decided they weren't temporary survival tactics anymore. They made them permanent. Yes. They decided they were the new permanent standard. They baked those bare minimum labor costs right into their long-term financial projections. So they essentially said, you know, we survived with half the staff. Let's just make that the rule going forward. Precisely. But now here we are in 2026 and the customer wants the premium service back. And management is demanding the staff provide it without actually giving them their co-workers back. Yeah. I want to look at the skies for a perfect example of this. Let's talk about the news with Alaska Airlines. ⁓ this is the perfect case study. Right. So Alaska Airlines is pushing hard into long haul international routes using their new Boeing seven eighty sevens. We're talking Seattle to Rome, London, Tokyo. Big long flights. Exactly. Now, when they negotiated with the flight attendance union, they signed off on a base train service flow for the main cabin. Can you break down what that means for Operators listening. Sure. So for those who don't know airline operational terminology, a train service flow is essentially the most streamlined utilitarian way to serve a cabin. Like an assembly line. Basically, you roll the cart from the front of the cabin to the back, you serve the meal, you serve the drinks, you collect the trash, and you are done. It is a highly choreographed routine and it's designed specifically to match a very minimal cruise size. Right. Okay. But after the ink dried on that union agreement. Management started loading up the main cabin with premium offerings. Right. The extras. I'm talking alcohol for purchase, expanded beverage options, ice cream, and the absolute kicker warm cookies. Warm cookies. That is actually the perfect illustration of how corporate directives break down in physical reality. How so? Well, on a spreadsheet, adding a cookie to a flight seems completely privial, right? Yeah, it's just a cookie. It's an upsell. It's a surprise and delight moment for the passenger. But in the actual physical space of an airplane galley, adding a warm item changes the entire physics of the service flow. Because of the heat. Yes. It requires a flight attendant to first of all use the limited oven space, then they have to time the heating perfectly. ⁓ Then they have to use tongs to individually plate and hand out the item, wait for the passenger to accept it, and then this is the big one, do an entirely separate run through the cabin to manage the resulting trash. It shatters the thirty minute service window. Completely shatters it. You cannot do that with a basic train service crew. But when the union raised the issue, you know, after a thirty day observation period, they pointed out that it was physically unsustainable to execute all these extra touch points with the current staffing levels. Right. And management didn't renegotiate the crew size. They didn't pull the cookies. Their reported response to the union was simply make it work. Make it work. Make it work. That phrase, make it work, it is the defining mantra of the industry right now. It represents this total transfer of operational friction from the corporate office directly onto the frontline worker. So what's the so what here for a manager or an operator listening? The so what is that you cannot scale premium hospitality on a survival mode labor budget. If you try, the system breaks. And the actionable takeaway for leadership is that you have to audit your service promises. If you were going to introduce a high touch item like a warm cookie or a tableside pour, you have to attach labor hours to that specific initiative or you have to cut a different touch point to balance it out. That makes total sense. But ⁓ it's not just happening at thirty five thousand feet. Let's go back to the ground. Let's go back to that TikTok I mentioned earlier about Chick fil A. ⁓ the winter one. Yes. You have these employees standing outside taking orders face to face in twenty eight degree weather. Yeah. Now Chick fil A's corporate strategy for years. Has been explicitly about bringing hospitality out to the drive-thru. Right. They don't want you yelling into a static filled speaker box. They want a human being making eye contact with you. Well, because taking the order upstream, physically walking out to the cars, it breaks the physical bottleneck of the drive-thru lane. Yes. It significantly increases their throughput and their revenue. Exactly. It is brilliant for the bottom line. Yeah. But the TikTok showed the reality of that strategy. You had Workers shivering on the asphalt with nothing but a tiny portable space heater. Yeah, not a great look. The public backlash was severe because it visually exposed the paradox. The brand is demanding premium hospitality from the worker, but refusing to adequately protect or resource that same worker. And if we look at the data from the twenty twenty six mid year report by Restaurant three sixty five, it proves this isn't just a few isolated incidents of poor management. Right. This is a systemic strategy. Now, Restaurant 365 is a major management software platform. So