Corporate cafeteria management is software that runs an office cafeteria. It includes the app in which employees pre-order meals, the kiosk where they order on the spot, the billing at each counter and the reports for the company that pays for the food. It is also called canteen management software, or a digital cafeteria.
Large Indian office campuses feed thousands of employees every day. Their cafeterias are often food courts, with several counters, each run by a different caterer. Without software, there are long queues at 1 p.m., each counter keeps its own bills, and caterers guess how much food to cook. Much of it is thrown away.
For instance, a software company's campus in Chennai has 4,000 employees and a food court with eight counters. At 11 a.m., an employee opens the cafeteria app and pre-orders a thali from counter 3, for pickup at 1:15 p.m. The thali costs ₹120, and the company pays ₹40 of it as a subsidy, so she pays ₹80. She pays through her UPI app. At 1:12, the app tells her that the thali is ready. She skips the queue and collects it by showing a code on her phone.
The pre-orders also help the kitchen. By 11:30 a.m., counter 3 knows that 260 thalis have been pre-ordered. It adds its usual number of walk-in customers, and cooks for about 400. Predicting the number of meals in this way is demand forecasting, and it reduces the food that is thrown away.
Employees who did not pre-order use a touchscreen kiosk at the counter. The kiosk is a form of POS software: it takes the order, takes the payment and sends the order to the counter's kitchen. Payment can be by UPI, by a meal card that the employer loads every month, or by a deduction from the salary.
At the end of the month, the software tells the company how many subsidised meals each counter served. It then calculates how much the company owes each caterer. The same campus may also have smart beverage vending machines in its pantries, whose cups appear in the same reports.
In the United States, some companies instead order catered meals for their offices. Employees choose their dish in an app the day before, and the caterer delivers the meals at lunchtime.
How is this different from a restaurant POS? A restaurant bills its own customers. Cafeteria software bills employees on behalf of several caterers, and the employer usually pays part of every meal.