Foodics POS alternatives: choosing by one busy hour

You booked the demo because a friend in Al Quoz swears by his setup, and because Foodics POS is one of the names that surfaces first for Gulf restaurants. That is a reasonable place to start. It is a poor place to decide, because the demo will show you a very capable product without telling you whether it is the product your kitchen is short of.

There is a better test, and it takes ten minutes with no salesperson present. Pick your busiest hour of last week. Write down every single thing that went wrong in it. Then read this article against that list.

What Foodics covers

Foodics describes itself on its own site as a cloud based restaurant point of sale and restaurant management system. It publishes local contact numbers for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Kuwait and Jordan, so it is a regional company serving this market directly rather than from a distance.

Its published product range is broad. Point of sale, a waiter app, a kitchen display screen, a customer display screen and self ordering. There is also pay at table, where guests scan a code to view and split the bill, plus an online ordering product and a payments offering of its own. If your list from that busy hour is full of counter and back office items, this is the shape of company you should be talking to, and the demo is worth your Thursday.

The two shopping lists this market keeps merging

Almost every UAE restaurant owner who says "I need a restaurant management system" is holding one of two lists, and the two are bought from different companies.

The counter and back office list. Ringing sales, splitting bills, shift reports, purchase orders, recipe costing, stock valuation at month end, supplier invoices, multi branch accounting. A full restaurant pos system does this. It is a serious piece of software and it costs what serious software costs.

The ordering and customer list. How an order reaches your kitchen from somebody who is not standing in front of you, what your team does with it, and whether that person ever orders again. This is a different purchase entirely.

The two lists overlap in the demo and almost never overlap in a real evening. That is why the ten minute test works better than a feature comparison. Feature charts are written to make everything look adjacent.

There is a third answer, and for a small kitchen it is often the right one: both, bought separately, in the order your list demands. A full platform for the counter and the books, and a lighter tool for the orders arriving on phones. Buying both at once is how a small business ends up paying for two things it has not learned to use. Buying the urgent one first, running it for a season, then adding the other is slower on paper and much cheaper in practice.

The hour that actually costs money

Here is the hour most small UAE kitchens describe, roughly in the order it goes wrong.

Eleven order messages arrive between eight and nine, spread across WhatsApp, a phone call and two apps. Three of them are answered late. One is answered twice. A customer rings to ask which tower the driver is circling, and nobody at the pass knows. A dish keeps selling for forty minutes after the last portion left the kitchen, because the only person who knew is on the line and cooking. The driver phones in from a building with two entrances. At the end of it, nobody can say who any of those eleven customers were.

Read that list carefully. Not one item on it happens at the counter. A faster counter, a better shift report and a tighter recipe cost will improve the business and will not touch a single one of those problems.

What an ordering layer does to the same hour

Get Menu is built for the second list only. Here is the same hour with it running.

Orders arrive in one place instead of five, because your menu lives on an ordering page of your own with a web address of your own, included from the first day. Guests open it from a link or a printed code. There is no app for anyone to download.

Each completed order produces 3 messages, sent over the WhatsApp Business Platform that Meta documents publicly: a confirmation to the customer with the delivery estimate you set, a kitchen ticket into your managers' group, and a dispatch message into the riders' group carrying the GPS pin. Nobody retypes an order, and every message is logged with whether it arrived.

The driver question answers itself. At checkout the customer drops a GPS pin and picks their building and unit from a list you maintain, and you can set a different delivery fee for each building and a free delivery threshold of your own. The rider gets a link that needs no account, taps once when the food is handed over, and the customer is told.

The dish that oversold stops overselling. Stock counts fall per item as orders come in, and per option too, so running out of one sauce does not take the whole dish off the menu. At zero it greys itself out on its own, everywhere, at once.

And you know who the eleven people were. Names, numbers and order history sit in your account and export to a spreadsheet whenever you want, including on the day you leave. A loyalty stamp was added to each order automatically, with nobody marking anything delivered for it to count. Regulars grow into tiers that carry their own discounts, and the card lives in Google Wallet on the customer's phone, updating itself, with colours and a logo from a designer you control.

