Smart restaurants offer high-quality experience

Boosted by the New Retail concept, China's catering industry is focusing on high-quality customer experiences and greater efficiency to increase revenues.

The catering industry's market scale is forecast to surpass 5 trillion yuan ($725 billion) by 2020, growing 13.6 percent from 2018, according to a report jointly released by Beijing-based think tank EO Intelligence and Koubei, Alibaba's dining and entertainment review site.

The report showed that in 2017, the nation's GDP reached 82.7 trillion yuan, and 58.8 percent was contributed by the services industry, including the catering industry. Sales revenue in the sector totaled 3.96 trillion yuan in 2017.