With Uber Eats and Olo partnership, will we finally get rid of back-of-house iPads?With Uber Eats and Olo partnership, will we finally get rid of back-of-house iPads?

Delivery startups are all about partnerships lately; the latest example is between Uber Eats and Olo, a digital food ordering platform. Through this partnership orders submitted through Uber Eats are directly inputted into the order stream at the restaurant. This partnership allows integration with a restaurant’s point-of-sale system, or POS, and is an example of the newest experience move for delivery platforms. 

“A lot of times the POS system is the heart of the restaurant,” Matt Jones, Uber Eats global business development manager, told Nation’s Restaurant News.

“It’s the gateway to the kitchen. For us having our orders flowing through straight to the POS ultimately makes it easier for restaurants to handle their workflow.”

This isn’t the first POS/delivery partnership. Chipotle and DoorDash rolled out a similar POS integration recently, as did Dunkin’ and Grubhub. On the reservation side, OpenTable and Upserve, the restaurant management system, announced a partnership that allows for real-time cross-communication between Upserve’s POS systems and the reservation platforms earlier this month.

These partnerships aim to unburden operators from the ubiquitous counters full of “multiple iPads” connected to various delivery platforms and “demanding their attention,” said Jones.

“Many of our existing partners like Subway, Checkers and P.F. Chang’s already partner with Olo,” noted Uber Eat’s Jones.

These partnerships also hope to improve the speed and accuracy of orders.

“Our mission is to make digital ordering accessible and simple for leading restaurant brands, and we are thrilled to now be able to offer direct connectivity to Uber Eats for our thousands of restaurant partners,” stated Noah Glass, founder and CEO of Olo, in a news release.

The partnership has the potential to impact a significant number of restaurants. Uber Eats works with 220,000 restaurants. Olo works with 60,000 restaurants.

Through Rails, Olo offers restaurants technology to publish menus, location information and prices on third-party marketplaces like Uber Eats. Olo also offers a Dispatch, a service that connects operators to delivery providers for orders made on restaurant branded apps and websites. The partnership with Olo and Uber Eats is oriented around Olo’s Rail product, said Jones.

“Today’s leading restaurants recognize the importance of providing access to digital ordering through various channels,” Glass said in the news release. “With this integration, our restaurant partners can benefit from the ordering power and scale of Uber Eats as a leading delivery option in markets across the world.”

Contact Gloria Dawson at [email protected]

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