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Integrations: The Lifeblood (and Political Minefield) of Your Restaurant Tech Stack

Paul Molinari Dec 1, 2025 11:23:02 AM
the politics of technology integrations

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What Keeps the Restaurant C-Suite Up at Night? Well...

From Data Chaos to Clarity: Why CTOs and CIOs are Turning to Livelytics.ai

Deloitte Spotlights AI as a Competitive Game-Changer

If you spend enough time in restaurant technology, you eventually figure out a hard truth:

Most “tech problems” are actually integration problems.

 

It’s not that your POS is bad. Or your loyalty platform. Or your KDS. Or your AI voice bot.

It’s that none of them are really talking to each other the way you were led to believe.

 

At OGC, we spend a lot of our time in the messy middle of restaurant tech stacks for multi-unit brands.

On paper, the stack looks great. In the wild, you’ve got:

 

  • Duplicate menus across platforms

  • Orders that disappear between aggregators and the POS

  • Loyalty systems blind to half the guest behavior

  • “AI” tools starved of clean data

 

And the root cause is almost always the same: integrations were treated as an afterthought instead of a strategy.

 

This post is about why that has to change, and how to partner with vendors that actually win at integrations — including some of the standouts we work with at OGC like Curbit, Khumbu, and Voicify.

 

 

lineart technology integrations abstract colors red white blackWhy integrations are now existential, not “nice to have”

 

Restaurant operations used to revolve around a handful of systems: POS, maybe a back-office tool, and some spreadsheets.

 

Now your average multi-unit brand is juggling:

 

  • POS + KDS

  • Online ordering and delivery marketplaces

  • First-party ordering apps

  • Loyalty and CRM

  • Labor / scheduling

  • Inventory and BOH systems

  • Voice AI and kiosks

  • Data/BI and AI intelligence layers

 

That’s not a tech stack. It’s an ecosystem.

 

Recent industry guidance for operators keeps coming back to the same point: the tech that wins is the tech that plays well with others. Modern “how to build your tech stack” pieces all emphasize that POS, KDS, inventory, labor, and marketing tools need to operate in one coherent flow, or they create friction and waste. 

 

Another emerging theme: scalability depends on integration. Multi-site brands looking to expand are being told very clearly that their back-of-house, inventory, and production systems must integrate tightly with POS and ordering channels to support growth. 

 

Marketing leaders are hearing the same message. The POS is no longer just a payment device; it’s the “source of truth” for guest behavior — and every modern marketing capability (personalization, loyalty, offers) depends on the quality of that integration layer. 

 

In other words:

 

If your systems don’t integrate cleanly, every new tool you add just multiplies the chaos.

 

 

The politics of integrations (and why they slow you down)

 

Let’s talk about what most RFPs don’t say out loud:

integrations are political.

 

 

lineart Politics abstract colors are red white black

1. POS as power broker

 

Like it or not, your POS often acts as the gatekeeper. Some platforms push heavily toward open APIs and rich partner ecosystems, positioning integrations as a core part of their value proposition. PAR, for example, talks explicitly about open APIs and comprehensive integrations as the key to scaling multi-unit brands and maintaining a holistic, cross-tool view of the business. 

 

Others move slower, charge certification fees, or control the integration roadmap in ways that can quietly delay progress for months.

 

As a brand, that means your ability to roll out new tools is often constrained by:

 

  • Whose “partner list” your vendor is on

  • How mature your POS’s API really is (not just in the sales deck)

  • Where you land on your POS vendor’s internal roadmap

 

 

 

2. “It’s on the roadmap” theater

 

You’ve probably heard this:

 

“Oh yeah, we integrate with that. It’s on our roadmap for Q2.”

 

Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it means, “We’ve had one conversation and someone created a Jira ticket.”

 

The engineering reality is often:

 

  • Integration work competes with core product features

  • Partner integrations may require joint resourcing and test environments

  • QA timelines get extended because you’re testing across two platforms, not one

 

If you don’t specifically interrogate the integration details — existing go-lives, reference customers, SLAs — you can end up with a contract that assumes an integration that doesn’t fully exist.

 

 

3. Data ownership and “who controls the pipes”

 

There’s also a quieter political problem: who owns the data and the pipes that move it.

 

  • Does your vendor let you export data freely?

  • Is there an event stream or webhooks you can subscribe to?

  • Are integrations only possible via “select partners,” or do they truly support open connectivity?