they have unparalleled visibility into what operators are actually doing in their back offices. So you see the real numbers. Exactly. And their data shows that finding and retaining staff has surged back to the number one challenge for restaurant operators. It's sitting at thirty-three percent, which is a massive fifteen point spike from just six months prior. So operators are openly admitting That finding and keeping human beings to run their businesses is their biggest existential threat. Yes. You would assume they're pouring capital into fixing that. You would assume that. But the data reveals the exact opposite. Really? Yeah. Financial investment in what the industry calls staff enhancements, meaning better pay, improved benefits, retention bonuses, or simply hiring more people has plummeted to a three year low. Wow. Only sixteen percent of operators listed staff enhancement as a top investment priority. That is wild. Okay, let's unpack this. This feels like trying to run a top-tier smartphone on 1% battery, but you're insisting on streaming a 4K movie with the screen brightness turned all the way up. That's exactly it. You cannot promise the customer a 4K premium experience like warm cookies on a flight or face to face service in freezing weather while completely draining the power source, the battery is gonna die. Well, to build on your analogy, the battery doesn't just die, it permanently degrades. The operators know the battery is dying, but they are making a calculated gamble. They are actively deferring their people investments, hoping that the revenue generating activities, the upsold cookies, the faster drive-thru times will pad their margins enough to survive before the workforce completely burns out. The actionable takeaway here for the C suite is pretty glaring, right? Absolutely. You cannot defer human maintenance forever. You have to align your capital expenditure with your stated operational hurdles. If retention is your number one problem, it has to be your number one investment, not an afterthought. The irony here is that while AI is perfectly predicting how to optimize a menu to squeeze out every drop of revenue, it completely ignores the human limit. Which brings us to the second block of our deep dive, the AI and tech pivot. This is where the money is actually going. Right. If these operators are publicly admitting that staffing is their biggest crisis, but they are refusing to invest in staff enhancements, where exactly is their money flowing? It is flowing aggressively into technology, specifically artificial intelligence and operational automation. Naturally. The logic is simple for them. If you refuse to pay humans to solve your labor shortage, you pay algorithms. And the restaurant three sixty five data on this is just staggering. AI adoption in back office operations, things like reporting and analytics, it jumped to sixty-nine percent of operators in just a six month window. Which is huge. That is a nearly threefold increase almost overnight. And we need to clarify what AI adoption actually looks like in this context. Yeah, please do. It's not a robot flipping burgers in the kitchen. It is dynamic menu optimization where the AI changes the digital menu board pricing based on the weather, the time of day, and current inventory levels. Super smart pricing. Exactly. It's also algorithmic scheduling, where the software analyzes historical foot traffic and Microshift's employees so that not a single human hour is wasted. Wow. And it's predictive inventory forecasting that orders supplies without a manager ever checking the walk-in freezer. The marketing tech is moving just as aggressively. The twenty twenty six restaurant marketing trends report explicitly outlines how AI powered personalization has become the foundation of the industry. ⁓ yeah, mass emails are dead. We're completely past the era of blasting out a mass email with a generic ten percent off coupon. Right. AI is now tracking predictive ordering behaviors. It knows you buy a coffee every Tuesday at 8 AM, so it segments you and targets you with a hyperspecific automated push notification at 7.45 AM designed to maximize your spend. And operators are seeing an immediate financial return on this. The report notes that 61% of AI users are reporting a direct reduction in labor costs. Here's where gets really interesting, but also highly suspicious to me. Okay. Let's look at the Alex Partners report. For context, Alex Partners is a massive global consulting firm that specializes in corporate turnarounds. Right. Their entire thesis right now is that the 30 year legacy labor model, you know, the way restaurants and hospitality have staffed themselves since the nineteen nineties, is officially dead. But their report comes with a massive caveat. Yes. They argue that operators who use AI solely as a tool for cost reduction are ultimately going to lose in the marketplace. Wait, why? Because cost reduction seems to be exactly what that sixty one percent of operators are cheering for. They are thrilled to be cutting labor costs. Because Alex Partners makes the case that you cannot cut your way to growth. They argue the true winners