Contactless Dining in India: A Deep-Dive

Much has been written about contactless dining with everyone and their grandfather joining the contactless dining fray. This is turning out to be similar to the post-lockdown land-grab for grocery delivery. From payment startups to table reservation and delivery aggregators, every company has a horse in the race. 

“The post COVID era would see the advent of Hospitality 2.0 at restaurants and other establishments, not just from an operations perspective, but also in terms of the factors determining excellence. From aligning a restaurant to the new social distancing guidelines to adapting new strategies and approaches to secure a strong come-back with digital alternatives”-Ankit Merhotra, DineOut

While the jury is still out on whether “Hospitality 2.0” can sustain, this happened at the NRAI (National Restaurant Association Of India):

In the start of May 2020, NRAI president Anurag Katriar rubbished contactless dining. He compared it to someone saying “Can I have chilli chicken without chilli or chicken” 

However on May 18, the NRAI tied up with DotPe to facilitate contactless dining for it’s members.

So let’s take a deeper look at what contactless dining is, how it can help restaurants and the players in the race.

 

What is Contactless Dining:

Contactless Dining is a blanket term enabling the use of technology to minimize human contact while dining in restaurants. While a true contactless experience involves complete automation from food preparation to service (sounds quite dystopian, doesn't it?), in its current form, it involves customers ordering and paying for food using their own device by scanning QR codes. This technology is not new, however, and has been in use by China’s super-apps (Alipay and WeChat) for a while now.

Why Contactless Dining?

The new CDC guidelines state human-to-human contact as a primary means of Covid-19 transmission while surface contamination is a secondary source. Contactless Dining alleviates both to an extent.

1. Servers don’t need to interact with the customer for taking their order

2. Menu cards are eliminated

3. Payment becomes contactless – no need for a physical bill or for cash to be exchanged.

While these are direct benefits for the customers and staff, 2nd order effects of Covid-19 are also managed by Contactless Ordering. The disease has caused a lot of restaurant workers to migrate back to their home-states, leaving the industry with an acute staff crunch. Contactless dining also significantly reduces the need for front-of-house staff since most of the mechanical work is taken care of but the customer himself.

Different Players and restaurant format suitability:

Not all QR-codes are born the same. The distinction here pertains to the format and usage of these QR-codes:

1. For QSRs, Take-aways and self-serve restaurants:

These are the most prevalent with customers scanning the code, making their order and paying for it. Essentially payment has to be completed while placing every order. A common QR-code can suffice for the entire restaurant since the order is paid for (no chance of fraud) and the onus of collecting the food lies on the customer.

2. For Dine-in Restaurants:

For full-service restaurants where servers deliver food to the table, the QR codes need to account for 

1. Multiple KOTs in each bill, payment only happens after the meal is consumed

2. Fraud prevention since the order can be placed without paying for it

3. Knowing which table the order has come from

The QR-codes in this format is specific to each table and there is generally a mechanism to ensure a customer is physically present in the restaurant before an order can be placed.

While These are the fundamental differences in the two formats, let’s take a look at the players in the running:

PayTM’s contactless offering. The Payments giant is mostly focused on QSR format for now

Payments: GooglePay, PayTM

Aggregators: Zomato, DineOut

PoS providers: Petpooja and others

Solution Providers: DotPe, Dash.menu

Payment Startups and Aggregators:

We will group these two together since their behavior and charges are bound to be quite similar. While the payment companies are more likely to pass on customer data, the aggregators will not. And these companies are bound to have higher transaction charges, further eating into margins. On the background too, a fight has been brewing between the restaurant owners and aggregators which reached it’s peak with the #LogOut campaign. 

However while there have been differences, and a higher cost of using aggregator QR codes, people often forget the huge customer base that these players command. The advantage of using their QR-codes is exposure – getting a customer in through the door. And in bleak times like these, the marketing muscle that these large startups have are sure to have a large impact on the people walking in. However to ensure a smooth usage from the merchant end, restaurateurs must look for PoS integrations since reporting, KOT printing, menu updation and billing are all handled by the PoS. Restaurants must also check whether the player they choose to go with supports their format: QSR/take-away or dine-in.

Restaurant aggregator Zomato’s Contactless dining feature caters to both QSRs and Full-service restaurants

PoS Providers:

PoS providers like Petpooja lend themselves naturally to contactless ordering since they already control the backend. Updating the menu, reporting, printing the KOT in the kitchen and billing is already handled by the PoS and hence the QR-code ordering module is a natural extension for a PoS provider. At Petpooja, we too have our own contactless ordering “Scan & Order”, which supports both formats (self-serve and dine-in).

Solution Providers:

This becomes tricky since solution providers are standalone providers only providing QR-code ordering solutions. The customer data belongs to the restaurants. The downside is that these are most often not integrated with PoS players, so there is a lot of friction for usage and neither do they have the marketing muscle that the aggregator and payment companies have. So while this looks like a tempting option (since restaurants don’t have to part with their data, nor do they have to change their PoS), it becomes difficult to use from the merchant’s perspective.

Petpooja:

Petpooja’s PoS and Restaurant Management Platform allows you complete control over your restaurant operations

Among PoS players, we stand out because we are a platform, powering over 15,000 restaurants across India. While we have our own product for contactless dining in Scan & Order, we are also integrated with several other players like GooglePay, PayTM, DineOut and many more in the works. The integrations allow you to manage your menu from the PoS itself – mark items out of stock, update prices and change menu items. Any order that comes from the apps gets directly printed in the kitchen KOT printer. And all the reporting happens on a single dashboard, allowing you a comprehensive view of your sales. Essentially we are the merchant facing interface, no matter which player you choose to go with.

If you are looking for a Restaurant Management Platform which takes care of not just your billing, inventory and reporting, but also allows you the freedom of integrations, look no further than Petpooja.