The Sector of the restoration faces the present with relative optimism after reinventing itself after the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. While it lost almost 40% of sales in stores, delivery grew by over 20% and its billing skyrocketed.
But, even so, and in a context in which technology becomes a key piece of the machinery of home delivery, almost a third of the businesses in the sector still do not digitize.
“Technological tools not only allow us to offer food delivery services, they are also essential for customers to refill bars and restaurants”. It is explained by Salvador Alcaraz Marín, co-founder of Readyme, a online ordering system, which allows the menu, take-away and delivery orders to be centralized on a digital platform, and those that are made to consume on the premises via a mobile app.
And it is in this last field, where one of the new bets of the catering sector, the self-order at table. “It came a few years ago from the hand of some fast food multinationals, but it is already a reality that more and more restaurants are adopting, whether they are independent or part of a chain”.
Alcaraz Marín believes that this trend, which has begun to be adopted after the pandemic as a preventive measure to reduce contact between the customer and the restaurant staff, brings many more benefits to the business and the diners beyond the strictly sanitary ones. “It reduces table occupation time by streamlining orders and, consequently, increases its turnover considerably, allowing the business to offer more meal shifts. Reducing the waiting time between the order is sent and the order is brought to the table, also allows increasing the number of drinks per table ”.
The advantages of self-ordering
The metrics that ReadyMe handles in this regard are enlightening: Auto-ordering reduces the occupancy of each table by 26 minutes on average, while the total of the account increases by as much as 35% in some cases. “It is about taking the diner one step further. If you are already used to scanning a QR code with your smartphone to view a letter, why not also offer you the possibility of placing your order directly from the table? “. The ReadyMe bet works, and you already have 400 associated restaurants, 6,000 users of its app and 55,000 orders processed.
A QR code with a link to a letter posted on a Facebook profile or a PDF document. This is how thousands of Spaniards have returned to bars and restaurants for months when they want to consult menus and menus. “Difficulties to open these links or to read the letters are our daily bread, and although it has been very useful to overcome this period of difficulties, the time has come to deepen the digitization of these businesses”explains the co-founder of ReadyMe.
