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Sick of waiting in line (or on line, for those in New York) to grab food or drinks? One startup is using QR codes to cut down on queues.
Sunday debuted last year with tech that lets customers pay their bill by scanning a QR code, targeting traditional sit-down restaurants. Today, the Atlanta-based startup is introducing a feature that allows people to order the same way, aimed at QSRs, bars, and food courts often plagued by long lines.
- Customers can skip the wait and both place an order from a digital menu and pay on their smartphone, co-founder and CEO Victor Lugger told Retail Brew.
“What makes such a solution successful or not is its capacity to address all the small use cases of all the different restaurants,” he said.
Pay Your Way
Lugger and co-founder Tigrane Seydoux come from the restaurant biz, previously co-founding Italian restaurant group Big Mamma. As menu QR codes proliferated during the pandemic, they wanted to take them a step further—solving the inconvenient payment problem of awkwardly flagging down a waiter (we’ve all done it) and handing over your card.
- Sunday has raised $124 million in funding so far and now has ~400 employees. It says its payment tech is deployed in 5,000 restaurants in the US, UK, Canada, France and Spain.
“Every good restaurateur in the world has an obsession to improve their guests’ experience,” Lugger said. “When you do that, everything comes with it; top-line, bottom line, etc.”
Lining up: The ordering tech—in beta mode for three months and now at spots like Bareburger in the US—is continuing to improve those margins, Lugger said.
- So far, according to Sunday, partners have seen a 15% boost in spend and a 12% larger basket size, on average. Nixing the line can also create more room for tables and encourage quicker turnover, cutting out an average of 15 minutes of time.
- Sunday receives a cut of each order placed that it says is "less than the industry standard," but declined to share specifics.
Employees see perks as well: Notably, an average 18% increase in tips, according to Sunday, which he believes is a result of the overall improved customer experience. “No one is leaving a tip because they see the waiters sweating,” Lugger said. “People leave a tip if they have a good time.”