Top 5 POS Systems For Food & Drink Retail in 2024

The food & drink industry is a high-volume business that always requires a fast-moving process. And the business owners and operators in the industry are having so much hard time handling their food & drink retail stores. That’s why a POS (point of sale) system is critically needed to ensure a smooth and seamless operation. In today’s article, we’ll spill the beans about the top 5 POS systems for food & drink retail that we find the most outstanding in 2024.

ConnectPOS

ConnectPOS, one of the leading POS software solution providers, delivers a robust POS system for food & drink retailers of all sizes. Its vast set of features is specifically designed to address the main challenges facing businesses in the field, and facilitate their growth and profitability. Besides, ConnectPOS works well on multiple devices from desktops, laptops to mobile alike including smartphones and tablets. Additionally, the POS system is compatible with leading e-commerce platforms which are Magento, Shopify and BigCommerce, and it is receiving a lot of love from retailers on all 3 platforms. 

ConnectPOS has a completely free demo version. After the demo, if you see the potential, there are 3 transparent plans for you to choose from: Standard, Advanced, and Premium. Plus, retailers like you can also customize your own plan with self-selected features to suit both your business needs and your pocket. 

Some key features that particularly matter to your food & drink business are: 

• Speed up service to serve more customers
  • Add, edit, or remove products within a blink
  • Search products with a breeze by name, ID, SKU, or barcode
  • Enable custom sale allowing customers to customize their orders, which is common in the food & drink industry
  • Check stock level at each store and transfer stock directly in POS

Add custom sale note in ConnectPOS

• Empower customers with the ConnectPOS PWA consumer app
  • Easily access the app by scanning a QR code without any app needing installation
  • Scan item barcodes to view detailed product information and stock level, then easily add it to the cart
  • Do self-checkout right on their mobile phones with various payment and delivery options
  • Get rid of long queues as speed does matter to the food and drink retail section

• Keep your retail business under full control
  • Identify your best customers and their favorite products through detailed reports
  • Make use of loyalty extensions integrated into ConnectPOS to retain customers
  • Manage multi-warehouse and multi-store inventory with ease to avoid running out of stock. You don’t want to upset your hungry customers
  • Identify dead stock, slow-moving stock, and best-sellers to optimize your inventory’s ROI
  • Sync inventory in real-time between stores and transfer stock directly in POS

Square POS

Square POS’s complete register service is a full POS solution that offers a wide range of handy tools, from tracking sales and inventory to rich analytics. It is one service for your entire business, from a register in your pocket to reports on your laptop. Whether you’re food & drink retailer or operating in other industries, Square helps make businesses a little less work. Square puts the finishing touch on your business and keeps the important stuff organized. 

Square comes up with 4 different plans that you get more features as you upgrade: Professional, Performance, Premium, and a really attractive Free plan having just enough tools for you to start selling right away. 

Some of the key features for the success of food & drink retail are: 

• Keep track of your business
  • Track payments across multiple types of tender
  • Break down your sales to see what is your dead stock, slow-moving stock, and best-sellers to facilitate timely and insightful decision-making
  • Customize and manage taxes, tipping, and discounts
• Manage your business operations with ease
  • Sign in to your account to upload and manage multiple items or change details like price, name, and quantity
  • Keep track of your stock flow, cash flow, and footfall
  • Manage your inventory with Square – free. You can also connect your account to Stitch Labs to track stock quantities across Square and your other sales channels easily

ShopKeep POS

ShopKeep is a mobile-based POS system for food and drink retail suitable for small and medium-sized businesses. The system gives your convenience store the tools to make quick sales and maximize your profit margins. It provides an intuitive and secure POS for iPad with software that empowers merchants to run smarter businesses. It helps retailers manage their businesses all on one seamless, cloud-based platform. 

Furthermore, the e-commerce capabilities of ShopKeep help retailers easily sell items online. E-commerce by ShopKeep is powered by Ecwid, a quite well-known e-commerce platform. Currently, ShopKeep offers 3 plans, the Basic Plan, Essential Plan, and Advanced Plan for food & drink retailers to choose from. Being an ideal POS for food & drink retailers, the key features that ShopKeep provides are:

• Increase your store’s sales performance

ShopKeep’s rapid iPad register facilitates your convenience store’s quick checkout process. This gives your customers maximum convenience and enables your business to serve more customers in the same amount of time. As a result, your profit can be improved.

