A new tech platform for venues lands in Australia

Lightspeed Restaurant will be unveiled at the Fine Food Australia Trade Show being hosted in Melbourne this week.

The cloud platform combines an innovative POS, contactless integrated payments, online ordering, advanced inventory, analytics and more, with the promise of enabling operators to run smarter, more efficient restaurants.

Peter Dougherty, General Manager of Hospitality, at Lightspeed, says, "Ultimately we see payments as part of the furniture: diners want food and bev businesses to be easy to find, easy to order, easy to pay. Digital ordering has changed the expectations on convenience both at home and on premise."

The Lightspeed Payments' platform is currently operating in Australia but Lightspeed Restaurant is a heftier service, suited to multi-room venues. It allows Australian venues to take control of seat level ordering, multiple service environments, complex printing setups, and more, all through a single commerce platform.

Mr Dougherty says that Australian restaurants have rapidly accelerated their digital transformation in recent years.

He says, "We actually see an industry that is growing but changed. The food and beverage businesses that could adapt, have adapted. They’re growing. 

"The challenges are operational and financial. Food costs are up, inflation is up. Margins are even thinner. Menus have to be leaner, recipes need to be smarter. You might not have the number of staff you used to. You have to do much more with much less. But the huge opportunity is that your diners expect you to be digital first, and digital platforms will enable you to be more efficient."

In what is set to become an increasingly competitive environment, data is essential.

"Every venue needs to ask why their diners choose them over someone else; in fact, every venue needs to know why their diners choose them over some other venue, and they should demand that of their tech platforms. If your technology is telling you how much you sold, that’s not enough. Diners have the ability to see every restaurant in their neighborhood, whenever they want. You have to know what’s keeping them in yours, and what’s turning them away," says Mr Dougherty.

Bluebonnet Barbecue in Brunswick East, Melbourne has been using Lightspeed Restaurant in the initial launch phase. Bluebonnet’s Manager, Mikey Buchanan, says, "The access to real-time insights has given us a deeper, more accurate understanding of our business than we’ve ever had before. It’s incredibly powerful and sophisticated, but also user-friendly, which is so important in a transient industry where staff come and go. 

“Rather than using different systems for different business functions everything is on one system, driving operational efficiencies which benefit our team and, ultimately, our customers. We’re passionate about our craft and our customers, and with Lightspeed Restaurant we spend less time working on administration and non-revenue generating tasks and more time delivering the food and experiences that bring people together.” 

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Photo with thanks to Bluebonnet Barbecue.