Groupon Sells Breadcrumb to Upserve

Bringing mobile payments technology to restaurants is increasingly a priority these days, as restaurants look for ways to make diners’ experiences better and faster, which clears more tables faster and allows the restaurant greater profitability.

Upserve—makers of a smart management assistant for restaurants—managed to snag a key feature from Groupon that should help it drive further business as it adds Breadcrumb’s line of services for its users.

With Breadcrumb, the Upserve platform can add a mobile point of sale operation to its own tools, which gives users in bars, restaurants and similar venues the ability to run sales operations directly from an iPad.

The service is available on a subscription basis, and users can use the combined force to manage tables, expedite orders, and carry out a variety of other functions from that platform.

Additionally, the Breadcrumb platform can help compile online review results to help restaurants figure out where to improve, where to make changes, and how to generate the best experience for diners.

The acquisition’s roots go back to 2015, where Breadcrumb and Upserve had worked together as part of a commercial partnership, if only informally.

With the two together, demand went up in a big way, representing about a quarter of Breadcrumb’s new growth, and since Upserve worked with a variety of point of sale systems—including more legacy-oriented systems like the Oracle Micros or NCR’s Alpha system—it could slot effectively into whatever organization needed it.

When you combine versatility and a range of functions together in one package, it’s perfectly reasonable that Breadcrumb and Upserve would continue to get together.

When Breadcrumb already saw use gains when working with Upserve previously, its own interest would have been clear, and Upserve had every reason to get Breadcrumb away from Groupon.

Being able to condense a restaurant’s operations into a mobile device helps drive future sales by making the experience smoother and less time-consuming for the diner.

That’s going to make the Upserve / Breadcrumb proposition more attractive, sufficiently so for Groupon to be willing to hand over Breadcrumb for a minority stake in Upserve.

Groupon smells a good thing cooking….and hopefully, Breadcrumb / Upserve is a dish that tastes as good as it looks.