In 2012, from a humble beef noodle shop named ‘Mazendo’ in Taipei, iCHEF was born.
Since its founding, ‘Mazendo’ was popular with customers and enjoyed healthy growth. Yet as business boomed, so too did it its problems. With ever increasing workloads, operations at the restaurant grew more hectic, and it was evident that this growth would soon be unsustainable. Realising this, our founders made the painful choice to temporarily close the restaurant and rebuild it from the ground up. They realized that they needed to tweak the flavours of their dishes according to customers’ palates and improve table turnover rates, all while ensuring that the service quality did not drop and without increasing the staff headcount. Thus, the team spent countless hours thinking about how they could achieve such operational efficiency through relentlessly reviewing their use of space, workflows, training… and soon their minds drifted to the issue of their POS system.
“Ah, if only our POS could handle such tasks!”
At the time, the POS system used in the restaurants was no different than the generic retail models. Yet the F&B industry was not just about being able to settle the bill; managing the queue, table management, ordering, order customization, kitchen management, serving, order cancellation, bill splitting, customer management, service charge, takeaways, discounts… the list goes on. All of these factors needed to be considered and on top of that, the POS system had to be fast and easy to use. While retail POS system have some of these functionalities, they are almost always an afterthought, not executed well and with software interfaces that were impossible to navigate. To use an F&B analogy, they are like a wanton noodle restaurant replacing the wanton with beef cubes, placing them directly on the noodles and calling that beef noodles. However, making good beef noodles is far more complex than simply placing beef on a bowl of noodles.
Finding a solution overseas to fit our small Taiwanese noodle store’s needs proved too complex, so we decided – Why not just do it ourselves?
We envisioned a user interface as seamless as Apple’s, with the restaurant management and reporting capabilities rivaling that of McDonald’s enterprise system. Simple and efficient, yet capable and durable. Hardware that utilized iPads, instead of the antiquated black box existing POS systems had. We had set out to create a POS system that was created by restaurant operators, for restaurants.
And so, iCHEF was born.
But so too did our never-ending headaches.
Building a POS app was far more difficult than we could ever imagine. Not only did it need to be highly functional and easy to use, it also needed to always be reliable. In order to survive in a restaurant environment where the Internet could be cut off at any time and employees could manhandle the equipment, the system needed to be extremely durable. To get a better sense of how it would be used in the restaurant environment, our engineers pulled many all-nighters at the restaurant to finish the software before the restaurant relaunch. What was originally a three-month project quickly turned into a half-year project as we struggled to reach the level of durability we wanted. It was only after one year of grueling work that we were able to finally reach our goal. Soon after, nearby restaurants that eagerly awaited our transformation began to use iCHEF as well. It didn’t take long before even more restaurants began adopting our solution as they realized what we could do for their businesses, and so iCHEF kept continuously improving.
Since our first 100 users in 2013, to hitting our 1,000-user milestone in 2015, demand for our product has flooded in. Everyday there would be a new restaurant with its own ideas, and everyday we have scrambled to add additional functionality and improve our product. Yet, with our never-ending anxiety came tremendous growth for iCHEF.
Seemingly overnight, iCHEF has now become one of the leading F&B POS systems in the world.
In 2016 we received a gold medal from Europe’s iF Product Design Award, and just the year after we even took home the grand prize at the 2017 German Design Award. Typically reserved for cutting-edge sports cars, no POS system has ever had the honour of receiving recognition at such a prestigious international awards ceremony. Yet all these awards did not make us complacent. We are still looking for every opportunity to improve our product, and from our long journey of continuously pushing ourselves, we have also learned quite a few things.
Functionality comes with trade-offs, and we should not attempt to do anything and everything.
Service requires precision, and success comes more naturally to those who master efficiency.
Perspective requires proximity; we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our clients.
Failure is the mother of success, and only those who are unafraid of failing can finally succeed.
Today, we work with over 12,000 restaurant owners daily to help support the success of their businesses. They help us continuously refine our product, uniting thousands of small F&B owners into one large community. Today, we shape technology and solutions that would be unfathomable for larger corporations. Along with our thousands of clients we learn together, grow together, and progress towards the future of F&B together.
With each step, we expand our capabilities like a city expands its network.
With each step, we close the technological gap between small F&B outlets and large restaurant chains.
With each step, we grow our family of F&B with new restaurant entrepreneurs.
Forging a path forward together with over 12,000 F&B partners – that is what we at iCHEF take pride in.
We hope that you won’t hesitate to reach out and join us on this journey as we improve together.
iCHEF Co-Founder — Ken Chen
iCHEF Co-Founder. 2013
Award Record
2021.10. Good Design Award, Winner
2016.10.24 German Design Award, Special Mention
2016.02.27 iF Design Award, Gold Award
2015.11.06 Red Dot Design Award, Winner
2015.09.29 Good Design Award, Winner
2015.05.05 Future Commerce, Winner
2014.12.19 Global Brain Alliance Forum（GBAF）World Ventures Pitch Battle, The Top Award Winner
2014.11.25 Start Up Nation Summit, Top 15
2014.06.10 Echelon 2014 Global Brain Award, Winner
2014.03.14 Echelon Japan, Most Promising Startup
2013.12.12 Neo Star Demo Show Top Award Winner