More than the average company, TouchBistro—a Toronto-based software company that offers an all-in-one POS and restaurant management system—understands how important it is for an entire restaurant to function like a well-oiled machine. That’s why efficiency was top of mind when the POS provider was looking for a company to partner with that could print items such as POS receipts and temperature logs.
TouchBistro ended up turning to Star Micronics, a company whose suite of thermal printing products offered the perfect solution for TouchBistro’s restaurant-operator clients. Now, approximately 99 percent of TouchBistro’s clients use Star Micronics thermal printers.
One of the major advantages of using a state-of-the-art thermal printer in a restaurant environment is that it streamlines communication between different internet-connected platforms and devices—an integral component of any restaurant operation. For example, employees in the back-of-house can print off temperature-log checks, or “use-by” dates on prepped ingredients.
Thermal printing is especially pivotal in the current industry landscape. With the movement toward modernizing all facets of restaurant operations, printers from Star Micronics can ensure everything—and everyone—is on the same page.
“We’re seeing—especially through the pandemic—an open mind to and a necessity for new technology,” says John Maieli, channel partner executive for Star Micronics, an point-of-sale hardware solutions and printer manufacturing company based in New Jersey and headquartered in Shizuoka, Japan. “And we’re seeing that with thermal printing, which is software agnostic. Technology has advanced, the papers have advanced, and the thermal printheads have advanced as well. At the same time, kitchens are changing. Modern kitchens are climate controlled with dedicated areas for expediting, which is primarily where you’re finding the tickets. It helps simplify a more complex technology for our industry.”
Star Micronics’ printers intake from multiple ordering platforms simultaneously and output from a ribbonless printer that is smudge-free, offline resistant, cloud-ready, and Bluetooth-enabled. All of this translates to greater efficiency, which begets greater profit margins. Operators can rely on both speed and accuracy to easily manage across several channels—the POS used for in-venue dining, drive-thru lanes, app and online order integrations, and even reporting and analytical data delivery.
The communication benefits begin from day one. “It makes the biggest difference in our onboarding,” says Darko Pavlek, TouchBistro manager of implementation solutions. “We can walk a customer through setting up the printer directly through the TouchBistro App. Fewer apps or programs to download saves us time.”
In comparison to impact printers, some often-overlooked advantages to communicating with thermal printers include easing language barriers, omitting sensory noise, and printing QR codes, barcodes, and labels—all of which funnel into successful team dynamics, whereby back-of-house staff effectively communicate with front-of-house staff to seamlessly deliver fast and accurate orders to the customer.
“As a customer, you may not notice any difference,” says Maieli, “because thermal printing is seen in terms of communicating between the POS, the server taking the order, and the back of the house in preparation and production.”
Karl Mamer, TouchBistro manager of product documentation, agrees on these finer points. “Even in the smallest towns, we live in a multilingual world,” Mamer says. “Our servers and back-of-house staff don’t necessarily use English. Thermal printers can much more easily render non-Latin character sets, like Chinese or Thai.”
And sometimes, the absence of communication—in other words, when no news is good news—is indicative of success when it comes to fielding TouchBistro’s help site. “The amount of documentation that I don’t have to write because Star makes it so easy is a real tip-off that the actual end-user has made the best possible choice,” says Mamer.
For more, visit the TouchBistro website.
