From celebrities to software

Virtual Dining Concepts acquires dynamic pricing startup Sauce in a move to push beyond delivery-only restaurants.

image credit: Dave Kotinsky / Getty Images

Earlier this month, Virtual Dining Concepts, the parent company behind MrBeast Burger and other celeb-adjacent online-only restaurant brands, announced it acquired Sauce Technologies, an artificial intelligence and dynamic pricing startup.

What does a virtual restaurant operator want with a tech company? It’s part of VDC’s strategy to move beyond the online brands and into operations, offering its restaurant clients more tech tools to optimize business, including pricing strategies informed by AI.

“This term dynamic pricing has gotten sort of a bad rap. But the reality is that collectively, everyone is doing a form of markups or discounts already. So we're not changing behavior, we're just giving it more intelligence and allowing it to react in real time to meet customers where they are,” Robbie Earl, Virtual Dining Concepts’ president and co-founder, said in an interview. 

The term dynamic pricing has gotten a bad rap, in part thanks to a February earnings call where the CEO of Wendy’s casually dropped the term into conversation. It didn’t go over well with consumers, probably due to comparisons to Uber’s surge pricing, itself a form of dynamic pricing. But the idea of promoting different prices to different people at different times of day is a tough one for Americans to accept at restaurants, even if we tolerate it in other industries like airlines and hotels. 

Still, Sauce co-founder and CEO Colin Webb, now working for VDC, echoes Earl’s sentiment: Most major restaurant chains are looking to implement some sort of tech-infused pricing strategy, he said. “It’s not only the one that made the news. It’s everyone at this point.” 

(Leaders of both companies declined to share acquisition terms. )

Virtual brands haven’t gotten the best rap either.