Introducing Mashgin Cafeteria: The Whole Café, Moving at the Speed of Checkout

Checkout was just the beginning.

Mashgin is well known as the fastest checkout experience on the planet. But for years operators kept telling us the same thing: while checkout was lightning quick, everything around it was still slow and disconnected. 

Here's the thing about a busy café: a fast checkout can't fix a slow kitchen, a clunky ordering flow, or a line that backs up three stations before it ever reaches the register. Speed up one link in the chain and the bottleneck can quickly slide to the next one. So we went and built the rest of the café to move at the same speed as our checkout.

That's Mashgin Cafeteria, one system that runs the whole operation: in-person and online ordering, kitchen management, delivery, loyalty, stored value, and easy, instant checkout. For café operators that means every piece finally works together instead of requiring someone to babysit the seams between four different vendors.

And we built this for one person in particular: the General Manager. GMs are the busiest people in the building. They're doing menu updates at 6am, running a staff meeting by 7:30, fixing a jammed printer during the rush, and reconciling three vendors' spreadsheets after close, all while actually running the café. Mashgin Cafeteria is our attempt to hand a big chunk of that time and energy back to them:

• One vendor for ordering, kitchen ticketing, in-venue checkout, delivery, loyalty, and badge pay, not four contracts to sign and four platforms to learn.
  
  
• One login to configure, manage, and report across the entire stack. No more exporting data from multiple systems into a spreadsheet just to figure out what actually happened yesterday.
  
  
• One number to call when you need help. Plus the person who picks up actually works at Mashgin, not a 3rd party call center, where our response time averages under 3 minutes.
  
  
• One happy GM thanks to smooth handoffs between systems and a few extra minutes the day to actually plan for tomorrow.

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A Quick Look at What’s New

New Cafeteria Hardware: MashTab

Mashgin’s own mounted tablet with three software modes to take on the different needs that span the cafe. MashTab runs on the same code base as our kiosks, so it inherits existing menus and integrations - simplifying your stack.

Ordering Mode - Place orders onsite with the option to pay in advance or at checkout. Any MashTab can be set to place orders to a single or multiple stations.

KDS Mode - Receive and manage orders from onsite MashTabs or online.

*POS Mode - Traditional cashier-led checkout without the fancy cameras and AI, for the spots where a kiosk or Power Counter doesn’t fit.

*Cash drawer compatibility - Mashgin will work with select cash drawers, on both kiosk and MashTab (in POS mode).

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New Cafeteria Software

Online Ordering & Delivery - a web/mobile experience similar to modern delivery apps for customers and a companion app for deliverers to keep track of orders and mark delivery status.

Unified User Accounts - one identity across kiosk, Cloud, and MashCash, with role-based permissions and audit logs.

*Mashgin Loyalty - build and run your own points, punch-card, discounts, and rewards program entirely inside Mashgin.

*MashCash - an enterprise system for issuing and tracking gift cards, reloadable cards, and single use meal tickets with program management and easy migration off your old system. Plus badge spend tracking for payroll deduction.

Please note that products marked with a * are coming soon. If you’d like to have early access as a beta tester, reach out to your success manager or our support team.

Now let's dig in.

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MashTab: Ordering

Made-to-order is where a lot of cafés live and die, and it's often the busiest part of the floor (especially if you’re already running Mashgin checkout for grab-and-go options). MashTab offers a compact ordering tablet where you can order from a single or multiple cafe stations at once. Add a few at the front of a single station or a bunch at the doorway of your cafe so that diners can browse extras on their way to pick up food.

Diners can build exactly what they want (down to the extra patty, no pickles) and send it straight to the kitchen. They can pay right at the tablet or carry a printed receipt to any Mashgin checkout where it can ring up on top of the box or scanned on the barcode scanner.

