Operating system – the spine of restaurant operation: Apurv and Parthiv Patel

Apurv and Parthiv Patel, Co-founders, Petpooja, talk about how technology is changing the food business

Today’s environment is challenging every business in unique ways. Can technology come to our rescue is the obvious question. Therefore, technology, and more importantly with increasing complexity of operations and heightened customer expectations, user-friendly technology is an absolute necessity. Today’s consumer expects seamless experience that they get from online channels.

Petpooja allows customers to browse the menu and order digitally right from their table. We offer multiple payment options to cater to every payment app, real-time inventory tracking, to avoid the situation where the waiter has to say “sorry ma’am we checked but the item you ordered is out of stock or unavailable”, the process of online ordering has been optimised to ensure a smoother experience to both restaurant and customer, and so on.

In fact, with a powerful Kitchen Display System (KDS), no orders are missed and wait time for food is significantly reduced, ensuring diners don’t wait for their food and restaurants can serve more tables!

Technology is key to service quality

Today, the kitchens need to be in sync with its serving staff. And the wait-staff needs to have suitable technology to cater to every customer’s needs more robustly. How, we can come to the rescue of those in need of such technology. Petpooja offers Captain App that allows waiters to take customer orders digitally. It also displays real-time inventory to avoid checking the fridge if you have any particular item in stock. Captain App also uses an AI-recommendation engine that offers customers dynamic suggestions based on their order history and the best-selling dishes of the restaurant.

Our unique Waiter Calling Systems are small devices kept on each table that alert a waiter when the customer presses the button for any request like Serve, Water or Bill. These devices maintain a tranquil atmosphere in the restaurant and avoid customer howls of ‘waiter waiter’.

Let’s say as a restaurant owner you have defined biryani to have 200 grams of chicken. Customers love it when they get that quantity of meat consistently, but that’s not always the case. So, Variance monitoring is extremely important that ensures that the rules you have set to be followed are actually being followed religiously.

Smooth operations

Petpooja is not merely a PoS, it’s a complete Operating System (OS) for any restaurant. A PoS just does billing, whereas a restaurant OS handles each and every aspect of restaurant operations. To give a few examples like easy third-party integrations, customer order history for each customer along with their details, suppliers hub to host 4,000+ restaurant suppliers and centralized monitoring to manage multiple outlets.

We believe that as a whole the delivery-only spaces (cloud-kitchens) are poised for above-average growth, as due to the pandemic customers have gotten used to ordering food home. Having said that, the entire food service industry in India, although huge, is largely unorganized. Each passing year, the F&B industry is getting more organised, so we believe that each niche has significant headroom to grow.

Costs and returns

Restaurants would have to eventually get on the technological innovation bandwagon to keep up with the customer expectations and transforming industry. There are some products which will surely change the game in coming days. For example, voice-ordering kiosk where customers want their order-placing process to be quick, safe and independent of a waiter. Then, there are personal website for restaurant brands for unique identity. Furthermore, report & analytics tool to analyse sales, staff output, customer retention, etc, and visualise the data in simpler formats.