What is it?

An online photo menu, ordering and payment system. Mr Yum is web-based, which means customers scan a QR code specific to the venue and receive the visual menu on their phone (rather than using an app). A group can opt to split their bill at the start and the order still hits the kitchen on one docket.

Where did the idea come from?

Co-founder and CEO Kim Teo and her friends Kerry Osborn and Adrian Osman set out “to make menus more interactive and more helpful”, she says. The trio were colleagues at startup incubator Pitchblak. “We’d get to a restaurant and read the menus then go on Instagram and Google – we wanted more data points to make a decision than just five words. People are visual and love seeing what their food or drink will look like, especially cocktails.” Once they added the ordering and payment system, selling points for the hospitality industry included fewer errors with orders, easier customisation, dietary filters and language translations.

What have you learnt?

Early customers lit the way. Teo says the general manager of Collingwood’s Proud Mary Cafe came to them and said, “You have no idea how many operational challenges you could solve for our industry and I’m going to lay them all out for you.” Later, the CEO of hospitality group Australian Venue Co. approached them because it had been trying to build a QR ordering and payment system for 12 months. The organisation asked Mr Yum to take it on and provided funding that enabled it to hire the fourth co-founder, software developer and now CTO Andrei Miulescu. “I’ve learnt to be comfortable saying I don’t know a whole lot,” says Teo. “The answers will come if you’ve got the right people around you.”

Biggest challenge?

“Figuring out what to say yes to and what to say no to. Everyone wants to partner to go to a new market. We get approaches all the time. ‘Hey, we want to take Mr Yum to Country X.’ It seems attractive and it’s hard to say no but you have to. You can say yes to a lot of stuff and not do any of it well. If we were to go into a non-English-speaking country right now, it would add levels of difficulty that we don’t need, especially when we’ve barely scratched the surface of the US or the UK.”

What’s next?

Mr Yum recently deployed machine learning and AI to suggest upsells. “For example, you order a chicken parma and it recommends products that go well with that dish.” Teo says they focus on the most recent data “because that highlights trends”. What sold well three months ago isn’t as relevant as three days ago – weather changes can influence the popularity of dishes and drinks. “It’s automated so the recommendations flow without restaurant staff having to do anything. We want to make things as simple as possible for our customers.”