The big deal here isn't just that it's a nice ordering experience - it's that MashTab is on the same codebase that powers our kiosk. That means every integration that already works on a Mashgin kiosk now works on MashTab too. That includes MashCash and Mashgin Loyalty, which we’ll get in a little bit.

We also added light pole compatibility to MashTab so a busy floor can be read at a glance. A light pole shows which tablets are open and available, when a transaction is cancelled, or when a diner is calling for an attendant - the same at-a-glance status language our kiosks already speak with their lights.

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MashTab: Kitchen Display System (KDS)

Running both ordering and KDS from the same hardware makes it easier to manage devices or swap them out as needed. As for the software, our KDS got a design refresh with one goal in mind: help the kitchen see the whole rush. The redesigned layout fits more orders and more items on screen at once, so staff aren’t scrolling frantically to figure out how deep the queue really is during the lunch rush.

The KDS is natively connected to online and MashTab ordering so every order lands in one place no matter where it came from. Connected printers can automatically print tickets as orders come in. For online orders staff can tap to mark them as in-progress or ready for pickup.

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*MashTab: POS

Not every spot in a café can fit a camera-based checkout. To fill in that gap, we built a fully operational traditional POS.

Set up with a barcode reader, MashTab can operate as a classic attended register: ring up made-to-order items, scan order codes and barcoded items, and add non-barcoded items to the cart by hand.

MashTab runs the same Mashgin codebase as our kiosks, just without the cameras, so it inherits all existing integrations. For an operator, the beauty is that it's not a different system to learn and maintain. From a management perspective you’re using the same menu and the same reporting, just in a form factor that fits the corner you couldn't cover before.

Note: POS mode for MashTab is coming soon. If you’d like to have early access as a beta tester, reach out to your success manager or our support team.

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*Cash Drawers

Cash isn't going away, especially in mixed environments where not every diner is tapping a badge or a card. While we’ve integrated with cash recyclers for a while now, they can be bulky and expensive if only a few transactions a day need cash. 

Mashgin now works with select cash drawers on kiosks, Power Counters, and MashTab, so an attended lane can take cash and make change through the same Mashgin flow it uses for everything else. No need for a separate register off to the side just to handle the cash customers.

When customers choose cash as their payment option, cashiers will be prompted to enter the amount of money handed over. Mashgin will calculate the change and pop the cash drawer for the cashier to complete the transaction.

Once change is given out, the cashier is able to close their transaction from the cashier-facing screen.

Note: Cash drawer compatibility is coming soon. If you’d like to have early access as a beta tester, reach out to your success manager or our support team.

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Online Ordering & Delivery

Diners increasingly expect to order from their phone, and until now that was one more disconnected system. Our rebuilt online ordering feels like the apps people already use every day when ordering at home. The system is built as a website, not an app, so customers don’t need to download anything to their phone and can order just as easily from their computer or personal tablet.

It's easy to reorder a favorite, to browse a menu, and to switch between locations if your campus has more than one café or station. Diners order, pay, and then track their order, from "Placed" to "Preparing" to "Ready," so nobody's hovering at the counter wondering if their food is coming.

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Payment is flexible too - Apple Pay, Google Pay, and MashCash are all in, alongside saved cards. Online orders are integrated with Mashgin Loyalty so diners can earn and burn points from their desk or dorm.

For cafés that deliver there's now a full delivery companion app, with the kind of orders, locations, statuses, and confirmations you'd expect from leading delivery apps.

A driver opens their queue on their phone and marks each order picked up and delivered, essentially carrying the KDS in their pocket. The diner sees a "picked up" status update the moment it happens, so a delivery to the fourth floor stops being a black box.

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*Mashgin Loyalty

Loyalty used to mean signing up with yet another outside provider and hoping it talked to your POS (or spending months coordinating vendors to integrate). Now you can build and run your entire program inside Mashgin: points, discounts, and punch cards, all customized and managed from the same platform you already use.

