HungryGoWhere wades deeper into restaurant space with SmartPOS

HungryGoWhere has launched a POS system for restaurants. Photo credit: HungryGoWhere.

Singapore foodie portal HungryGoWhere today launched a point-of-sale (POS) system that will enable merchants to lean on its reservations and takeaway platforms, as well as its extensive customer base.

HungryGoWhere’s SmartPOS offers restaurateurs a suite of tools to manage table reservations, incoming takeaway orders, and payments sent through the company’s online portals. The system also allows diners to place their meal orders at-table using ‘e-waiter’ tablets, potentially freeing up staff resources for proprietors.

Merchants will likely consider the POS system’s biggest asset to be the access it grants to HungryGoWhere’s 1.3 million-plus unique monthly visitors. This opens up opportunities for proprietors to target their loyalty schemes more precisely and to upsell certain dishes to specific customers, based on their food and restaurant preferences.

“Every single feature that we have in our SmartPOS system meets a very specific pain point that merchants have revealed to us,” said Frank Young, CEO at HungryGoWhere, in a statement. Specifically, the food portal’s monthly flow of traffic could help merchants “scale their business, expand customer reach, and provide a seamless experience for the customer from discovery to dining,” he added.

Built on an open application program interface, HungryGoWhere SmartPOS can be integrated with other software used by merchants in their day-to-day, like accounting programs and mobile payment platforms. It can also provide data analytics so that restaurant owners can keep track of trends, such as average capacities at peak and off-peak times, or which dishes are proving most popular among their clientele.

The product is aimed at filling a gap in the market for an end-to-end POS solution, Young tells Tech In Asia. “Merchants expressed their pain points to us, which got us thinking about creating a ‘one-stop shop’ to ease their burdens,” he says. “We know that e-waiter apps are abundant, but there’s nothing in the market which combines operations from order-taking to kitchen help.”

This is not the first time that Singtel-owned HungryGoWhere has sought to expand into new areas. Back in March, it announced a partnership with food delivery firm FoodPanda to add online food ordering and delivery to its offering.

While this means that HungryGoWhere has a strategic partnership in place with one of the city’s largest food delivery services, the space remains crowded with competition. Burpple started out as a foodie photo-sharing platform before moving into restaurant discovery, while Hong Kong’s OpenRice, UK company Deliveroo and Malaysia’s Offpeak are other notable local players.