Digital iPad POS Gets Pizza into the Pan and the Fire Faster4 min read
Jack’s Oven is not just baking pizza on Logan’s Historic Main Street; it’s making history. Not only did husband and wife owners, Jack and Julie Carlisle, open the city’s first Wood-Fired Oven Pizzeria in January 2010, early last month the restaurateurs replaced their cash register, notepads, and menus with a digital iPad POS.
Situated near the eastern edge of Cache Valley on the western slopes of the Bear River Mountains in the Wasatch Range of northern Utah, Logan is home to Utah State University (USU). Food blog GrubGrade describes the city as “a small, out of the way western community that houses a large state university.” The university presence makes Logan ideal for a pizza place run on a digital iPad POS.
The vast majority of the 25,000+ students at USU are in the highly sought after, tech-savvy 18-34 year old demographic (Generation Y or Millennials): the average undergraduate student is 22.3 years old and the average grad student is 33.8 years old. In consumer surveys, Millennials have consistently indicated that they are most likely to eat at “restaurants which offer a wide selection at low cost,” with priority given to fast food chains and pizzerias. Moreover, Millennials are the largest users of online, mobile phone, and smart phone applications, are early adopters of new technologies, and prefer restaurants “with high-tech gear” over those without. A digital iPad POS can seamlessly integrate with these new technologies and applications.
With its new digital iPad POS, Jack’s Oven is just the type of place Millennials are looking for. As Managing Editor of Swipely, Amanda MacArthur, points out, “Millennials … appreciate small, independent businesses, mom and pop shops, locally-sourced vegetables, free-range beef and organic everything.” The menu at Jack’s Oven defies the small size of the cozy mom-and-pop restaurant. In addition to the long list of artfully crafted pizzas, Jack’s Oven offers a house soup-of-the-day, plus sandwiches, salads, and even a dessert pizza. And, while Jack’s inspiration for the authentic Neapolitan-style thin crust pizzas, and the massive brick oven in which they are baked over a wood-fired flame, are imported from Italy, the high-quality, fresh ingredients for Jack’s artisan pizzas are all locally-sourced and the flour for the delicate crust, certified organic. And, according to GrubGrade, owner and master chef “Jack Carlisle personally mans the cooking as well as the slicing of the ‘hot out of the flame’ pizzas,” to the delight of patrons.
The digital iPad POS lets Jack’s Oven offer these young consumers just the type of unique experience they crave: it allows them to customize everything, involves them in the cooking experience, provides personal customer service, and offers them the opportunity to connect to social media, like Facebook and Twitter, to provide feedback on their dining experience, see updates and promotions, and develop a personal relationship with the restaurant. (Don’t miss our previous blog post, “The Handheld Digital Menu: Building a Relationship with Gen Y Customers.”)
Unlike outdated traditional restaurant POS systems, the digital iPad POS has the architecture to collect and track a wealth of empirical customer data, mine customer intelligence, and leverage that information so that Jack’s Oven can sharpen the focus of its advertising, promotional, and sales messages and create marketing campaigns precisely tailored to its customers. (Be sure to read our previous blog post, “POS a POS? An iPad POS System Makes POS = Position of Strength.”)
What’s more, Jack’s General Manager, Jim Bear, told the Herald Journal that the wireless digital iPad POS not only cost far less than conventional, space-consuming, stationary restaurant POS systems, it’s already paying off! Orders take less time to process, which means Chef Jack can get pizzas into the pan and into the wood-fired oven faster and guests have less time to wait to see Jack pull their perfectly-charred pizza from the fire.
The digital iPad POS also helps the owners manage the restaurant’s table layout, to maximize seating capacity and reduce waiting time for guests, and facilitates tableside ordering and payment processing, which saves valuable server time, so servers can handle more tables, take and serve more orders, and turn tables faster.
(Find out how “Feature-Rich Digital Menus Saves Time and Money for NYC Eatery” in these previous blog posts.)
Disclaimer: This is an independent report sourced from one or more news articles and or press releases; none of the company’s, entities or technologies digressed in this report are affiliated with or a client of Aptito.
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