• Better inventory planning

You can set the bottom-most level to let ShopKeep’s iPad POS alert you when your items are running low. With that, you can plan ahead to avoid running out of stock and ruining your customers’ shopping experience. 

It’s also important for POS systems for food and drink retail like yours to identify which of your items sells the most and the least. Accordingly, you can decide which one to reorder and which one not to. 

Vend POS

Vend is a cloud-based POS that lets food & drink retailers run their business in-store, online, and via mobile devices. Retailers using Vend have access to many powerful and intuitive tools at a fraction of the cost. It is compatible with popular e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Shopify. Vend POS offers retailers 3 pricing plans: Lite, Pro, and Enterprise. 

Retailers using Vend on all 3 platforms are loving this POS thanks to its wide range of features, such as:

• Get better retail insights
  • Make smarter business decisions with reporting features
  • Analyze your sales, inventory, and customer data so you always know which items to serve and sell in your business
  • Keep your assortments on point and ensure your store is constantly stocked with scrumptious food and beverages
• Keep your inventory in check
  • Vend POS’s food & drink inventory software streamlines all your stock control practices
  • Upload products in a snap and track all your orders from one platform
  • Let you conduct full and partial inventory counts so you’ll always know what you have at any given time with Vend’s stock-taking capabilities
  • Get to know your best products and make sure you’re never caught out of stock again
  • Easily find your best-sellers and busy hours with real-time reporting
  • Keep making sales even when the internet connection is down with offline mode

• Delight your customers
  • Keep shoppers coming back with Vend’s built-in loyalty and customer management features
  • Run promotions, sell gift cards, and implement innovative payment initiatives like mobile payments, buy now pay later, and more
• Speed up service
  • Quickly add, edit or remove products, including flavors and sizes, and process sales efficiently using customizable quick keys
  • Streamline the ordering process with Vend’s simple sell screen, making it easy to keep up with your customer’s needs

Erply POS

Erply POS is one of the few providers to offer dedicated tools for franchise-model businesses. As food & drink franchises are emerging rapidly, a POS system that supports retail franchises like Erply is desired. With its franchise plan, franchise owners can set security permissions that determine what level of access managers have within each franchised business. Owners can also decide how to centralize their inventory, CRM tools, and potentially sensitive information.

Erply POS provides 3 dynamic pricing plans: Point of Sale, Inventory for E-commerce, and Inventory + Retail POS. If you’re running a way larger business, Erply also has a fourth plan, the so-called Enterprise & Chain. For this plan, you need to contact them for consultation. 

• Always have your best-sellers stocked
  • Help you face the challenges of high volume and constantly changing inventory, especially during rush seasons like Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. 
  • Easily identify products that are running low to make reorder quickly
• Optimize your inventory: It’s common for the food & drink industry to have specialty suppliers for all kinds of ingredients or products. With Erply, you can:
  • Keep your suppliers and contacts organized and easy to lookup in just a few clicks
  • Organize your products that come in different sizes, flavors, or ingredient makeups, into matrix products to easily track each variation’s sales history
• Earn customer loyalty: This feature becomes extremely handy when you need to get rid of your dead stock or slow-moving stock that is staying forever on the shelves.
  • Utilize Erply’s promotions engine to come up with meaningful strategies to keep inventory moving
  • Create different kinds of discounts, target specific customers, and choose time frames, regions, or individual stores
  • Leverage Erply’s rewards program to allow shoppers to gain points for later redemption, which helps with customer retention

Our story,

So, have you seen any potential in the top 5 POS systems for food & drink retail that we carefully chose for you? Have you even tried one? Or are you already adopting a POS but looking for a better solution? Well, we will be that solution! We, ConnectPOS, take our pride in our capabilities of offering one of the best cloud-based POS solutions for your food & drink businesses. Well, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”, let’s book your 14-day free trial now to have the big picture of our globally standard product! Contact us for further assistance!