of this tech revolution will be the operators who automate the back office, the inventory, the scheduling, the data entry, and then take the capital and the human hours they just saved and redeploy that talent directly back to the guest experience. So reinvesting it. Exactly. The thesis is that AI should free up human beings to be more hospitable, to actually connect with a guest, rather than just replacing the human entirely. I have a really hard time believing that is actually happening on the ground. We're skeptical. Highly skeptical. If sixty-one percent of operators are successfully saving on labor costs by plugging in AI, are they really taking those savings and putting a second flight attendant on the 787 beverage cart? Probably no. Are they taking the money they saved on a scheduling algorithm and building a heated structure for their drive-thru workers? Or are they just pocketing that margin and showing it to their shareholders while the skeleton crew continues to freeze? The evidence strongly points to the latter. Yeah. The temptation to use AI as a permanent crutch for understaffing is almost irresistible for a CFO. ⁓ I'm sure it is. When an algorithm can write the schedule so perfectly that you only have the absolute bare minimum of bodies on the floor at any given second, you achieve maximum operational efficiency. But the fatal flaw in that thinking is confusing efficiency with hospitality. They are completely different things. Exactly. Efficiency is getting your food handed to you in forty-five seconds. Hospitality is feeling like the person handing it to you is actually acknowledging your existence rather than hyperventilating because they are managing three different delivery app tablets and a drive-thru window simultaneously. And so the actionable takeaway for managers here is crucial. If you automate a backhouse task, you must deliberately reassign those saved hours to a front house guest interaction. Right. Don't just erase the hours from the ledger. If you do, you become a vending machine. Not a hospitality brand. A vending machine. That is a great way to put it. And here is the twist. While operators are hyperfixated on optimizing the supply side, you know, squeezing every drop of efficiency out of their labor and their tech stack, the demand side is transforming in a way that AI cannot fix. Which brings us to block three. Yes. The actual biological makeup of the consumer is changing. This is the collision I find most fascinating. While the corporate tech teams are building algorithms to perfectly optimize the sale of high-margin junk food, a pharmaceutical innovation is actively rewiring the consumer's brain to reject it. Yep. We have to talk about the GLP one diet revolution. This is perhaps the most disruptive force in the food and beverage space in decades. By 2026, we have 15 million US adults actively taking GLP one medications, drugs like Ozempic and Wigovee. And we need to explain the mechanism here for anyone not deeply familiar, because it's not just a traditional diet. No, it's biological. Right. GLP1 drugs mimic a hormone that slows down digestion, so you physically feel full longer. But more importantly, they target the reward centers in the brain. They don't just suppress your appetite, they actively kill your impulse cravings. That distinction is critical. Yeah. It isn't just that people are eating smaller portions, it is that the psychological desire for hyperpalatable, ultra processed food is being muted. And that breaks the fundamental business model of massive segments of the industry. Look at the research from Cornell University Ennumerator. They tracked the massive spending shifts that occur when a household goes on these drugs. The numbers are staggering. Within six months, overall grocery spending drops by five point three percent. For high income households, it drops by over eight percent. And fast food spending takes an immediate eight percent hit. And if you drill down into the category winners and losers, it becomes an existential crisis for For convenience stores. This is the C store fluff we promised. Right. Salty snacks see an eleven percent drop. Energy drinks, heavily processed sweets, and alcohol all take massive hits. The data point that absolutely blew my mind was beef jerky. ⁓ yeah, the jerk beef jerky is a two billion dollar staple for the convenience store industry. Think about it. It is the ultimate checkout aisle impulse by. You are waiting in line, you see the shiny package, your brain's reward center lights up, and you grab it. Right. But because GLP 1s sever that impulse response, Circana data shows a 17% decline in monthly spending on dried meat snacks by GLP 1 users. The psychological architecture of the convenience store checkout line is being rendered obsolete. That is insane to think about. Convenience stores and fast food chains rely disproportionately on the high margin impulse buys of those ultra-processed foods. Yep. If a customer walks into a gas station to buy fuel, And they don't grab a bag of chips and a soda on the way out, the retailer's profit margin on that visit completely evaporates. GLP one is effectively a margin