The Top 3 Technologies from the 2022 Bar and Restaurant Expo
The 2022 Bar and Restaurant Expo was held in Las Vegas, NV from March 21 - 23, and featured hundreds of new and exciting products for the service industry.
Thousands attended this years Bar and Restaurant Expo in Las Vegas to get a glimpse of the newest products and technologies. From new drinks, to audio/video systems, to POS accessories, the expo served as a great guide to what's coming next to the service industry. Here's a list of our 3 favorite products/booths, and how to get started with each:
1) Barpay - QR Code Order + Pay Platform
As a shock to nobody, QR codes dominated the expo. It seems clear that QR code digital menus have paved the way for additional services that QR codes can provide. For example, just about every POS company at the convention now offers some version of a QR code platform that either allows guests to pay, or order and pay for their food and drinks.
Why We Love This
Aside from the fact that Barpay utilizes QR codes for our industry leading Order + Pay platform and digital menus, simply put, QR codes are a better customer experience for the standard bar and/or restaurant. Sure, there will always be old school dive bars and extremely high end restaurants that only operate one way, the traditional server and bartender model, but for just about every other type of venue, customers should be given the ability to choose between using QR codes to order and pay, or receive traditional service from a staff member.
Why Your Customers Will Love This
The service is faster - they never have to wait for a staff member to place an order or pay
They don't worry about forgetting to close out or losing a debit/credit card
They can see what they are ordering - for example, Barpay's platform allows for images and descriptions to be uploaded for each individual item
It's a safer contactless experience
Why You Will Love This
QR codes simplify and alleviate staffing inefficiencies - with the current staffing shortage, QR code ordering allows less servers to handle more customers
Customers are ordering more from QR codes than from servers - across the industry, the average check size is roughly 30% larger from QR code orders
Table turnover time - because customers can pay and leave without the wait time it takes to get a check, your tables clear faster and can take new customers sooner, thus increasing the total number of checks you process during your busiest hours
Capture customer data - for example, Barpay's platform requires the customer to leave an email address that the venue has access to, if they want a receipt
Why Barpay Stands Out
While plenty of POS systems have created their own QR code order and pay feature as a response to new health and safety concerns due to covid-19, we believe that Barpay outshines the rest for one main reason:
Barpay's only focus since 2015 has been on the contactless in venue order and pay experience. The company has been working with bar and restaurant owners since well before the pandemic to build a robust, yet simple platform that can be used as the primary way for guests to order and pay, not just an additional feature of a POS system.
We believe that the features and upgrades Barpay has made over the course of seven years, greatly outweigh any of the other Order + Pay platforms available. The best example of this might be Barpay's ability to limit how many orders are sent to the bar/kitchen within a certain timeframe. At face value, that might not seem like a big feature, but we are yet to see another order and pay system that has an order governor, and one of the most common concerns we would get from owners over the years, was how to limit ordering when the bar or kitchen is already slammed. This is just one of the many well thought out features that Barpay includes, and the competition does not.
How To Get Started
Barpay's onboarding experience was designed to minimize any owner effort. There is no setup or hardware cost, no minimum contract or cancellation fee, and the Barpay team uploads all menu information, configures all hardware, and generates all QR codes with the venue's floorplan embedded directly into the codes. Typical turn around time is less than 2 weeks.
Price - $199/month
To learn more about Barpay, click here
2) Vyyer - Age Verification Technology
From our point of view one of the questions owners constantly ask, is how Barpay handles age verification. For liability reasons, we leave that responsibility on the venue, so when we spoke the people from the Vyyer age verification app, we were really excited about their simple solution for bar and restaurant owners.
Why We Love This
Vyyer is actively solving one of the main problems associated with contactless order and pay platforms - how do you prevent someone underage from purchasing alcohol? They have built their application to be extremely user friendly, but also with the idea of 3rd party integrations in mind. This makes it easy for a company like Barpay to be able to offer venues a legitimate age verification platform, within the Barpay system itself. Consolidation is awesome!
Why Your Customers Will Love This
The customer may never realize it, but Vyyer protects their identity and never collects Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Why You Will Love This
Consolidate your age verification, guest list, and VIP reservation systems
Gain data/insights on guest visit count
Less hardware
Why Vyyer Stands Out
This is not the first product we have seen that was an app based solution, but Vyyer takes a different approach to catching fake IDs than the competition. The norm for age verification apps is simply relying on a database of fake templates that is constantly updated (as of right now, there are about 1,500 known fake templates). Considering states don't have a single standard and can change ID formatting without notice, these apps have a lot to keep up with, which means constant updating for you.
Vyyer takes a different approach. The app has a proprietary system that uses a series of barcode verifications to measure ID validity. This means that if a state changes its ID format, it doesn't affect Vyyer, as the app is not comparing a format or template to a database, but instead is actually reading the barcodes and measuring them against each other and other legitimate IDs that have been scanned.
On top of that, the Vyyer team is recently funded and actively integrating with other 3rd party applications and POS systems. We believe that interoperability between applications is the future, and Vyyer is doing a great job of developing with that in mind.
How To Get Started
You can download the Vyyer app immediately on both iPhone and Android. The app offers a 14 day trial period to see if it works for your operations, after which, you pay a monthly subscription that you can cancel at anytime.
Price - $80/month
To learn more about Vyyer, click here
3) Jet Pong (by Valley Dynamo) - Bar Games
Nothing better than some friendly competition at a bar. And what better way to prove you're a true bar hero than by beating someone in the classic game of beer pong? Valley Dynamo's Jet Pong was the coolest in venue entertainment system we saw at the expo. A beer pong game with a floating ping pong ball? Come on, that's awesome!
Why We Love This
Bars are all about fun, and beer pong is arguably the funnest drinking game on the planet. Combine that with a bar atmosphere and bragging rights amongst strangers and friends on the line? Sign us up.
Why Your Customers Will Love This
See answer for Why We Love This
Why You Will Love This
See answer for Why Your Customers Will Love This
Incremental revenue for you with very low maintenance
Why Jet Pong Stands Out
There are a few other beer pong related machines on the market, but Jet Pong is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition in both design, and functionality. The machine itself looks like something you would see in a modern arcade, complete with multiple screens, LED lights, speakers, and a scoreboard. But our favorite feature is the floating ping pong ball. When the game starts, an air vent blows out air at the perfect speed to keep the ball floating about 6 inches off the table. Is it necessary? Maybe for health standards. Is it cool? Undeniably.
How To Get Started
While the machine itself is complex, getting started is simple. You place your order through the sales department, and the machine comes assembled virtually plug and play ready.
Price - Unknown
To learn more about Jet Pong, click here
Next year's Bar and Restaurant Expo is scheduled to be held from March 27 - 29 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. If you're in the service industry and have never been, we highly recommend attending! Early bird tickets are available through the expo website.