Case study
Seven kitchens. One QR code. One payment.
Helch Market is a food hall in Winchester: seven independent kitchens trading under one roof, each with its own menu, its own stock and its own money. It is also where HelchPOS is built — every feature below survived a real service before it was called finished.
The problem a food hall has
A guest who wants tacos from one kitchen, bao from another and a drink from the bar is three queues and three card payments — or they give up and order from one. The systems built for restaurants assume one kitchen and one till. A food hall is neither: the trader’s money is the trader’s, the hall takes its share, and no kitchen can see another kitchen’s orders. Most software solves that by pretending the hall is one restaurant. The traders’ accountants disagree.
What Winchester runs
Every table carries one QR code. It opens the whole hall — all seven menus, filterable by dietary need, with the day’s sold-out dishes already marked. The guest builds one basket across as many kitchens as they like and pays once.
Behind that single payment, each kitchen receives its own order on its own kitchen screen, with only its own lines. The money is divided the moment it arrives — each kitchen’s food to that kitchen, tips following the food, any hall-wide discount split to the penny. A three-way split of £10 is 333p + 333p + 334p with the remainder handed out by rule, so a trader can always be told why their number is their number. A refund comes out of the kitchen that was paid for the dish — never smeared across the hall.
The guest gets one five-digit order number. Of twenty cups on a counter, theirs is the one somebody can actually call.
Nothing here may claim something that is not built and working. Every feature on this page had to survive a Saturday service before it counted as finished.The rule HelchPOS is written under
What the kitchens get
Each trader runs their own register, their own kitchen screen and their own stock — staff sign in and the system knows whose kitchen they are in. A sale takes real ingredients off a real shelf: the first kitchen through the full costing, Loco Lime, has every one of its 54 dishes carried down to ingredient lines and prep batches, so a taco leaving the pass moves the chicken, the tortillas and the salsa it was made from, and the margin on the menu is arithmetic rather than hope.
The hall’s owner sees the whole picture — every kitchen’s takings, labour against sales, and one audit log of who changed what. Each trader sees exactly their own, and nothing of their neighbour’s.
Where it stands
Counts, not claims
Helch Market is where HelchPOS is made, so this page is a working venue described plainly rather than a customer testimonial. The numbers above are live counts anyone can check against the hall today — not uplift figures, because the hall’s previous system took its history with it when it left. As real month-on-month numbers accrue, they will appear here.
See what one QR code can do for your hall.
The software is free — we only earn when we take a payment for you. Set a hall up in an afternoon, or write to us and we’ll walk you round Winchester’s.