killer. And the massive food conglomerates are panicking. They are pivoting at lightning speed. Canagher is literally slapping GLP one friendly badges on their healthy choice frozen meals, actively marketing them as high protein, high fiber, and smaller portion sizes. They have to. Nestle didn't just tweak a product. They rolled out an entire brand called Vital Pursuit, specifically targeted at this demographic. Even the convenience stores you mentioned are tearing up their floor plans. They are ripping out traditional snack displays to push premium protein-infused smoothies and raw nuts. They are even stocking extra gum, breath mints, and digestive aids like Peptobismol right at the point of sale, explicitly to combat the specific side effects of GLP1 medications like dry mouth and gastrointestinal issues. The beverage menus at restaurants are undergoing the exact same overhaul. According to Restaurant three sixty five, about half of the operators out there are just burying their heads in the sand, assuming this is a fad. Which is a mistake. Big mistake. Yeah. Because the smart money is moving aggressively. Twenty six percent of operators are actively expanding their non alcoholic offerings, and eighteen percent are building out entirely new moptail menus. And we should explain the economics of a mocktail for the bar owners listening. Please do. From a margin perspective, mocktails are brilliant. You are taking flavored syrups, carbonated water, and elaborate garnishes, and you are pricing them similarly to a premium alcoholic cocktail. Right. It allows the restaurant to maintain their beverage profit margins while catering to a demographic that suddenly has zero biological desire to consume a high calorie IPA or sugary margarita. Okay, I have to push back on this entire panic though. Okay, let's hear it. The data also clearly shows that roughly sixty percent of people who start taking GLP1 drugs. Drop off the medication within a year. That is true. Either the out of pocket costs become too astronomical or the gastrointestinal side effects are just too miserable to sustain. Right. So are these massive global food conglomerates and restaurant chains massively overcorrecting? I mean, are they redesigning their entire supply chains and brand identities for a medication that has incredibly high user turnover? It is an incredibly high stakes gamble and consultants are heavily divided on it. Yeah. If a legacy brand completely overhauls its identity to become the GLP one friendly option, they risk alienating their core loyal customer base. Exactly. And if that GLP one user drops off the medication a year later and reverts to their old eating habits, the brand has essentially lost both demographics. Which is a disaster. However, the counter argument is that even if a user goes off the drug, a year of forced portion control and altered eating habits might permanently shift their baseline awareness of nutritional value. So the actionable takeaway for operators here is agility. Yes. You don't need to rename your bar, but you absolutely need to train your staff to upsell premium health products and mocktails to protect those margins. You have to adapt the impulse by to fit the new biology. Exactly, which transitions us perfectly into our fourth block. Strategic consolidation and real estate hacks. Right. Because put yourself in the shoes of a hospitality CEO right now. Okay. You are facing unpredictable consumer biology that might destroy your high margin impulse items. You have an absolute crisis in labor attention that you refuse to spend money on. Yeah. And your tech investments are making you efficient, but they aren't actually improving the guests' perception of your service. So how do you actually grow your bottom line in this environment? You stop trying to grow your customer base and you start hacking your real estate. Exactly. We are seeing a massive wave of strategic corporate consolidation and operational leverage plays. Let's look at the baseline numbers from the National Restaurant Association. They are projecting a jaw-dropping $1.55 trillion in sales for 2026. Huge number. Huge. If you just read the headline, it sounds like the industry is booming. But when you look at the underlying math. That massive number is overwhelmingly driven by inflation and aggressive menu price hikes. Right. The real inflation adjusted growth for the industry is a measly 1.3%. That 1.3% is the most critical metric we will discuss today. Why is that? It tells you that foot traffic is essentially flat. You cannot rely on a growing pool of customers to save your profit margins. If you can't build a new restaurant and expect a flood of new people to walk through the doors, You have to extract more value out of the physical footprint you already own. The real estate. Right. This is the concept of operating leverage. Aaron Operating leverage is basically asking the question you know, I can't make the pie any bigger, so how do I charge twice as much for the exact same slice? Yes. And that leads us to the wildest strategy we found in these reports. The dual brands solution. ⁓ this is fascinating. Dyne Brands, the parent company