CulinArt Embraces Cashless Systems

FM Staff

CulinArt, the Lake Success, NY-based onsite dining services provider to high-end New York area corporate and educational clients, has become one of the leading users of electronic ordering and cashless payment technology across its operations. The company is using different platforms depending on the needs of the client and the constraints of the environment.

For instance, at its operation in the New York Mercantile Exchange, a pilot program with American Express employing Radio Frequency Identifi-cation (RFID) and a highspeed internet connection allows more than 450 AMEX cardholdersto effect "wave and go" cashless transactions at the point of sale.

At the Rye Playland amusement park in Rye, NY, the company will be piloting a walk-up ordering system that uses illuminated icons to allow customers to place custom meal orders on an LED touch-screen terminal and pay with a credit card with no signature required.

At CulinArt's operation at Symbol Technologies, a pilot program the company says is the only one of its kind in the industry, bar-code scanning technology allows customers to perform "self check out" at cashierless registers.

And at the new FactSet Research Systems headquarters in Norwalk, CT, where the employee cafè is still under construction, employees use a webbased online ordering system to place orders with Webfood from their workstations. The orders come to an off-site kitchen, where they are printed out onto labels used by the dining staff to prepare and identify individual meals.

In addition to the efficiency of production facilitated by the system, it allows the CulinArt unit manager to monitor usage trends, track transactions, generate statistics and even view customer feedback in real time through the administrator subsystem. A patron subsystem helps integrate an easy-touse interface that stores customer preferences accessible from any browser, and a cook's subsystem enables the kitchen to view upcoming orders and print order tickets for meal prep.