For restaurant owners and managers, the past 2 years have felt like a really long and painful chess match – constantly strategizing and making new moves to navigate repeated lockdown restrictions in an effort to stay afloat and minimize losses (if at all possible).

They’ve explored every single possible option, including setting up dining areas outside in the winter with portable furnaces to keep their customers warm. The most obvious solution for all restaurants throughout the pandemic was to sign up with popular food delivery apps (such as UberEats, Skip the Dishes and Door Dash) so that they could keep bringing in enough food sales to cover their baseline expenses. These solutions – even when put together – cannot makeup for the losses that these restaurants have endured over the past 2 years, especially since these food delivery apps can take upwards of 25% per order from these dine-in restaurants who notoriously operate with such small profit margins.

These small profit margins have been a struggle for dine-in restaurant owners long before the COVID pandemic, with most restaurants only taking home an end profit of 3-5% each year. The other 95-97% is split up between expenses like rent, cost of goods sold, labour, and payment processing fees. With such tight operating margins, it’s hard for these restaurant owners to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Even if they were able to successfully return back to their pre-pandemic profitability numbers, it would take them years to make up for the losses they’ve experienced over the last 2 years. Clearly, the dine-in restaurant industry needs an update – now more than ever before.

Restaurant owners and managers need to find a way to improve their operating efficiency when their dining rooms re-open. They need to improve upon a few key operating metrics, such as table turnover times, labour costs and average order size so that they can increase their profits far beyond the typical 3-5% range. This can easily be done by empowering customers and automating the ordering process in dine-in restaurants. By placing the ordering and payment power directly in the hands of the customers, dine-in restaurants will be able to complete more orders each day and ultimately make up for losses from the past 2 years much quicker. Serv Restaurant Services provides restaurants with the ability to do just that – offering a QR code-based system that expedites the ordering and payment processes, improves table turnover times, increases average basket size per customer and decreases daily labour costs for the best profit margins possible.

How does Serv work?

Serv uses QR codes to place the ordering and payment power directly in the hands of the customer. Customers scan the QR code using their smart-phone to access, browse, and interact with the menu before adding items to their cart and submitting their order directly to a server, who can accept the order with the click of a button. Once the order is accepted by the server and the food is served, the customer can pay directly from their phone at their earliest convenience before leaving the restaurant.