iCHEF announced integration with Grab and Xero, becoming the first omni-channel POS in Southeast Asia

iCHEF, the Taiwan-based leading restaurant POS system provider, has lately announced their partnership with multi-service giant Grab and online accounting platform Xero across Singapore and Malaysia, making it the first F&B solution to adopt an omni-channel POS strategy in Southeast Asia.

Founded in 2012, iCHEF was born to solve the inefficiency of the food serving procedure in their beef noodle shop Mazendo. As traditional POS terminals could only handle basic orderings, they developed the entire brand new POS system on their own, aiming to optimize the workflow between servers and chefs, which then became iCHEF, the most awarded POS design ever, including the 2016 iF Design Golden Award.

Starting to develop its overseas market in 2016, iCHEF has now owned the largest share of the POS system in Singapore, accounting for 30-40% of the market as it does domestically.

On top of that, while the food and beverage(F&B) sector, which has been hit hard by COVID-19 restrictions in Singapore, experienced a 26% decline in sales in 2020, iCHEF merchant sales however rose by 8%.

Following the success it has gained, iCHEF took another step forward recently as it integrated with the greatest unicorn in Southeast Asia. Grab, which has lately clinched a record-breaking SPAC merger, securing a $40 billion equity value, evolved from a ride-hailing app operator to offer various services such as GrabFood.

In the past, when receiving orders from GrabFood, restaurant staff had to key them into their iCHEF POS manually, which made taking orders from the food delivery platform a time-consuming and error-prone task. With the integration of the two platforms, GrabFood orders now appear on iCHEF menu automatically and thus are sent to the kitchens directly, saving up to 40 mins during peak hours.

The integration of iCHEF and GrabFood highly streamline the online food ordering and delivery process. / Photograph: iChef

Furthermore, there are over 30 e-payment methods in Singapore, and thus many restaurants have adopted Xero, a New-Zealand based online accounting platform for small businesses, to help with their bookkeeping.

With the integration of financial data from the iCHEF into Xero, automated accounting is now available for restaurant owners on iCHEF. As Xero takes care of the accounting of the food cost, expenses, commissions, and the payment received from banks, orders from different channels with different payment methods are now automatically dealt with by iCHEF and Xero.

iCHEF users can now have their finances automatically managed, regardless of order channels and payment methods. / Photograph: iCHEF

iCHEF users can now have their finances automatically managed, regardless of order channels and payment methods.

In fact, not only Grab and Xero, iCHEF has long been collaborating with Facebook, UberEats, and LINE in Taiwan. In March 2021, Google has also become one of its partners.

The partnership deal with Google introduced Google My Business (GMB) service into iCHEF POS system. That is, instead of applying GMB on their own in the standard way, iCHEF now enables their users to directly open and have their shops licensed on Google Map, cutting the original 14 days of waiting to 3 days only.

"We aim to become the POS that integrates the most platforms, and the openness of Taiwan's ecosystem allows us to do so," said Ken Chen, the co-founder of iCHEF. Since there are no monopoly platforms in Taiwan, iCHEF is able to cooperate with as many companies as possible.

Accordingly, iCHEF is no longer just a POS system, it has now advanced its business by positioning itself as a platform of platforms for F&B that benefits three sides of the restaurant business.

For restaurant owners, it digitalizes the marketing and financial management; for restaurant staff, it makes orders and kitchen management more efficient. As for customers, iCHEF makes mobile ordering and membership management easier.

“The menu, the table orderings, and the CRM data are all synchronized on iCHEF, it's an omni-channel service," he said. "We've always tried to make opening a restaurant a better business."

Online ordering demand and food delivery service have both grown faster than ever in recent years, especially due to COVID-19. "The pandemic has challenged the status-quo of the F&B industry, and this causes larger F&B companies to adopt iCHEF as their POS," he added.

Consequently, instead of developing new markets, the team is now focusing more on their technology development, gaining its footing in the countries it has developed and eyeing an IPO.

〔Original :Meet Global〕
https://meet-global.bnext.com.tw/articles/view/47399