of AppleD's and IHOP, is rolling this out aggressively. By the end of 2026, they plan to have 80. Dual branded Applebee's and IHOP locations operating across the US. It is a radical reimagining of physical retail. It is. For roughly a one million dollar conversion cost. Dyne Brands takes a struggling single brand restaurant, for example, an Applebee's that sits empty all morning and early afternoon, and they graft an IHOP directly into the same building. It is a Frankenstein restaurant. Basically, yeah. It's wild to visualize. You walk through one shared front door, you look to the left. The dining room is decorated in red, and that's Applebee's. You look to the right, it's blue decor, and that's iHops. Right. They even created exclusive crossover menu items to bridge the gap, like a buffalo chicken omelet. But the illusion of choice in the dining room is masking a hyper-efficient industrial core in the back. Yeah, let's talk about the kitchen. They share one single kitchen, one point of sale system, and a completely cross-trained staff. By serving IHOP pancakes in the morning and Applebee's ribs at night from the exact same footprint, the CEO noted they are yielding one point five times more sales than a single branded unit with massive incremental profit margins. Wow. It is essentially a ghost kitchen with a dining room attached. We're seeing this exact same obsession with scale and platform control in the broader travel and hospitality world too. The KPMG report on mergers and acquisitions points out that while the total number of mergers is slowing down, the actual dollar value of the deals is surging. Right, they are making bigger bets. Buyers are no longer taking risks on small, quirky independent ventures. They are hoarding their capital to buy massive established platforms where they can instantly apply this kind of ruthless operating leverage. It is entirely about acquiring assets where you already own the customer data and where you have clear, credible pathways to slash redundant overhead. You buy a competing hotel chain, you fire their entire back office accounting and HR teams, you plug their properties into your existing AI software, and your margins instantly expand. ⁓ but what does this mean for the worker? ⁓ We are circling right back to where we started with the service labor paradox. We are. Think about the physical and cognitive reality of that dual-branded Applebee's iHop kitchen. ⁓ man, the stress. If a cross-trained line cook is suddenly responsible for perfectly executing IHOP pancakes and basting Applebee's ribs simultaneously, managing two completely different ingredient ecosystems, two different prep stations and different ticket times. Yeah. Aren't we just recreating the exact same make it work nightmare that the Alaska Airlines flight attendants are protesting? It is the exact same dynamic. Corporate leadership views the dual brand model as a brilliant real estate and efficiency hack. But from the perspective of the frontline worker, it is simply a doubling of their cognitive load and physical labor without a corresponding doubling of their paycheck. The friction of that stagnant 1.3% industry growth is being pushed entirely onto the shoulders of the labor force. And the actionable takeaway for managers here is if you are going to consolidate operations. You have to acknowledge the cognitive tax on your staff. Yes. You have to simplify the menu or boost the pay, because you can't just mash two jobs together and expect the same output. Exactly. Which brings us to the final fatal flaw in this entire master plan. Let's do it. Block five. The loyalty and experience gap. Ultimately, all of these corporate gymnastics, the AI algorithms, micro scheduling shifts, the high margin mocktails. The Buffalo chicken omelets in a dual-branded dining room, they only work if the customer actually feels dollied enough to come back. And this is where the house of cards starts to wobble. Big time. Recent data indicates a severe disconnect between what corporate thinks they are providing and what the customer is actually experiencing. The 2026 EY Loyalty Market Study highlights this beautifully. EY, one of the major global accounting and consulting firms, calls it the gap between performance and experience. Right. And the EY report identifies two massive gaps we need to talk about. Okay. First, the speed to value gap. This happens when the process of earning a reward feels vastly slower and more tedious to the consumer than the effort and money they are putting in. I feel this all the time. We all do. Think about the last time you opened a coffee shop app or a hotel loyalty program. You've spent $200 over the course of a month, you've allowed them to track all your data. And the app triumphantly offers you a free extra shot of espresso. Right. It's insulting. It doesn't make you feel valued, it makes you feel like you are being managed. And what's the second gap? The second gap is the visibility gap. This is when the brand might actually have a great value proposition or reward waiting in the system, but their technology or their frontline staff fails to surface it to the customer effectively. How