How Bar Soba boosted revenue across every venue with me&u
Harnessing a visual-first menu, easy at-table ordering and smart tech to give teams total control and a smoother service experience.
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About
Bar Soba
From Glasgow to Leeds, Bar Soba has been delivering a bustling nightlife experience to UK diners since the 1990s. Now with five venues to their name, the Bar Soba Group are renowned for pouring classic cocktails for discerning drinkers with a twist.
Each Bar Soba venue serves up a street-food inspired menu capturing the best of South-East Asian flavours. Plus, a night out at Bar Soba guarantees a serve of cutting-edge music from the best local and international DJs.
The challenge
The Bar Soba team had been on the hunt for an at-table ordering system that didn’t take away from their guest experience. They didn’t want to add an app to their tables that would cause a negative experience for customers, but would instead allow their teams to work smarter.
Instead of having staff stuck behind tills and processing payments, the Bar Soba team wanted to make better use of their staff and get them back to making great food, delicious drinks and delivering stellar customer service.
Plus, the Bar Soba team (like many hospitality venues across the UK and beyond) had seen a significant decline in cash tips. With the move towards tap-and-go and cashless payments, it was becoming harder than ever to reward their teams for top-notch service and experiences.
The key for Bar Soba was to find a solution built by hospitality, for hospitality. And that’s where me&u came in.
"The guest and staff response to me&u has been very positive. Times are changing and we’ve got to adapt and me&u really has helped us do so."
The solution
By adding me&u to the tables of Bar Soba’s five venues, the group has seen a big uptick in spend per head and revenue.
Making it easy for customers to spend more
With me&u’s Quick Sells feature, guests are automatically served tailored food and drink suggestions at checkout, based on their past orders. Powered by machine learning and AI, these tailored nudges have sparked a significant uptick in sales for every Bar Soba venue (not just their flagship sites).
The stats speak for themselves: Bar Soba has driven over £1,000 in extra revenue each month through our Quick Sells feature for items on their menu like their shrimp crackers, edamame, Asian greens, dirty katsu fries and super Thai fries.
Tapping into the power of visuals to drive sales
For Bergson and the Bar Soba team, moving to a visual-first menu was always on the cards. But me&u made this an easy transition with a digital ordering platform driven by drool-worthy food and drink photography.
We took care of all the photography for Bar Soba’s venues as part of our set up process (at no extra cost).
With these professional shots on hand, we helped their team get their menus setup and left them to customise the placement of drinks and dishes based on what items they wanted to push.
Giving teams total control over their menu (and the ability to make changes whenever they need to) is another reason why me&u is the only choice for bars and pubs in the UK.
Giving teams total control to work smarter, not harder
As hospitality allies, we’ve designed our tech to take care of the manual parts of services so teams can get back to delivering great food, top-notch drives and exceptional service.
And that extends to our Enhanced Tipping feature, which understands exactly what hospo needs. We know that cashless payments are the way of the future, so we launched a marketing leading tip feature to support the industry.
This feature lets venues set a default tip and suggested tipping amounts at checkout to give their teams the recognition they deserve. And the uptake has been huge: Bar Soba’s teams are generating over £4,500 per month in tips via me&u.
With ordering and payment taken care of by me&u, Bar Soba’s teams now have more time up their sleeve to provide great hospitality to guests.
