The way Cynthia Hollen sees it, the next disruptive technology isn’t ChatGPT or facial recognition. It’s your dashboard.
Hollen, CEO of Mavi.io, which offers a platform for in-car retail commerce called OnMyWay, delivered a Knight Rider vision for the future at the recent Food On Demand Conference. She outlined scenarios in which consumers can order meals right from their dash. Of course this already exists in some vehicles, particularly those with Apple CarPlay technology. Domino’s and Dunkin’ and Panera are wired in. But Hollen thinks in the not so distant future nearly all cars will offer this convenience.
Cynthia Hollen, CEO of Mavi.io
“Seventy percent of new cars are rolling out with Google operating systems in them and all car companies have a mandate to move to a transactional business model,” she said in an interview. “I’m talking to every single car company right now about how to get connected car functionality in at least the top 50 percent of their vehicles.”
So it’s coming. Will it really upend everything? It may if the tech can do one thing right: capture consumer attention at just the right time. “I call it at the point of hunger,” Hollen said.
But offering location data and a list of restaurants in the area isn’t new. Anyone can offer up restaurants within a radius. What would be valuable is to narrow that list down and serve up customized recommendations and offer an ordering process that doesn’t require a driver to tap on a phone while steering.
Mavi.io offers a solution called OnMyWay. It connects a car’s dashboard directly to the ecommerce platforms of the retailers in its marketplace, which features more than a million restaurants. It uses local services to assess nearby inventories, offer purchase recommendations, recommend driving routes, place orders, fulfill payments, and coordinate pickups. Drivers can communicate preferences through voice commands or a touchscreen.
“You may have a consumer who says, Hey Jeep, I’m hungry, and are told, OK, you can get a cheeseburger that is five minutes away, pizza next door, or Chinese food at your destination. To do this you can’t be limited to an individual app. It’s like any kind of ecommerce. Sometimes you want to shop from a brand, sometimes you want to shop from a marketplace. If you want a marketplace, you want to know the most likely ones you want to order from that are easy to get to. You want to be told that your regular order will be waiting for you where you always get it. Restaurants want to serve customers in this way,” she said.
One notable brand that has signed up with Mavi.io is MrBeast Burger. You can find it in the dashboard marketplaces in select Chrysler Pacifica vehicles. And Hollen says the company is in talks with other high-profile restaurants and car manufacturers, including one in Germany and one in Japan. Mavi.io also recently raised $3 million in venture capital to assist its explorations.
Hollen is optimistic about U.S. adoption of OnMyWay for another reason: people may be tiring of delivery.
“Seventy-five percent of customers are saying that if they could do pick-up easier they would,” she said, citing expense and wait time as factors. “It’s so annoying to drive by a restaurant but be too distracted to place an order and then make it when you get home and have to wait. This way you can make that order and pick it up in a timely fashion. If I say Hey Kia, I want dinner, and hear that my favorite thing I always get is going to be waiting for me when I get there, I’d just say, ahhh, thank you. We’re at the forefront of building this right now. You’ll see our applications starting to show up.”
