Dining goes digital as iPad replaces paper menus

Nikita Peer

No more gritting your teeth when your sizzler arrives. Now, when you say, “no mushrooms” or “extra chilli sauce”, that’s exactly what you’ll get. And if you’re a couch potato, here’s a delicious morsel. Thanks to a new app, you no longer have to repeat your order to a distracted voice at the other end of the line – and then keep your fingers crossed! Promising to change the fine dining experience, Titbit is an app that’s catching the fancy of restaurants and their patrons in metros across India that works with the iPad. While restaurants can replace paper menus with digital ones and streamline the flow of orders, customers can make more informed food choices and count on getting exactly what they’ve ordered.
Launched with an investment of US$ 2 million from its parent company, Valuable Group, Titbit began its journey in 2011. 
 
Customer Experience
This digital menu platform, developed by a Mumbai start-up, already has restaurants in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore handing out iPads to patrons to take their orders. Apart from displaying the menu, the Titbit app also offers nutritional information and calorie count, alternative food choices, pairings with other dishes and wine, and mouth-watering images and videos. It also tells you what’s off the menu while promoting the special of the day. And guess what? You can also personalise your dish! But isn’t it all too cold and digi? Pre-empting this challenge, Titbit introduced a TB Captain, an app which is in the waiter’s iPad, to manage the entire flow of the order. “When the customer submits his order through the TB digital menu app on the iPad, the waiter receives it on his TB Captain and uses it to recommend dishes and make suggestions. Once the order is finalised, the waiter passes it on to the kitchen via the app, which ensures that the kitchen is not flooded with orders and the chef can time his dishes too,” explains Ameya Hete, Founder of Titbit. “Through this platform, the waiter performs a customer service rather than take orders.” The Pilot
Titbit was founded by Ameya Hete and Kaustubh Cholkar, who started developing a basic field test in January 2011. They researched their app by talking to restaurants to understand their processes and created a platform based on their findings. They did a pilot at Melting Pot in Juhu, Mumbai, and Opa Café in San Francisco, US, in March 2011. They actually wanted to take the order straight from the iPad into the kitchen. “Menu management is a very expensive process, not simply in terms of the costs of making the menus but also through intangible, indirect costs like varying commodity prices, ability to react to consumer feedback and unavailability of certain items listed on the menu due to unforeseen circumstances. We therefore felt the need to adopt the global trend of replacing paper menus with digital ones,” says Hete. Revenue Model
“For clients who want to invest in the business themselves, there is a simple licensing-based model where they pay approximately $200 per year for the license of a device and we service them across the board,” says Hete. Titbit also partners with restaurants by making a capital investment themselves in the devices and charges their clients on a per-bill basis, depending on the number of devices provided. The fee per transaction varies between Rs 25 and Rs 50 per bill, depending on the investment required in the restaurant. “With this model, we have an upside as the restaurant realises the value we are adding to their business by luring customers through pictures and effective designs we which add to the menu. This also enables higher sales. And our fee is actually coming out of the increased revenue. We are not enabling their existing revenues; we are adding to their revenues,” explains Hete. He says that while 80 per cent of restaurateurs prefer to partner with Titbit, only 20 per cent invest in buying the devices. The company has also launched a portal for home delivery service. It has tied up with about 400 restaurants that pay 8-10% of the bill amount to the company. Scaling Up
Titbit recently added 45 restaurants from across India and a few in Turkey, London and the US too. “We are adding three to four new restaurants every month and are growing overseas through our partner network in sales. These partners execute last-mile operations and customer management,” says Hete. And, of course, it’s working because Titbit is clicking with customers too. Oh, did we mention that the app is integrated with social networking features? So if you loved your meal and ate your heart out, don’t forget to ‘like’ it and share the experience on Facebook too!
 
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