Skift Take
Upserve's acquisition and subsequent implementation of SimpleOrder technology speaks to a larger trend: point of sale companies will continue to acquire smaller, niche technical operations in order to build out their products.
— Kristen Hawley
Upserve, a cloud-based point of sale and restaurant management software company, has acquired inventory management software company SimpleOrder, integrating its technology into the Upserve product. The new functionality, which will be rolled out to all operators on the Upserve platform, allows restaurateurs to see food costs in real time, automated inventory management, and one-click purchasing from large, national vendors and smaller, local merchants, too.
Upserve CEO Angus Davis said that customers who use Upserve Inventory, as the product is named, can expect to save between 30 and 50 hours per month and 5 to 8 percent improvement in their margins, according to restaurants already on the platform.
“Angus’s vision for the product is to bring restaurateurs closer to profitability,” Upserve chief marketing officer Andrea Kayal told Skift Table, adding that the insights that a restaurant receives from the fully integrated system are far deeper then those a separate inventory management system would provide.
“By us having this fully integrated, you can see down to the recipe level, whether it’s profitable or not,” she continued. “You can tell your servers that, because we’re reaching through to the front of the house. If you know something’s popular but unprofitable, you can tell the servers to stop recommending it and offer another dish.”
Brian Reeder of Vessel Kitchen in Park City, Utah, said that after switching to the platform, his food cost decreased 11 percent. “We were surprised to learn how much food we were wasting and we are now able to cost down to the individual recipe and negotiate the best prices with vendors,” he said.
Speaking to a Larger Trend
The trend in restaurant point of sale technology — increasingly dubbed “restaurant management software — is integrating as much functionality as quickly as possible. Restaurant point of sale systems like Upserve integrate with a variety of smaller companies to add specific and customizable technology to systems. Upserve competitor Toast, for example, lists 10 separate inventory management partners on its integrations and APIs marketplace. SimpleOrder was an Upserve partner before its acquisition.
As these small, niche companies prove their worth to restaurants, larger POS and software companies are acquiring them with increasing speed, building the functionality into the main product with greater frequency. Still, the restaurant technology landscape is vast, and a vote of confidence from a major POS provider is good news for any startup or smaller company poised to work with great benefit to the restaurant industry.
Mike Wior, CEO of Omnivore, a technology company that facilitates integrations of smaller restaurant tech companies into a restaurant’s larger POS system told Skift Table that restaurants are facing an increasing number of decisions when it comes to tech providers. “If we look at connectivity into restaurants through different technologies five or six years ago, restaurant brands were looking at bringing one or two different technologies into their organization in a given year.” That’s all changed in the last few years — today restaurants are faced with five or six good options to provide a single service.
“It’s getting complicated and it’s going to continue to increase,” he said.
