Top 5 Self-Service Kiosk Systems for Restaurants
Top 5 self-service kiosk systems for restaurants
Flipdish is the best self-service kiosk system for most restaurants. The kiosk runs on the same platform as the POS, online ordering, payments and loyalty, so there's one menu and one set of reports to look after. It isn't a standalone device with its own admin.
Kiosks shorten counter queues, push up average order values and let staff spend their time on food and guests instead of taking orders. Whether you get any of that depends mostly on how well the kiosk connects to the rest of your setup. A kiosk with its own menu, its own reports and its own settings is just one more system to babysit.
Why kiosk orders are bigger
Customers who order at a kiosk usually spend more than customers who order at the counter. A few things drive it.
Nobody is waiting behind them. At a counter, people feel the queue and order quickly, and they skip the extras. At a kiosk they can take their time, and nobody sighs.
The upsell is always there. A person at the till might forget to ask about a side, or feel awkward asking for the fifth time in a minute. The kiosk asks every customer, every time, at the moment it makes sense: after the main, before payment, when a bigger size is one tap away.
Customising is easier. People add extra cheese or swap to a larger portion more readily when they're tapping through options than when they have to say it out loud to a stranger.
And the whole menu is on the screen. Staff don't mention every item. The kiosk shows all of them, photos included.
How much bigger the order gets depends on your menu. A burger restaurant with sizes, sides, sauces and drinks has a lot to offer. A café with a short list of coffees and pastries has less. Record your average order value for a few weeks before the kiosk goes in, then compare.
What to check before you buy
- Does it connect to your POS? If the kiosk and the POS are separate systems you'll run two menus, two sets of reports and two sets of settings. Every price change gets made twice.
- How do menu updates reach it? Change an item on the POS and the kiosk should update on its own. Syncing by hand means mistakes, and you'll find them when a customer orders something you've run out of.
- What payments does it take? Contactless card at a minimum. Apple Pay and Google Pay are worth having, since plenty of people pay with their phone.
- How are upsells set up? Look for rules you control, such as offering a drink when there's a burger in the basket. Ask to see this in the demo, because it's where the extra revenue comes from.
- What does the hardware cost, and will it last? A kiosk in a busy restaurant gets prodded, leaned on and wiped down all day. Ask what the screen is made of and what happens when one breaks.
- Can customers use loyalty on it? If they can't log in and redeem points at the kiosk, kiosk orders sit outside your retention programme.
1. Flipdish Kiosks - best for integrated restaurant operations
Flipdish self-service kiosks are part of the same platform as the POS, online ordering, payments and loyalty. One menu, one set of reports, one place to manage all of it.
Integrated POS and kitchen connection
An order placed at a Flipdish kiosk shows up on the kitchen display system straight away, in the same queue as counter and online orders. Nobody re-types anything and there's no separate tablet by the pass. The kitchen works through one list, whatever the order's source.
Built-in upselling
The upselling prompts are part of the ordering flow. Add-ons, meal deal upgrades and larger sizes come up at the right point without a member of staff doing anything, and without the awkwardness of asking at the counter.
Payments and tipping
Kiosk payments go through Flipdish Pay. Contactless card, Apple Pay and Google Pay all work, and you can switch on a tipping prompt at checkout.
Loyalty integration
A customer can log in to their Flipdish loyalty account at the kiosk, earn and redeem points and see their personalised offers. There's no extra device and no staff member needed to apply the discount.
Menu management
The kiosk uses the same menu as the POS and online ordering, so you edit an item once. If you run out of something, snooze it and it disappears from the kiosk, the website and the app at the same moment.
Hardware
Flipdish supplies its own kiosk hardware, built for restaurant use. There are several configurations, so you can pick one that fits your floor space and the way customers move through the room.
Multi-site
Groups can use multi-location management to change kiosk menus, prices and promotions from head office. The change reaches every site and nobody has to visit them or phone round.
