TouchBistro: Supporting Restaurateurs Since Inception

With the goal to support the passion of restaurateurs through cutting-edge technology, TouchBistro was founded in 2010. As an organization, TouchBistro knows that while passion is plenty in this industry, time and money usually aren’t. That’s why TouchBistro was built as an iPad POS and integrated payments solution that helps restaurateurs put more money in their pockets and more time back in their day.
In an interview with Insights Success, Alex Barrotti, CEO & Founder of TouchBistro describes the story of the organization.
Below are the highlights of the interview between Alex and Insights Success;
Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness and its vision.
TouchBistro is an iPad POS and integrated payments solution with every feature designed for the unique workflows of restaurants to achieve optimum operational efficiency, deliver an exceptional dining experience for patrons, and take the guess work out of making business decisions to improve the bottom line.
Describe your company’s cutting-edge food & beverages solutions which address all the needs of your customers?
TouchBistro was built from the ground up to work as the heart of a restaurant’s operations by streamlining and simplifying all aspects of running a restaurant – from order taking, payment processing, menu management, accounting, reporting, and inventory management, to staff scheduling and customer loyalty – and continues to add functionality that restaurateurs need most. We carefully listen to our customers to guide product development, so we solve the problems they have. As we are focused only on the restaurant vertical, our award-winning product development team gets to design workflows and use cases that are specifically tailored for restaurants and benefit the lives of restaurateurs. This creates a best-of-breed solution for the restaurant vertical.
Cost is a sensitive issue for restaurateurs. With TouchBistro, they don’t overpay for features they don’t need that are often found in POS solutions that were designed initially for other types of businesses, like those that sell clothes or repair cars. In TouchBistro, the functions are essential to running a restaurant – such as our patented bill splitting or combining feature, management of restaurant staffing, inventory tracked against dinners served, table assignment and reservations control – which may not be found in other POS solutions that are not specifically built for restaurants. High cost proprietary POS hardware has also been a problem for restaurateurs with legacy systems. To resolve this problem, TouchBistro was designed to run on any offthe- shelf iPad available at an authorized reseller. In addition to lower or comparable monthly license fees, TouchBistro offers a flexibility in the choice of integrated payment processors, so restaurateurs can choose the one they prefer. Many POS solutions do not offer this flexibility which can significantly impact the total cost of ownership of a POS solution with higher bill processing fees.
With the escalating number of food & beverages solutions providers, how is your company creating an impact on its customers?
TouchBistro immediately stands out with its rich feature set and intuitive graphical user interface – restaurateurs can literally download the app and learn how to operate it in 30 minutes or less as it automates the actual workflows and processes that are already familiar to people in the restaurant business. Staff can be rapidly trained on it as well, which is important with the high turnovers that are common in a restaurant.
Enticing photos of menu items, along with ingredients, can be displayed on the iPad to show to diners and to rapidly respond to allergy concerns, helping customers with meal choices and providing servers with a great upselling tool. Servers are prompted with a pop-up display of modifiers to customize menu items, such as well-done or rare for a steak, or for adding combos like fries or a salad to a burger. This feature prompts servers to upsell specific items automatically, lowering the burden of training or memorizing while increasing the bill. Customizing the system for items like daily menu changes or seating rearrangement can be easily done by management in-house without requiring any costly outside programming. Product updates and enhancements are provided to users about every eight weeks at no charge. These are simply downloaded by users when they chose to implement that functionality.
What challenges does your company face in providing your solution and how is TouchBistro tackling them?
TouchBistro is leading the charge in overseas markets in partnering with payment acquirers so we can offer greater operational efficiencies and financial services to our end users by integrating with banking services. Finding the right partners, localizing the app with translations and tax/legal regulations and local currency are all challenges faced when expanding into a new market. TouchBistro has already partnered in this new model with JPMorgan & Chase in the USA, BarclayPayments in the UK, and EVO Payments in Mexico.
What could be the potential future of TouchBistro and how do you envision sustaining its competency?
The total addressable market for TouchBistro is $72 billion. Our SaaS business model enables us to open and expand markets around the world with extraordinary agility. To support sustainable and profitable growth, we are continually fine-tuning our operations, expanding our product features, opening new markets, and adding new partnerships. Most importantly, our product quality is unmatched. No other system is able to duplicate our design, making TouchBistro the most innovative solution for improving restaurant operations.
About the Leader 
Alex Barrotti, TouchBistro CEO & Founder, is a successful serial entrepreneur who has emerged as a visionary in the advanced technologies that help retail and hospitality businesses expand. Alex launched TouchBistro iPad POS solution in 2011. As of today, TouchBistro has helped over 16,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries to increase sales, improve the customer experience, and make better business decisions.
Before TouchBistro, Alex was at the forefront of ecommerce development when he founded INEX in 1997. While others doubted online shopping would one day become the norm, Alex persisted in developing a novel turnkey solution that enabled storeowners to create online storefronts with pre-designed templates. At 29 years old, Alex sold INEX for $45 million.