unPLUG is far more than just a platform allowing restaurants to offer their own direct digital ordering channels. unPLUG is a purpose-built ordering experience designed to enhance the human aspect of dining.

Restaurants play a crucial role in society. Not only do they aid in the basic necessity of eating, they also serve as a basic pillar of human connection. There’s only one social engagement that’s constant throughout our entire lives: engaging over a meal.

The rise of digital ordering has led most ordering experiences to detract from the opportunity to form a connection. It’s under this premise that we’ve built unPLUG. We design ordering experiences that create an elevated connection on three different levels:

1. Restaurant/Customer Connection

The online ordering experiences we’re used to tend to make us feel like a pawn in a money-making scheme. Our value to a restaurant is little more than what can be squeezed out of us each time we order.

It’s time to change that narrative. At unPLUG, we’ve created an experience that says to the restaurant customer, “Hey, we’ve got your back.” With suggestive tooling like our Dining Assistant, we create an experience that wraps around each user and caters to their needs. We emphasize choice, customization, and personalization. Our goal is to create experiences that keep customers happy and coming back. This builds emotional currency, as well as loyalty between the restaurant and its diners.

2. Customer/Customer Connection

Let’s face it: phones are a distraction. And living in an era where we use them to order food not only promotes excessive use, but also interferes with engagement. We’ve designed unPLUG to streamline the ordering process and get you from start to finish as fast as possible. We’ve also created fun ways to introduce social ordering: take “trending items,” for example – sort of like a stock market for menu items.

3. Customer/Self Connection

Last but not least (arguably the most important of the three, in fact) is the connection restaurant guests have with themselves. More than one third of people struggle with indecisiveness. Furthermore, heavy technology use is 5x more likely to cause anxiety and depression.

Every decision we make in building the unPLUG ordering experience relates to how we can reduce the mental energy required of diners to order confidently.