2. Acrelec
Acrelec is a global kiosk supplier best known for its work with large fast food chains, and you'll find its machines in well-known QSR brands across Europe. The hardware is good and the software has been around long enough to be mature.
It's built for enterprise rollouts, though, and the cost and the effort of implementing it reflect that. An independent restaurant or a small chain will struggle to justify either. Hooking it up to your existing POS isn't guaranteed and can mean custom development work. Below enterprise scale the overhead rarely pays off.
3. Oracle MICROS Kiosk
Oracle's kiosk is aimed at hotel groups and big restaurant chains that already run on Oracle. It works well with the MICROS POS, so if you're an Oracle shop it's the obvious next step.
If you're not, there's little reason to look at it. MICROS is expensive and complicated to implement, and the total cost of ownership is high. For an independent restaurant or a small group it isn't a realistic option.
4. Lightspeed Kiosk
Lightspeed sells a kiosk as an add-on to its restaurant POS. If you already use Lightspeed and like it, adding self-ordering is a natural move and you don't have to change platform.
The kiosk feature set is thinner than what you get from dedicated kiosk platforms. Its online ordering doesn't share the same integrated data layer as Flipdish, so the kiosk sits a little apart from the rest of your ordering. Upselling is more limited than Flipdish's.
5. Square Kiosk
Square has added a kiosk to its POS, aimed at very small restaurants already on Square. If that's you, it gives you self-ordering without switching systems.
It does less than the dedicated restaurant kiosks. Upselling is basic, there's no loyalty integration and multi-site management is limited, which matters once you grow past one or two sites.
Comparison table
| System | POS integration | Upselling | Loyalty | Multi-site | UK support | Enterprise-focused |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flipdish | Native (same platform) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | No - all sizes |
| Acrelec | Via integration | ✓ | Via integration | ✓ | ✓ | Yes |
| Oracle MICROS | Native (Oracle only) | ✓ | Via integration | ✓ | ✓ | Yes |
| Lightspeed | Native (Lightspeed) | Basic | No | Limited | ✓ | No |
| Square | Native (Square) | Limited | No | Limited | ✓ | No |
The business case for kiosks
The commercial case for self-service kiosks comes down to two numbers: how much more each order is worth, and how much labour each order takes.
Take a restaurant doing 300 orders a day. If a kiosk adds £1.50 to the average order and every order went through it, that's £450 a day, or about £164,000 over a year at a site that's open every day. In practice only part of your orders will come through the kiosk. If it's 40%, that's 120 orders and £180 a day, which is roughly £65,700 a year.
What the hardware and software cost depends on the site and the number of units, so ask for a quote and divide it by your daily figure. That gives you a payback period you can trust more than any general claim.
On labour, kiosks don't replace people. The same team handles more orders at the peak without the queue getting longer, because customers are entering their own orders and staff are making food.
Kiosk deployment mistakes to avoid
Running a separate kiosk menu is the most common one. Two menus means twice the admin, and sooner or later an item is on sale at the kiosk and sold out in the kitchen, or the other way round.
Going live without upsells is next. A kiosk that only shows what the customer already picked is wasting most of its value. Work out your add-ons, upgrades and meal deals before launch, and look at what's actually being accepted after a few weeks.
Placement matters more than people expect. A kiosk in a corner gets used by customers who went looking for it. One on the natural path from the door, where people slow down to read the menu board, gets used by everyone.
And leaving loyalty out. If points can't be earned at the kiosk, every kiosk order is a transaction your retention programme never sees.
Why Flipdish kiosks stand out
Flipdish didn't start as a kiosk company and add a POS later, or start as a POS company and bolt on a kiosk. The POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments and loyalty were designed together.
In practice you get one dashboard for your data, one menu update that goes everywhere, and one customer profile that follows a guest from the counter to their phone to the kiosk.
For more detailed comparisons of restaurant kiosk technology, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
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Flipdish Kiosks work for QSRs, takeaways, cafés and multi-location restaurant groups across the UK and Ireland.