The part GMs and marketing teams will love is the custom “program” presets that you can quickly add new employees, students, or diners to. Each program can set its own points-per-dollar, discount amounts, punch-card thresholds (by items or by dollars), and which specific items even qualify.

From the dashboard you can watch adoption, points issued and redeemed, and a full event log of every rule that's fired so you can actually tell whether a promo is working and who is using it.

Best of all, because loyalty now rides the same rails as everything else, diners earn and burn anywhere. At the kiosk, at a tablet, or ordering from their phone. One wallet, one program, everywhere they eat.

Note: Mashgin Loyalty is coming soon. If you’d like to have early access as a beta tester, reach out to your success manager or our support team.

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*MashCash Programs and Payroll Deduct

MashCash is our enterprise system for issuing and tracking stored-value and spend cards. It's built for the real complexity of corporate and campus dining, where "who gets to spend what" is rarely simple. 

MasCash configurations support the full range of options, from single-use vouchers, to gift cards, to staff cards that automatically reload at a regular interval as a perk. Customers simply scan a QR to pay, so you can print cards and hand them out or just email the QR to guests and staff to use on their phone.

The upgrade is really about manageability at scale. Just like Mashgin Loyalty, you can now set up programs. For example, you can set up a program that starts with a balance and is topped up by a set amount once a day or once a week. As you add new users, you can just add them to that program and they will inherit all of the settings.

MashCash now also features payroll deduct as a payment option. This is a simpler way to let your staff pay with their badge without having to regularly reload it on their own. Staff simply tap at an RFID reader to add it to their tab.

We’ve also made mass onboarding a lot easier. You can add a whole department via a CSV upload, not a week of manual entry. Migrating off a clunky legacy system? You can import your existing programs and card balances rather than starting from scratch. 

Every card and every transaction lands in a single ledger, and if a diner loses access or needs a resend, you can pop into their individual card and fix it on the spot.

Note: Mashcash is coming soon. If you’d like to have early access as a beta tester, reach out to your success manager or our support team.

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User Accounts, Logging, & Privilege Levels

With adding so many products to the lineup, we realized it was important to unify user accounts for simplicity of login and team management. Now accounts on checkout products, Cloud, and MashCash can share a single identity that spans all three, so a manager isn't juggling separate logins for separate systems.

With that comes role-based permissions. Each client will get a handful of roles (Mashgin will help define them to start, with room to customize the feature access for your own roles), so a crew member, a shift lead, and a GM each can see and change different things. 

This may manifest on the kiosk as a regular cashier being able to add items to someone’s cart, while only a shift lead or above has the access to issue a refund.Team members will sign in to Cloud with a phone number or email, and to the kiosk with a PIN, QR code, or badge, but privileges for both will be defined in a single profile.

And the piece a lot of operators have been asking for: audit logs. You'll be able to filter history by user, by permission tier, or by platform and answer questions like:

• who opened a cash drawer and when, 
• who added that new item to the menu or deleted an old one
• who changed the day part times
• who built or edited a discount. 

For a GM overseeing dozens of staff across multiple locations, that's real peace of mind.

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Cheers to the GMs

We want to close with a thank-you. Mashgin was forged in the crucible of cafeterias, going from an idea to where we are today with the help of hundreds of General Managers and other food service leaders who took the time to help us understand the industry and what we needed to build. It was all of your feedback and willingness to give us a chance that got us here.

And what we learned about your lives was harrowing! For a long time, running a great café has quietly meant being a systems integrator on top of everything else: keeping the POS, the ordering system, the kitchen displays, the loyalty provider, the payment processor, and the reporting all somehow in sync, by hand, while also actually running the café. That's an absurd amount to carry, and the General Managers and District Managers who've been doing it deserve enormous credit for holding it all together.

That's exactly the part we built Mashgin Cafeteria to take off your plate. The stack is one system now. The seams are ours to worry about. And it’s all built by a team you know will pick up the phone faster than anyone else.

You run the café. We'll take it from there.