Restaurant India cites a projection that the worldwide market for restaurant POS terminals will be worth $38.16 billion by 2030, with small independent restaurants behind much of the growth. More than half of Petpooja's roughly 35,000 customers are in towns classed as Tier 3 and Tier 4, a sign that POS adoption is no longer a big-city trend.
The size of the shift
Restaurant India's 2023 reporting attaches a number to the decline of the handwritten bill and the paper ticket. It cites a projection that the worldwide market for restaurant POS terminals will be worth $38.16 billion by 2030, rising by roughly 8% each year from 2023. Large chains went digital years ago, so much of that growth is coming from small independent restaurants, many of which used to run entirely on handwritten orders and stock counted by hand.
What the paper system costs you
The older way of working that Restaurant India describes will be familiar to most owners: orders written by hand, stock tracked manually and records kept on paper. It takes a lot of staff time, and it invites small mistakes that lose money week after week.
There is a second cost. Without a system that records customer preferences, busy hours and best-selling dishes as a matter of routine, menu and pricing decisions come down to instinct, because there is nothing else to base them on.
Petpooja's growth in numbers
Restaurant India uses Petpooja's growth to show how quickly restaurants are switching:
- About 35,000 customers across India
- A six-fold rise in recurring revenue over two years
- New customers each month up from roughly 1,200 before the pandemic to more than 3,000 at the time of reporting
- A stated goal of signing up over 4,000 customers monthly, with growth of 33% month-on-month
- More than half of its customers based in Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns rather than the metros
Petpooja also connects with ONDC, WhatsApp, Knowlarity, Gupshup and Paytm's payment devices. Those links point to where restaurant technology is heading: billing, payments, customer messaging and order routing handled together in one system rather than several. Shaival Desai, Petpooja's VP of Growth, contrasts the company's analytics with the fixed, standard reports offered by most POS and ERP providers, and points out that a single bakery and a group of breweries need very different reports drawn from the same data.
Why smaller restaurants gain the most
Urban Piper co-founder Saurabh Gupta, quoted in the Restaurant India piece, says small food businesses were hit harder by Covid than any other segment, and that they turned to technology to digitise and find new ways to reach their customers.
The article's argument is that a proper POS takes away an advantage that used to belong only to scale. A small restaurant with the right system can now keep track of stock, see when its busiest hours fall and offer loyalty rewards as accurately as big chains have long been able to.
Digitisation is reaching the supply chain
The same thinking is spreading beyond the billing counter. Restaurant India also mentions UdyogYantra, a startup from Delhi set up by Ankur Jain, which applies the same approach to buying food. Its aim is to make sourcing, production and distribution clearer and more predictable for food businesses.
What this means for your restaurant
- If you still take orders on paper, you are not capturing the data on busy hours, best-sellers and customer preferences that menu and pricing decisions depend on.
- Being outside a metro is no reason to wait: more than half of Petpooja's customers are in Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns.
- When comparing POS systems, check what they connect to, such as payment devices, WhatsApp and ONDC, and whether reports can be shaped around your kind of business rather than fixed templates.
- A POS that tracks stock as it moves gives the storeroom the same records as the billing counter, which helps with par levels, portion control and cutting food waste.
Sources
- How POS Systems Are Redefining Indian Restaurants to Go from Paper to Pixels — Restaurant India
This article summarises the reporting and guides listed above; the figures belong to those sources and are attributed in the text. Check anything that affects your business against your own platform agreements, payout statements and advisers.