"Most of the waste I see in a small kitchen is not in the cost of anything. It is in the same information being typed by three different people, badly, while the food gets cold. Software should remove the retyping first and impress you second."

— Agha Shah Zaman, co-founder of Get Menu

For a dining room, and for a spreadsheet

Two more parts, because they come up constantly in this market.

If you have tables, each one gets its own printed code, generated in a card designer in your colours and delivered as a print pack ready for the printer. The table number travels with the order, so a dine-in ticket knows where it came from without anybody asking. A whole table can order into one bill from their own phones.

If your menu already exists in a spreadsheet, you upload the file in one pass instead of typing items in one at a time. Photos are compressed automatically so the page opens quickly on a phone. Options and add-ons carry their own prices, required choices are enforced, and every line is re-priced from your live menu at checkout so the price shown is the price charged.

Around all that sit the small earners: coupons with caps and expiry dates, bundles at a fixed price, ten kinds of upsell, and a rule that the best single discount wins so nothing stacks by accident. Marketing messages travel in their own queue that can never delay a real order, with a weekly cap per customer so nobody is pestered.

Payment, plainly

This is where the two purchases differ most, so read it before you go further.

Get Menu takes no online payments at all. Customers pay cash or through your own card machine, at the table or at the door, which is how a very large share of orders in this market are paid anyway. A full point of sale platform with its own payments product does something different, and if taking card payment at the moment of ordering matters to your trade, that is a reason to buy the other kind of software.

There is a quiet benefit on our side. Because no card details ever enter the system, there is nothing stored for anyone to steal. Any product that does handle card data falls under the PCI Data Security Standard published by the PCI Security Standards Council, and it is fair to ask any vendor which parts of that are theirs and which are yours.

What Get Menu does not do

Stated plainly, because a comparison that hides this is not worth reading.

It is not a counter register. No terminal, no cash drawer, no card processing, no shift reports at a counter station. It does not do recipe costing, purchase orders, supplier invoices, payroll or scheduling. If your busy hour list was full of those, you want the other kind of product and you should buy it.

What it is: an ordering page, a live menu, stock that maintains itself, WhatsApp order messages, delivery details, VAT invoices carrying your own TRN, and loyalty. Plenty of restaurants run it beside a full system, and plenty of small kitchens run it as the only software they have.

How to test it against your own hour

Do not compare feature lists. Run the hour again.

Setup is usually same day work. Upload the menu, connect the WhatsApp group your managers already read, print table codes if you have tables, and set your building fees. Briefing the team takes about 10 minutes, because the only thing that changes for them is that orders arrive as tickets instead of conversations.

The trial runs 15 days with no card details required, so nothing can be charged by accident. After that it is a flat monthly price with 0% commission, which means the amount you owe does not move when you sell more. Detailed order contents clear themselves automatically after 120 days while your sales figures stay, and you can export your customer list on any day, including your last.

Then look at your list from that hour and count how many items moved. If the answer is most of them, you were holding the second list all along.

Frequently asked questions

Is Get Menu an alternative to Foodics POS?

For part of the job only. Foodics publishes a broad point of sale and restaurant management range including its own payments and kitchen display products. Get Menu covers ordering, menu, stock, WhatsApp order messages, delivery details and loyalty, and does not run a counter register.

Can I run both together?

Yes, and many restaurants do. The full system keeps the counter and the back office. Orders placed from a phone arrive as WhatsApp tickets in the group your kitchen already reads.

Can my customers pay by card when they order?

No. Payment is cash or your own card machine on delivery or at the table. Nothing is charged through the ordering page, so no card numbers are stored anywhere in the system.

Does it handle several branches?

Yes. Each branch can have its own menu, prices, hours and WhatsApp groups, with logins that only see their own outlet, and sales shown side by side in one view.

How long does it take to set up in a UAE kitchen?

Most are taking orders the same day. The parts that take longest are usually waiting on printed table cards and deciding the delivery fee for each building you serve.