 

Vendors who view data as a moat tend to:

 

  • Restrict API access

  • Limit who can integrate

  • Slow-roll integrations that might “compete” with their roadmap

 

Vendors who view data as a platform tend to:

 

  • Publish docs for robust APIs

  • Invest in partner enablement

  • Encourage integration partners like Khumbu and others to connect their tools into a broader ecosystem

 

The difference shows up in your P&L: one world leads to brittle workarounds and manual exports; the other compounds value with every new integration.

 

 

 

lineart technology integrations abstract colors red white black-1What “good” looks like: partners that treat integrations like a product

 

The good news: there are vendors and partners who treat integrations as a first-class product, not a side job. Here’s how that looks in practice, using a few OGC–adjacent examples.

 

Khumbu: when integrations

are the business

 

Khumbu’s entire reason to exist is simple: integrations are messy; they make them simple. 

 

They’ve built an Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS) model focused on restaurant brands and tech platforms. They’ve done integrations for more than half of the top 10 largest restaurant brands and operate as an extension of their clients’ engineering teams, absorbing long-tail integration projects at a fraction of the cost and time it would take in-house. 

 

On the platform side, Olo tapped Khumbu to handle complex integrations with delivery and marketing ecosystems — Uber, DoorDash, CloudKitchens, and more — enabling the expansion of Olo’s Engage suite by connecting CRM attributes to multiple POS systems with high reliability and 24/7 support. 

 

In a conversation we captured at Popcorn GTM, Khumbu’s CEO talked about how fragmented standards, legacy systems, and inconsistent APIs make restaurant integrations uniquely hard — and how their job is to “normalize the chaos” so AI, personalization, and analytics tools can actually deliver. 

 

What this signals to you as a buyer:

 

  • There is now a mature category of companies whose entire job is solving integrations.

  • If your vendors are working with partners like Khumbu, you’re already one step closer to a truly connected stack.

 

 

 

Curbit: integrations as a real-time “intelligence layer”

 

Curbit positions itself as a real-time intelligence layer sitting on top of the systems restaurants already use — ordering platforms, POS, loyalty, delivery providers, labor tools, and more. It uses that data to manage kitchen capacity and keep orders in a “Goldilocks Zone” where food is fresh, not frazzled. 

 

That only works because Curbit has made integrations central to its product strategy:

 

  • Strategic partnership with Olo so operators can combine real-time kitchen intelligence with digital ordering to better manage off-premise capacity. 

  • Integrations with KDS providers like QSR Automations to dynamically update quote times and send real-time order progress via SMS. 

  • Partnerships in loyalty ecosystems like Thanx, where Curbit feeds capacity intelligence into guest engagement, ensuring on-time arrivals for guests and delivery drivers. 

  • Recent collaboration with Epson and Kitchen Armor, integrating Curbit with Epson’s TrueOrder KDS to power real-time SMS “order up” notifications. 

 

All of that adds up to a very simple story for operators:

 

Curbit doesn’t replace your tech stack. It unlocks it.

 

If you’re a brand evaluating AI-driven capacity or order flow tools, this is what you want to see: a vendor who has already done the heavy lifting to integrate across ordering, POS, KDS, loyalty, and messaging — and has public proof points to back it up. 

 

 

Voicify: voice AI that respects the stack

 

Voice AI is a perfect example of a category where integrations are the difference between “cool demo” and “actual ROI.”

 

Voicify’s restaurant offering automates order taking across phone, kiosk, drive-thru, and digital channels, leading to a 2–3x increase in answered calls and more completed transactions for restaurants using its AI. 

 

Here’s the critical part: Voicify doesn’t operate as a silo. It has:

 

  • Direct POS and ordering integrations (e.g., Adora POS) so voice orders feed straight into the restaurant’s existing workflows. 

  • Partnerships with providers like Chowly so voice AI can plug into existing phone, POS, kiosk, and restaurant technologies quickly. 

  • A presence in marketplaces like Olo’s partner ecosystem, where it slots into the broader digital ordering fabric. 

 

The takeaway: voice AI only works if it’s wired into POS, ordering, loyalty, and marketing. Voicify’s integration footprint is why it’s not just a “shiny object,” but a lever for throughput, labor savings, and guest experience.

 

 

 

lineart red flags projects abstract colors are red white black taupe-1The red flags: how integrations quietly kill tech projects

 

Even mainstream trade press is warning operators to be wary of vendors that don’t integrate deeply with POS and payments. One QSR Magazine piece calls out lack of POS or payments integration as a major red flag before signing with any digital tool. 

 

From where I sit, some of the biggest integration red flags for restaurant tech buyers are:

 

  1. CSV imports are the “integration strategy.”

    If “we’ll just export CSVs” is the default answer, you’re building a manual, error-prone process that will crack under scale.

