iChef is bringing startup savvy to Taiwan’s new class of food entrepreneurs

Kaiyu Chen, cofounder of iChef, at Mazendo in Taipei

Startups in Asia are sometimes scolded for focusing on local issues rather than global ones. But a narrow vision can be an asset since business intuition is at its sharpest when one experiences a market void first-hand. So when a local solution coalesces with a global opportunity, startup magic emerges.

That’s exactly what iChef is trying to cook up. The four-man team from Taipei created an iPad-based point-of-sale system for small restaurant chains that’s tailor-made for the domestic market, but might have a shot at moving beyond Taiwanese borders.

iChef is designed to mark and track every point-of-sale that occurs in a restaurant, from the moment customers open the door to the second they pay their bills. Employees can use a simple drag-and-drop interface to log wait lines, take orders, and input specifications (“there’s a child in this party…” “this party is waiting for two more people…”). The end-goal is to synchronize the knowledge of restaurant staff – the host knows that Table 12 should free up soon, and the server knows that the chef is working on that dried tofu for Table 15.

The app also records payments, and allows restaurants to manage financials and accounting in preparation for taxes.

iChef requires no centralized hardware and imposes no limit on the number of devices a restaurant can use. All inputs into the system are synchronized across a wireless network. The company charges restaurants who use the app a monthly fee of US$65, which covers on-site and off-site assistance, training, access to an additional web-based extension, and analytics.

The iChef team won’t claim to have the prettiest or most feature-rich restaurant POS system out there, as that’s not where they excel. The team believes that competing POS systems create a sales bottleneck – by forcing unwanted features down a restaurant’s throat, staff members lose efficiency. As a result, iChef’s software is flexible, which means employees don’t need to use it exactly the same way. If a waiter feels that taking an order via pen and paper is more efficient than using iChef at any given moment, no problem – input the order into the POS system later, or don’t do it at all. Is business slow and the host out sick? Skip out on seating management for a few hours.

“Traditional startups think that they are more advanced than the restaurant industry,” says Kaiyu Chen, co-founder and CMO at iChef. “But actually they are not. Restaurants are highly evolved. Think about it – they’ve been around for thousands of years. A tablet is not going to magically solve the problems of a restaurant. We have about 160 restaurants using our system, and every restaurant uses it in different ways.”

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