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POS

July 25, 2018

GrubHub Acquires LevelUp for $390M, Deepens Foothold in the Restaurant Space

This morning, food delivery company GrubHub announced that it would acquire digital order management platform LevelUp for $390 million cash.

Boston-based LevelUp was started in 2011 and had raised almost $108 million, according to Crunchbase. The company’s platform integrates into restaurants POS systems to facilitate online ordering and payments while offering loyalty discounts to repeat customers. Their software is already in use at 200 fast food and fast casual chains like Sweetgreen, KFC, and Taco Bell.

GrubHub founder and CEO Matt Maloney told TechCrunch that the purchase will allow his company to handle more deliveries and deepen its integration with restaurant partners’ POS systems. By acquiring LevelUp, GrubHub is widening its focus and taking a more holistic tack towards food delivery domination.

This announcement comes a few months after Uber Eats, GrubHub’s biggest U.S. competitor, acquired online ordering platform orderTalk. Both orderTalk and LevelUp integrate with restaurants to facilitate online orders and payments, but LevelUp also brings customer engagement and loyalty perks to the table. And with LevelUp’s long list of restaurant chain partners, including those under the Yum Brands umbrella, this acquisition helps cement GrubHub as the food delivery king — at least for now.

GrubHub has already gobbled up quite a few smaller food delivery businesses — including Seamless in 2013 and Eat24 in October of last year — making it the biggest company in the space (though Uber Eats is growing faster). It makes sense they’d start exploring other strategies, besides pure expansion, to ensure their supremacy.

As Maloney stated in the company’s second quarter earnings report, in which he announced the LevelUp purchase, GrubHub is hoping to become “the most comprehensive solution for restaurants.” With this acquisition, they just got closer to that goal.

May 16, 2018

Uber Eats Gobbles Up POS Integration With orderTalk Acquisition

Ever gone neck and neck with another car down the road for several miles only to suddenly have them speed up and leave you in a cloud of freeway dust? That’s probably how a lot of third-party delivery services are starting to feel about Uber Eats right now.

Grubhub remains the bigger company in terms of market share, but Uber Eats is the fastest-growing service, and according to recent numbers has the lead in 15 major U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Austin, and Seattle.

And that number will most likely increase, as Uber Eats just announced its acquisition of restaurant tech company orderTalk, who’s online ordering platform is known for its direct and easy integration with existing and custom custom POS systems for restaurants. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Uber Eats head of biz dev, Liz Meyerdirk, told Skift the acquisition is part of a two-fold strategy: to reduce the amount of errors, which can arise with manually entering orders, and to streamline workflow, so that orders via UberEats go direct to the kitchen, sans middleman.

For now, Uber Eats will “retain orderTalk’s point of sale technology as well as several engineers,” according to Meyerdirk. They’ll wind down other orderTalk features over the coming year, including the ability for restaurants to accept orders through the orderTalk platform. (Presumably, they’ll have to switch to Uber Eats.)

The acquisition is none too soon, considering Grubhub already integrates with leading POS systems and has exclusive deals with several big-name chains, including its recently announced partnership with Jack in the Box.

Not to be outpaced, Uber Eats has its own deals with quick-service heavyweights, including its lucrative and exclusive partnership with McDonald’s. They also just inked a deal a deal with Popeye’s to deliver in Florida, New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago.

If you happen to be a Miami-area resident, the Uber Eats-Popeye’s deal means you can get free chicken, biscuits, and red beans today in celebration. Head over to the Uber Eats website or app to get the goods.

For the rest of you, more Uber Eats deals are probably speeding your way in the very near future.

May 8, 2018

Square Launches a Well-Rounded POS System for Restaurants

Square has long been the favorite of small businesses like hair salons and independent artisans. Now, the merchant-services company is hoping to make an impact in restaurants with its newly announced point-of-sale system (POS).

The software, which works for both sit-down and quick-service restaurants, is reportedly Square’s “most sophisticated software yet.” The system centralizes all a restaurant’s operations in a single place, from booking a table to placing orders and managing the check after the meal. Restaurant owners and operators can also do maintenance tasks, like changing table maps and updating menus on the fly, without the need of a service person.

Most important, Square’s new system promises to also solve an issue puzzling more and more restaurants nowadays: how to manage orders coming in from multiple different channels, both online and off.

Its POS system does so by integrating online and offline sales and centralizing them into one software system. In other words, sales from in-house diners as well as those ordering via Postmates, UberEats, and the growing number of other online services can all be viewed in the same place, giving restaurant owners and operators a better understanding of how each channel contributes to the overall sales picture.

As others have said, the acquisition of Caviar from four years ago makes more sense in light of this news. Add to that Square’s recent acquisition of “certain assets” of corporate catering service Zesty, which would help Square to further expand Caviar’s capabilities. Meanwhile, Caviar serves 18 different metro areas and counts Eataly, and Momofuku among its restaurant partners, presumably giving Square access to a whole new set of potential clients for this new POS platform.

Square isn’t alone in rethinking restaurant operations. Actually, that’s an understatement, because there are plenty of folks trying to centralize restaurant tasks, orders, and data into one place and also address the growing number of channels by which consumers order food. “Every restaurant is becoming an omnichannel business,” Gokul Rajaram, Caviar lead at Square, told Fast Company.

Toast is another big player in the space, offering similar features to Square, including the promise of integrating online orders with the rest of the operations. TouchBistro and Clover both offer “all-in-one” systems, and there are tons more options on the market, too.

Square puts a lot of emphasis on the online orders and delivery aspect of its system, even saying “delivery is in our DNA.” That’s a wise proclamation to make in this day and age, but it’s also only a matter of time before most restaurants will add the same thing to their DNA. Which means we can expect the battle for the omnichannel restaurant to get much bigger, sooner rather than later.

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