does that look in practice? Imagine a top-tier VIP member walking into a hotel. If the understaffed front desk agent doesn't acknowledge their status because the property management system is lagging, or because the agent is so overwhelmed covering three different roles that they forget to check the screen, the millions of dollars spent developing that loyalty program have completely failed. It's like being in a relationship where one person is doing all these nice things in secret, like quietly pick the Netflix bill or getting the oil changed in your car. But the other person just wants them to do the dishes so they can actually see they care. That is a perfect analogy. If the customer cannot see or feel the value immediately, in real time, your back-end loyalty program is completely useless. To synthesize everything we've discussed today, when the hospitality industry deliberately removes the human touch to save on labor costs, they are forced to rely on digital apps and loyalty tech to make the customer feel special. Right. But an app cannot provide hospitality. It can provide a discount, it can offer a seamless transaction, but it cannot smile, you cannot anticipate an unstated need, and it cannot read a room. No, it can't. If you strip away the human element, your technology has to be utterly flawless. If that technology fails to deliver an immediate visible reward, the entire illusion of hospitality collapses. And when that illusion collapses, you are just left standing in the freezing cold holding a portable space heater. Wondering why you are paying a premium price for a miserable experience. The industry is attempting to mathematically engineer its way out of a fundamentally human endeavor, and the cracks are showing everywhere. Wow. Okay, rapid fire wrap up. The industry in 2026 is totally trapped. They are squeezed between sky high consumer expectations for premium seamless experiences and a rock bottom corporate willingness to invest in the humans required to provide them. Yep. To survive the margin crush of flat foot traffic, they were throwing AI algorithms at the back office, they are hacking their real estate by violently mashing brands together into ghost kitchens with dining rooms, and they are scrambling in real time to figure out how to feed a population whose very biology and cravings are being altered by GLP one medications. It is a precarious high wire balancing act. And the tension between efficiency and genuine hospitality is only going to escalate. So I want to leave you with a mind bending hypothetical to ponder on your own. We talked extensively about AI getting incredibly good at predicting what we want, and we've talked about GLP1's fundamentally changing what our bodies actually crave. What happens in the very near future when our smart restaurant apps sync directly to our health profiles and biometric data start pre-ordering our GLP one friendly meals for us before we even walk in the door? Will the ultimate corporate quest for total frictionless efficiency finally kill the spontaneity, the messiness, and the joy of dining out entirely? The Recipe for Results Podcast Extra, fast, high impact extras packed with operational tactics and actionable solutions. And 86ing the bad habits, cutting out systemic operational flaws, bad leadership habits, and inefficient practices across hotels, bars, and restaurants. So much good stuff. This podcast is supported by the generous commitment of our sponsors, and we extend a special thank you to HRB Universal. Their dedication to providing comprehensive resources and promoting excellence is key to empowering professionals across the culinary and hospitality industries. Absolutely. We also want to acknowledge the Plate and Poor Collective Equity Partner Program. This initiative exemplifies a true commitment to fostering shared success and equitable growth within the food and beverage sector, helping entrepreneurs build a more inclusive and thriving future. It's a fantastic program. The journey to the C suite is fueled by innovation, relentless dedication, and the right network. We encourage you to engage with the resources and support offered by our sponsors. For details on how to connect with HRB Universal and a Pleaton Poor Collective Equity Partner Program, visit HRBUNI.com or search HRB Universal online. Check them out. We look forward to having you join us for our next episode where we will continue to explore captivating topics designed to elevate your career and entrepreneurial drive. Stay ahead with Pulse Today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news deep dive brought to you by HRB Universal. Downright miss a beat. Whether you're commuting to work or unwindy on the couch, we've got your industry insights covered. We sure do. On the go. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, Audible, iHeartRadio, Deezer, or visit HRBuni.com, mobile app. Take the HRB network with you everywhere by getting our mobile web app at hrbuni.com/slash APP. Big screen experience. Level up your show viewing, stream pulse directly on TV via Roku or Amazon Fire TV. Until next time, Keep innovating and striving for excellence.