They say a good meal is the fastest way to a man’s heart. In the world of F&B, the fastest way to a restaurateur’s heart is a well-oiled point-of-sale or POS system. The POS is the beating heart of daily operations. It is where a cashier rings up your order in a clothing store or where a waiter puts in your order in a restaurant. It is the system that remembers to factor in the difference between a member’s and non-member’s price at the grocery store and to bundle a burger and coke order as a set meal price rather than the price of the individual items. The POS is what connects to the display system that tells the cooks in the kitchen what dish to make next and what connects to the credit card terminal so it knows how much to charge you. Most retail store and restaurant operations would come to a grinding halt if their POS system went down.

Ironically, the POS system is also where most operators live, painfully, with the most imperfection. Outdated systems with unpredictable time lags and sadly predictable crashes. Monolithic platforms with specialized features designed for F&B operations that retail owners don’t care about, or vice versa. Bloated systems that take six hours to spit out a daily sales report. A CRM that doesn’t know when customers last ate at a restaurant or what they ordered. Disconnected systems that require retail staff to spend hours reconciling inventory counts with sales numbers.

So the Feedme team, helmed by cofounders Squall Tan and Lo King Wei, set out to develop a POS system that was purpose-built for restaurant operators. Here’s the first sentence from our internal investment memo:

To date, we have evaluated several POS players, but have yet been able to make an investment. Winning the category calls for an almost unreasonable trifecta: relentless multi-product expansion to lift ARPU, infallible customer support to lock in retention, and disciplined go-to-market to contain CAC. Feedme is the first to check every box.

On the surface, much of what Feedme does looks like every other POS system you’d encounter in a restaurant. There’s a system for assigning tables in a restaurant, and a way to keep track of each table’s orders. In the post-Covid world, there is also the ability for diners to order via QR code. But it is in the tiny details where Feedme truly excels. Restaurants can opt to send orders directly to a kitchen display system, so that front-of-house and back-of-house is seamlessly coordinated. User flows are designed to reflect how a restaurant operates and not what makes the most sense to a software engineer. On the rare but critical occasions when the system goes down, panicked customers aren’t routed into a labyrinth of self-help options - a human being picks up the call within seconds.

There are bigger changes too. F&B operates on razor thin margins where getting prices right and minimizing losses from ingredients going bad are matters of life and death, so Feedme built an inventory management system that operates on an ingredient and recipe level so that costs can be managed with precision. Generating repeat visits is important to most F&B operations, so Feedme built a thoughtful CRM that rewards customers with discounts and loyalty points. For small F&B merchants, the platform incorporates a no-code template builder to build their own apps and websites. For larger restaurant chains, Feedme offers a partnership approach, co-creating product modules that support the restaurateurs’ vision for how they want to design menus, store experiences, and loyalty and engagement programs. Feedme’s product roadmap is informed by what customers request the most. Next up is HR and shift management, a complete AI overhaul, and embedded financial services.

To be building the one system that is mission critical to a restaurant’s operations is a privileged position. Do the job wrong and you’ll have a customer who not only hates but resents you; get it right and you’ll win undying loyalty. Feedme started out serving mom-and-pop restaurant operations that were looking for an affordable, easy-to-adopt solution to modernization. But their commitment to excellence has now won them customers like Din Tai Fung and Zus Coffee - large restaurant chains with instant consumer brand recognition and global ambitions that are setting a new standard of excellence in their industry. The fact that they have chosen Feedme to be their technology partner is an unmistakable vote of confidence.