Quick-service and fast-casual restaurants are finding more reasons to adopt IoT technology to help them manage food safety and cut costs, according to a survey from IoT connectivity company MachineQ.
About 86% of the more than 400 restaurant representatives surveyed said they already are investing in IoT or will do so within the next two years, according to the study 2026 Restaurant Readiness: Ops Meets Tech Report, conducted for MachineQ, a Comcast unit, by independent research firm Censuswide.
The finding comes as food safety concerns are growing throughout the restaurant, grocery, and food logistics sectors. IoT can be used to monitor cold storage equipment and vehicles throughout the food logistics chain to make sure conditions such as temperature remain constant.
About 14% of those surveyed said they already use IoT-based automated systems to monitor cold-storage temperatures - and this group reported the highest confidence that tasks are completed properly/on time. But, a big opportunity remains, as 46% of those surveyed said they use spreadsheets for cold storage monitoring, while 20% use paper logs, and another 20% said they manually record data in task management systems. That led to 20% of survey participants admitting that they are not confident temperature-logging tasks are being completed correctly and on time.
Elsewhere, about 49% of respondents said they experienced downtime due to equipment failure or unplanned maintenance, and about 24% of respondents estimated revenue loss between $1,001 - $5,000 per hour of disruption. Another 63% of survey respondents said they believe they could significantly reduce unplanned downtime if they could proactively monitor equipment performance and utilization.
Rising costs for food, labor, equipment, and more are making it hard for restaurants to survive, but MachineQ’s survey points toward increasing “back-of-house” technology investment as a way to help reduce costs and downtime, and potentially grow revenue and enhance brand reputation.
“Automation technologies, such as IoT and AI, are helping operators improve productivity, reduce waste, support sustainability goals, and protect margins, especially at scale,” the study concluded.