Leapset launches Restaurant 2.0 utilising Silicon Valley technology
16 Jul 2015 - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Zahara Zuhair
With a single application enabling the customers to order food from any restaurant with ease, making it a single platform for consumers as well as the restaurants, Silicon Valley-based restaurant technology company ‘Leapset’ was launched in Sri Lanka recently.
Leapset is a technology platform that helps restaurant operators to increase revenue, reduce costs and improve control. With the aim of helping employees based in Colombo to gain a more practical understanding of what they do, it allows restaurant owners to focus on what matters - the food, the service, enjoying that proverbial piece of a well-deserved cake.
Utilising the technology to transform a restaurant, it offers the latest innovations in restaurant technology, as it runs the restaurant management such as making a reservation, online, mobile ordering, restaurant operations via their advanced POS, payments, customer retention and loyalty.
Guest Manager
The product, ‘Guest Manager’ replaces paper and pages as when the guest arrives, the hosts simply add their name and the phone number, so they can optimise seating suggestions, and then the guests receive a text message once the table is ready as it avoids people getting bored and walking away, which has become an issue in the restaurant industry.
The restaurants can reach the customers through the mobile with ‘Online ordering for POS’ app, as it will add the restaurant and its contents to the app and customers who have the app can view and order from the particular restaurant.
A customer can customise the order in any way he/she wants and once the order is placed for pickup/delivery, it will appear in the Leapset POS machine while the customer can pay on delivery or at pickup.
For maximum security data is backed on the cloud as the merchants will receive updates to the system automatically.
‘Cake online ordering’ allows restaurants to accept online orders from the customers, directly to their phone or tablet device. It gives the ability to the customers to add the online ordering app to the restaurant’s Facebook page, as the restaurant’s online ordering system will then sync everything to the customers’ smartphone or tablet. Each time an online order is placed via the restaurant’s website or Facebook page, the customers will receive a notification on their device.
What and when to eat
Explaining about the technology, cake.net Senior Head Software Engineer Evan Mollaory told Mirror Business that as a new consumer product, this is where people come to find, what they want to eat when they want to eat.
“So when you have the system, you can find the top trending, the popular restaurants, also the individual items. For example, if you check for sandwiches, you get all the top rating sandwiches in your local area. Also we have an application system where you can go through and actually we can go up to real time information, so you know all the menu information, the pricing, along with directions how to get there” he said.
Leapset Managing Director Sri Lanka and Senior vice President Engineering Shanil Fernando said, “What we have done in Leapset is we build a single technology platform to cover the entire experience like a customer finding a restaurant, arriving, ordering food, paying, leaving and finally retention.”
He told that different payment methods are highly confusing the consumers, as well the merchants who have to deal with different vendors as Leapset is all about giving a seamless experience for them to make work easier.
“Consumer discovers one product, make reservations in another product as it is not seamless at all. For a merchant, he has to work with a multiple different vendors to get this entire experience,” he said.
Detailing about their functioning in the recent past Fernando said, they have over 5000 restaurants while 150 restaurants were adding per month and moreover, spending US $ 20 million last year on technology and research and development (R&D), backed by Sysco.
Besides, he noted that the products are designed with simplicity in mind, very similar to how Apple produces its technology.
“The hardware and software design happens with the team based out of Silicon Valley with the engineering done in Sri Lanka and the hardware manufactures to order in Taiwan,” he said.
“If you look at the technology landscape today, it is a highly fragmented technology space, multiple companies do different things such as Yalp, Facebook, TripAdvisor, Zomato, etc.,” Fernando further added.
US scenario
Go To Market Senior Vice President Jim O’Corner explaining on what’s happening in the US restaurant industry today said, in the US also restaurant owners have to deal with similar problems like in Sri Lanka.
According to him, restaurant operators face perpetual and transitory business issues that can be alleviated through technical products and services. He further spoke on the trends that have risen in the restaurant industry today, such as workforce management, keeping up with the latest demands, payment options, margin pressure as the operators live on razor thin margin.
“On average, 50 percent are out of business within three years of opening, big guys face this issue too. See Red Lobster, Subway, Olive Garden,” he noted.
Giving an overview of the US restaurant industry, Corner said it is one of the largest and most heterogeneous markets in the world which comprises from Mc Donald’s to hot dog vendors. It has sales of US $ 709.23 from restaurants which is larger than 90 percent of world’s economies, one million restaurant locations in the US and 47 percent of food dollars being spent in restaurants.
Food culture
“There is a culture of food now; people are writing about food, there are blogs, there are websites; food has become a topic,” said Director Delivery Peshele Randeni, who briefed the gathering on the Sri Lankan market space.
He noted that according to statistics, nearly 190 million travellers have downloaded the various TripAdvisor applications (as of 1Q 2015). Also with approximately 2,300,000 Facebook users, which is about 11.5 percent of Sri Lanka’s total population, it is outperforming any other social media platform in Sri Lanka and almost 2.5 million users access the Internet by using mobiles in Sri Lanka.
“Those days there were only one or two restaurants to pick, but now 54 percent of the Sri Lankan market consists of Indian and Chinese restaurants,” he said, while asserting that to be above the rest, there should be a very strong consumer-merchant relationship as that is what Leapset is all about.
Leapset has years of experience with Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase, while they partnered with Sysco in 2013, an American multinational involved in marketing and distributing food products.
