Coalition Effort Brings Swoope to Mobile Food in UK

Mobile order-ahead options have delivered, so far, a terrific proposition for users and even some gains for restaurants that put these to work. Out at Starbucks, it’s worked so well that it’s actually hurting sales; so many advance orders were coming in that at-the-counter order speed was suffering at least for a while. Now, there’s a new player in the mobile order-ahead market in the United Kingdom: Swoope.

Swoopos—a point-of-sale system geared toward the cashless transaction that’s increasingly popular in the UK—developer Lee Nazari connected with First Payment to better bring out the Swoope app, which will give Brits a range of options when it comes to ordering and paying ahead.

Already, Swoopos has been spotted working with Second Cup Coffee and Subway, and has generated a combined total of over 12,000 orders so far. So far, several major UK cities have taken up the Swoope gauntlet, including Oxford, Newcastle, and the big one, London.

Nazari himself commented “Working with First Payment, and being able to offer innovative payment technology to a wider audience, has opened the doors to big chains and sporting stadiums. This is a key partnership, which will see a sales force of over 100 selling Swoopos nationally. With more resellers partnerships due to launch soon, we can safely say it’s going to be a very busy and exciting 2018 for everyone involved.”

It’s still clearly early days for Swoope, Swoopos, and the larger partnership going forward, but they’re well-positioned all the same. A 2015 study from London Majors says there were just over 17,000 restaurants in London at the time—leave aside the numbers from Newcastle and Oxford—and the notion that any significant fraction of these could handle mobile order-ahead would doubtless be welcome. Such systems tend to speed up a restaurant’s operation with minimal investment and make the whole system better as a result. We’ve already seen it work well in several American restaurants, and even too well as mentioned previous, so the idea that it could work for Brits—who are already pretty avid mobile payments users—isn’t out of line.

Swoopos may not change the way Brits eat, but it might make getting their food just a little bit faster. That’s worth doing in and of itself.