  2. One-off “custom integrations” for every new vendor.

    Your internal engineering or IT team becomes the bottleneck for sustaining point-to-point connections that are fragile and hard to support.

  3. No clear integration diagram or data flow.

    If the vendor can’t show you a simple architecture of how entities move between systems, you’re buying into a black box.

  4. No named integration partners.

    The absence of specialized integrators (like Khumbu or others) can mean your vendor is trying to do everything themselves — and spreading engineering thin.

  5. Ambiguous ownership of break/fix.

    When an order disappears between your voice AI and your POS, whose problem is that? If the answer is “we need all three vendors on a call,” you’re in trouble.

 

 

lineart evaluation of tech abstract colors are red black white and beige-1How to evaluate integrations

before you sign

 

 

Here’s the checklist I encourage restaurant technology buyers and operators to use when integrations are on the table:

 

1. Ask for proof — not promises

 

  • “Which integrations are live today in production?”

  • “Can you give me three reference customers using our target stack combination?”

  • “What SLAs govern the integrations themselves (not just your core app)?”

 

Look for published case studies and partner pages that show your vendors working together in the wild — not just logos on a slide. The Curbit–Olo partnership, Khumbu’s work with Olo, and Voicify’s partnerships with POS and middleware providers are good examples of what real integration proof looks like. 

 

 

2. Demand an integration map

 

You should be able to see a simple picture of:

 

  • Systems in the flow (POS, KDS, ordering, loyalty, AI, etc.)

  • Data entities (orders, guests, items, locations, employees)

  • Events and cadence (real-time webhooks vs. nightly batch)

 

 

If the vendor can’t draw this on a digital napkin, they don’t understand their own integration story well enough.

 

 

3. Clarify who owns the pipes

 

For every critical integration:

 

  • Who holds the contract — you, your vendor, or an integrator like Khumbu?

  • Who monitors integration health?

  • Who you call first when something breaks?

 

 

This is where having a specialized integration partner can keep you sane. They’re incentivized to keep the pipes flowing so all your tools can do their jobs.

 

 

4. Ask about future integrations, not just today’s

 

Your stack in 24 months will not look like your stack today. When evaluating vendors:

 

  • How often do they ship new integrations?

  • Do they have a published partner roadmap?

  • How do they prioritize integrations requested by customers?

 

 

Vendors with robust partner ecosystems, open APIs, and a cadence of new integrations are betting on connectivity as a competitive advantage. That’s who you want to bet on, too.

 

 

lineart technology ecosystem abstract colors are red white blackPlaying the long game: build an ecosystem, not a Frankenstein

 

Most restaurant tech stacks that fail do so because they’re stitched together reactively. A problem appears, a new point solution gets bolted on, and another brittle integration is born.

 

The better approach is ecosystem thinking:

 

  • Start with foundational systems that prioritize open APIs and rich integrations (POS, online ordering, KDS). 

  • Layer in intelligence tools that explicitly enhance, not replace, those foundations (Curbit for capacity, Voicify for voice ordering, AI and analytics tools that consume and enrich your existing data). 

  • Leverage integration specialists (like Khumbu) as connective tissue, not last-resort fire drills. 

 

When you do that, you get compounding benefits:

 

  • A clean, consistent view of the guest across channels

  • The ability to move fast on new tech (because your integration strategy is already in place)

  • Less time troubleshooting “ghost orders” and more time improving the guest experience

 

 

 

My opinionated take: partner with winners or pay in friction

 

Let me be blunt:

 

In 2025 and beyond, the best restaurant tech isn’t just the best product — it’s the best partner in an integrated ecosystem.

 

When I look across the OGC vendor landscape, the standouts are the ones who:

 

  • Invest heavily in integrations and partner ecosystems

  • Are transparent about their integration footprint and roadmaps

  • Work hand-in-hand with integrators to make life easier for operators

  • Understand that access to data is a value-creator, not a gatekeeping weapon 

 

Those are the winners you want in your corner.

 

The alternative is a tech stack that looks modern on a slide and behaves like a patchwork of incompatible tools the minute you hit a Friday dinner rush.

 

 

Where OGC fits in

 

OGC sits in the middle of this world every day:

 

  • Helping operators uncover hidden integration risks before contracts are signed

  • Working with vendors like Curbit, Khumbu, Voicify, and others who treat integrations as a strategic priority, not an afterthought

  • Connecting restaurant brands with integration partners who can actually get them to the future they’ve been promised

 

If you’re evaluating your stack, planning a new rollout, or just tired of being told “it’s on the roadmap” every time you ask about integrations, let’s talk.

 

 

Contact Us

 

 

References & Links

 

 

 
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