Restaurants and takeout
Loyalty for restaurants and takeout.
Tuesday is the problem. The card is how you work on Tuesday.
Friday takes care of itself. The money in an independent restaurant is made or lost on the quiet nights and the empty second seating, and the only lever you actually own is the guest who already likes you. A card in their wallet is a way to reach that person on a Tuesday afternoon without paying a delivery app for the privilege.
What the card does in a restaurant
Restaurants are not cafés. Visits are less frequent, tickets are larger, and the person who decides where to eat decides a few hours before, not at the door.
It gives you something to pull on a Tuesday
A push to people who have eaten with you before, sent at 3pm for a 6pm decision. Not a discount blasted to strangers — a specific offer to people who already chose you once. That is the cheapest table you will ever fill.
The scan moment is the bag handoff
Dine-in scanning is awkward mid-service; pickup is not. Most independent restaurants get their cleanest enrolment at the takeout counter, where there are already ten idle seconds while the bag is checked. We build the launch around that moment.
It is the one customer the apps cannot take
Skip and DoorDash own the guest, the data and about thirty percent of the ticket. A wallet card is a direct line to a guest who ordered once through an app — a card in the bag, a scan, and the next order can come to you at full margin. That is the single strongest argument for doing this at all.
Frequency, not just covers
You already know covers. What you almost certainly do not know is how many of tonight’s guests have been in before, how often they come back, and how many have quietly stopped. Those three numbers change how you run the room.
The reward recipe I'd start you on
Restaurants are the one vertical where I usually recommend spend-based, not visit-based — and I will show you why before you agree to it.
- What earns credit
- Points per dollar, not stamps per visit. A $19 lunch and a $95 dinner for four are not the same event, and a stamp card treats them as if they were. Takeout-only counters are the exception — there, visits work fine.
- The reward
- $10 off after $150 spent is the honest starting point — a clean 6.7%, redeemable on anything, no minimum, no blackout nights. Blackouts on the nights people actually want to come are how you teach a guest to ignore you.
- What it costs you
- At roughly 28–32% food cost, a $10 reward costs you about $3 in product. Against $150 of spend that is a real cost of about 2% — less than the card fee you already pay without thinking about it, and far less than a delivery app commission.
- Breakeven
- About $650 a month in incremental sales to cover the $149. On a $45 average ticket that is roughly fifteen extra covers a month — half a table a night.
- The monthly campaign
- One offer a month aimed at your worst service, not your best. Usually a mid-week early seating, pushed to the card the same afternoon.
- The one to avoid
- Percentage-off-everything. It trains your best guests to wait for the offer and it discounts the Friday you would have sold anyway. Fixed-dollar rewards at a spend threshold do not have that failure mode.
Whether it is worth it, honestly
Fifteen extra covers a month. That is the bar at a $45 average ticket and typical contribution. If your average is higher it is fewer; if you are a takeout counter at $22 it is closer to thirty orders. Either way, write the number down before you start, because that is the number we check at day 60.
The number I care about more is how many of your guests have been in before. In most independent restaurants nobody can answer it. Thirty days after launch, you can — and that single figure tends to change what an owner does next more than the reward ever does.
The honest risk here is service. A host or server who has to explain a program at a busy pass will stop explaining it by Thursday. So the ask is deliberately small: a card in every takeout bag, a table tent, and one line at the end of the check. Nobody has to sell anything.
- Typical setup
- $99 one-time
- Monthly
- $149, one location
- Extra locations
- +$49/month each
- Best scan moment
- Takeout counter, or the check
- POS changes needed
- None
- Live in
- Seven to ten days
What restaurant owners actually ask me
My servers are flat out. Who is supposed to explain this?
Nobody, ideally. The enrolment is a QR on the table tent and a card in the takeout bag — the guest scans it themselves while they wait. The one line I would ask for is at the check drop, and it is seven words. If your floor has to sell it, it will not last a month, and I would rather design around that than pretend otherwise.
Most of my volume comes through Skip and DoorDash.
Then this is worth more to you than to almost anyone else. Those platforms keep the guest, the email and roughly thirty percent of the ticket. A card in the delivery bag is the only cheap way to convert a platform order into a direct one — and every order that moves across is worth about three times the margin of the one that did not. It is also the slowest-burning play here, so judge it at ninety days, not thirty.
We already collect emails for a newsletter.
Keep it. This is not a replacement — it is the channel people actually see. A wallet push lands on the lock screen; a newsletter lands in Promotions. The useful difference is that the card knows when someone is nearby and when they last came in, and an email list knows neither.
What about a franchise or a second location?
Each location gets its own geofence and its own numbers, at $49 a month on top of the base. If you are a franchisee, check your agreement — some brands restrict guest-facing marketing, and I would rather find that out before you pay me than after.
Do my guests need to download an app?
No. Apple Wallet and Google Wallet are already on the phone — nothing to install, no account, no password. They scan a code and the card is in their wallet.
Not quite your shop?
Same card, same price, different recipe.
Give me one Tuesday to work with.
Send your logo and I’ll build the card free. Look at it on your own phone, then decide whether it is worth $149 a month to have something to pull on a slow night.
Book a 15-minute demo