One QR code for the hall, or one per stall?
Does the code on the table open the whole hall or a single kitchen? What each does to spend per head, to queues, and to the kitchens not on the poster.
Every food hall that puts QR ordering in has to answer one question early, and it is easy to answer by accident: does the code on the table open the hall, or the kitchen the guest is nearest to?
It sounds like a detail of link structure. It decides what the hall sells.
One code per stall
The straightforward version. Each kitchen has its own code, its own menu, its own orders. It is easy to set up, easy to explain to a vendor, and every vendor is completely in control of their own page.
What it costs you:
- A guest who wants a taco and a pint does two transactions, and a meaningful number of them do not do the second.
- The kitchens without a queue in front of them stay invisible. A guest standing at the busy counter never sees the quiet one.
- Nothing hall-wide is possible — no cross-vendor deal, no single loyalty scheme, no one collection number.
One code for the hall
The code opens every kitchen in the building. The guest browses the hall, builds one basket across as many counters as they like, and pays once.
What it costs you:
- The settlement problem becomes real — see how a food hall takes one payment across five kitchens.
- A vendor who is closed, or who has sold out, must disappear cleanly rather than taking orders nobody will cook.
- The menu is longer, so browsing has to be good: filters, categories, a sensible order, and pictures that are actually of the dish.
- Collection gets harder. Three kitchens, three ready times, one guest. Somebody has to decide whether they are told once or three times.
The middle answer most halls end up at
One hall code as the default on tables and posters, plus a direct code per kitchen for the counter itself and for the vendor's own marketing. The two are the same menu data seen from different starting points, not two systems.
That way a guest sitting down browses the hall, and a guest standing at the Korean counter with their mind made up gets that menu immediately, without scrolling past six other kitchens to find it.
The thing to get right before any of it
Whichever you pick, the hall needs to be able to pause one kitchen without stopping the others. A kitchen that has run out, or gone home early, or had a fryer die, must stop taking orders in seconds and without a phone call to the hall manager. If a supplier's answer to "how do I stop that one kitchen trading" involves them doing it for you, you will be sending that message at half past nine on a Saturday.
HelchPOS is built for the one-code-per-hall model, with per-kitchen codes alongside it, because that is the model the food hall it was built in actually uses. If you are working through the same decision, we would rather compare notes than send you a brochure.