Online food delivery platform for football stadiums, theaters and cinemas

Enabling visitors of public venues to order food online, avoiding long queues at the kiosk.

SEAT is a London-based food delivery company that acts as an intermediary between takeaway food points and customers.

Venues fail to realize food & beverage revenue because over 50% of visitors opt-out of purchasing due to long lines. This congestion is caused by overwhelmed staff, unpredictable demand, slow payment processes, and outdated and expensive POS (Point of Sale) systems.

The goal of the company was to create a white-label platform which can resolve this issue for venues with a large number of visitors, like football stadiums, theaters and cinemas. The solution was to eliminate the frustration of queues by allowing guests to pre-order and prepay for food and drinks and enable the vendors to deliver a world-class customer experience whilst increasing bottom-line profit.

An online platform that allows customers to place an order online and receive it by barcode at the nearest kiosk or at their seats.

We have defined three categories of users:

• Customers.
• Food Vendors.
• Network owner.

Each user category requires a separate application functionality, so we proposed to develop three independent applications that are supposed to be integrated into a common unified platform.

Mobile application for Customers. The client can view food categories and meals in each category. Once you add items to your shopping cart, you can checkout and pay. The customer can also monitor the status of the order, and pick it up or receive the delivery by ticket, right at the seat, when the order is ready.

Mobile application for Food Vendors. This application allows to receive orders and accept them after the successful payment, specifying the estimated order lead time.

All created orders are automatically assigned to the available kiosks, evenly distributing the workload and taking into account the location of the seat for the order delivery. 

When the order is ready, the food vendor changes the status of the order to "ready for delivery", and the customer receives a push notification.

We have implemented a barcode system to identify orders. The customer can use the mobile application and show the order barcode, which will be scanned and recognized by the mobile application in the kiosk.

After the successful order acceptance, the client receives an e-mail message with a receipt.

Network owner uses a web application - a CRM system. This application is supposed to manage the venue where the public events are taking place. It allows to add, edit or delete existing kiosks, manage food categories, meals and prices, and move products among the kiosks. Moreover, there is an analytics section that provides viewing statistics (in the tables and graph format) about customers, orders and stock products.

Cross-platform mobile application for online food orders, using Xiaomi SunMi device, providing scanning of a barcode and quick receipts printing in kiosks and an admin panel for managing kiosks and tracking statistics.

To implement the platform, we proposed using AWS cloud services. We justified this decision with a large number of ready-made scalable services that have proven high availability and reliability.

The solution consists of 4 main components:

1. Mobile application for ordering food by customers. We used a cross-platform solution based on React Native, which allowed us to speed up and reduce the cost of developing, testing and supporting the application.

The Stripe system was engaged as a payment system.

2. An Android application for kiosk vendors was implemented for Xiaomi SunMi POS terminal, which is equipped with Seiko (Japan) high-speed thermal printer for printing receipts 58 mm wide (print speed 75 mm/s), as well as NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS modules.

This device is able to scan a QR or barcode from a smartphone in just 0.7 seconds, this criteria is important for the quick order delivery. After the order checkout, the device prints out a receipt for the customer.

The major asset in choosing this particular device was its cost, it is cheaper than many similar devices.

The customer is informed about the change of the order status by push notifications, sent by the vendor application through the AWS SNS (Amazon Simple Notification Service).

3. The CRM system was created using the Angular framework.

4. Server-side. All information about customers, products and orders is stored in the MySQL database. Since we do not interact directly with the database, using the AWS RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) service, the database scales automatically, depending on system load generated by the user's amount, without our participation.

We used AWS S3 to store static content such as images, media files and log files archive. AWS Lambda service is used for small tasks like image compression and database backups.