Before the pandemic, people used to sit there until a waiter brings them a menu.
However, social distancing and COVID-19 restrictions brought a mini-revolution in restaurants, where customers switched to QR menus that visitors can scan with a camera on a smartphone.
Digital menus are safer and also allow customers to order food remotely — an essential option for eateries, which turned to delivery during the quarantine.
While Ukrainian cafes and restaurants were struggling to live through the pandemic, losing 30% or $531 million in sales income last year, two Ukrainian entrepreneurs, Vladimir Olyanitsky, 27, and Alex Ilyash, 27, turned the crisis into an opportunity.
They created Choice, a company that develops QR menus for food chains and hotels.
As of today, Choice has over 3,000 clients in 25 countries, including Ukraine. On Oct. 8, Olyanitsky announced that the company closed the latest round of funding, raising 700,000 euros to add new features to its product and expand on new markets.
Part of the money came from entrepreneurs’ own pockets but they don’t disclose the name of other investors. The analytics platform PitchBook lists Chezh venture-capital firms J&T Ventures and Reflex Capital among the company’s backers.
Bright future
Ukrainian Choice is registered in the Czech Republic and has an office in Prague. According to the analytics website CrunchBase, Ukraine is the company’s biggest market, followed by the U.S., Russia, the Czech Republic and the U.K.
In Ukraine, Choice develops digital menus for popular eateries like Mimosa, Eurasia, Puzata Khata, The Burger, Kyiv Food Market, China Hi and others.
Olyanitsky told Forbes in March that the company was growing by 30-40% per month and had a monthly revenue of nearly $20,000 in Ukraine, Russia and the Czech Republic. Now the company is looking for partners in Europe and wants to attract 5 million euros from investors.
Choice’s main competitors on the market are delivery services like Glovo, Rocket and Bolt. However, the company believes that it has a significant advantage over them — it doesn’t charge a commission on orders.
“It is more profitable for restaurants to pay a fixed amount for the QR-menu every month than to give 30-40% of earnings to the delivery app,” Ilyash said.
Choice charges restaurants for the subscription to its service: $13 a month for the simplest online menu, $25 for the additional features like delivery or takeaway and the option to pay for the order inside the app.
The whole package — with analytics, integration with taxi services and couriers, as well as automatic translation of the menu — costs $67 per month.
Olyanitsky and Ilyash expect that their business will take off after the quarantine when all food chains will work to the fullest. “Restaurants will start making more money, they will become more open and ready to pay,” Ilyash said.
Business amid crisis
Olyanitsky and Ilyash know what it means to work during a crisis. Before founding Choice in September 2020, they worked together at a startup called Eurotrips, which organizes travel tours. Ilyash also worked on a service called Davinci Travel System, allowing travel operators to book hotels.
Before the pandemic, their businesses flourished: Davinci was going to conquer Asian markets, raising over 2 million euros in investments and increasing its annual income to $4.5 million.
Eurotrips had a team of 40 people in 2019 and 10,000 clients. But travel restrictions hit businesses hard, so their revenue fell by 80-90% as the pandemic started, Forbes reported.
For Choice, it wasn’t a problem. Olyanitsky said that before the quarantine many restaurants were not ready to switch to get rid of paper menus, but now they are queuing to embrace the innovation.
Many surveys show that paper menus have become a burden for the restaurant industry as many customers check out menus online before they dine out and just quickly scan them in the restaurant.
It also costs time and money to change the menu if it is already printed.
The pandemic was a suitable time for Choice to launch its service. “All the greatest and largest companies were actually founded in times of crises,” Ilyash said.
