Eats365: Combining innovation and technology to revolutionize the F&B industry
About Eats365
Eats365 is an innovative food and beverage (F&B) technology provider that empowers restaurants with end-to-end solutions offering exceptional control, cost effectiveness and advantageous features. Since launching in 2017, Eats365 has expanded into 19 markets across the globe. The company has won multiple awards, including the HK Retail Innovation Award and the HK ICT Award.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usEats365 expanded to 19 markets, went from five to 3,000+ clients in four years and widened their solution offerings, including business intelligence analytics and data with Google Cloud solutions.
Google Cloud results
- Supports growth from five to 3,000+ clients in three+ years with unlimited automated scaling
- Deploys multiple application upgrades each month across its 14 platform modules
- Enables continuous platform improvement by freeing development team from provisioning and security tasks
- Protects growth of top corporate clients with built-in world-class security and data compliance for due diligence
Supporting 19 markets with 99.999% uptime since launch
Did you know that your food order goes through a whole chain of events before arriving at your table? Whether for international enterprises or mom-and-pop shops, Eats365 provides an all-in-one food and beverage (F&B) solution that integrates backend and consumer-facing tasks that include ordering, delivery, kitchen management, inventory, reservations, and business intelligence.
Eats365 has roots across Asia and beyond, as the company provides its cloud-based solution to a diverse range of F&B establishments in 19 markets. The online ordering platform gives restaurants the flexibility to implement their own distinctive identity on top of their food ordering software, allowing them to save on fees they would otherwise have to pay to third-party delivery platforms.
Asia is fast paced and always evolving. It’s our job to provide meaningful innovation that lets restaurants thrive in this competitive environment. The flexibility of Google Kubernetes Engine and App Engine give us confidence that no matter how fast Asia’s F&B industry grows, our solutions can scale even faster."
—Wilson Lee, founder & CEO, Eats365To serve the needs of any restaurant across a sprawling client base, Eats365 needed a world-class cloud architecture that enabled it to achieve real-time scalability and deployment of application features and updates.
By turning to Google Cloud, Eats365 gained the cloud tools it needed to drive its vision of powering the future of dining. Due to the growth and rapid scaling of Eats365’s solution, the company needed to use containerized applications and VMs.
"Asia is fast paced and always evolving. It’s our job to provide meaningful innovation that lets restaurants thrive in this competitive environment,” says Wilson Lee, CEO and founder of Eats365. “The flexibility of Google Kubernetes Engine and App Engine give us confidence that no matter how fast Asia’s F&B industry grows, our solutions can scale even faster."
"Since we serve such a rapidly expanding customer base, our software on the cloud is mission critical. By utilizing Google Cloud, we feel more at ease since we don’t need to worry about any hardware failures. It means we're always free to add new Eats365 services, keeping customers happy."
—Wilson Lee, founder & CEO, Eats365Building forward-thinking F&B solutions to meet evolving market needs
Eats365's beginnings were patient and methodical. Lee and a small group of partners started operations in 2014, renting a rack at a data center and building the solution's foundations over two years until they felt it was ready to launch. "In the first two years, we were just working things out, not facing any customers, so we felt we could still afford to be on physical servers," Lee recalls.
In 2016, the company found itself rolling out its platform to a small group of actual customers in a soft launch. The Eats365 team knew that embracing cloud technology was now crucial to ensure its intricate end-to-end solution could grow at scale.
The ease-of-use and flexible interface of Google Cloud were exactly what the team needed to achieve freedom from DevOps tasks. This allowed Eats365’s developers to concentrate on the mission of getting the platform ready for an ambitious launch.
Eats365 implemented a seamless full-stack migration to Google Cloud within two weeks, moving its architecture to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Compute Engine for improved integration with external partners, and App Engine to code and develop new apps, all of which automated configuration and scaling processes to enable Eats365’s developers to focus on creative tasks building the platform. Meanwhile, Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage transformed the startup's database and data storage needs by providing unlimited capacity, low latency, and built-in security.
After a successful launch in 2017, Eats365 has grown from just a handful of clients to more than 3,000 today, at an accelerating pace. Lee says that the company can focus on driving business growth by building meaningful improvements to its F&B solution that gives restaurants a competitive advantage. Because of Google Cloud's security, scaling, and resilience, his team isn’t bogged down with issues such as downtime or data breaches as they continue to expand.
"Since we serve such a rapidly-expanding customer base, our software on the cloud is mission critical. By utilizing Google Cloud, we feel more at ease since we don’t need to worry about any hardware failures," says Lee. “It means we're always free to add new Eats365 services, keeping customers happy."
To keep up with their promise and innovative spirit, Eats365 deploys many application upgrades each month across its 14 platform modules, which covers all areas of a restaurant’s operations. "That would simply have been impossible in our bare-metal days, since we now cover many time zones and the deployment window is ever-shrinking" says Lee. "With Google Cloud, we can deploy new applications without the need for downtime, which is a lifesaver for us!"
"We used to be concerned about the hardware required to run new powerful features added to our solution. But with GKE and Compute Engine, we’re confident in the computing power at our disposal because the system just scales up and down as needed. That makes things very convenient for us."
—Wilson Lee, founder & CEO, Eats365Enabling a flexible ecosystem model through third-party tech integrations
One of Eats365's unique selling points is its open ecosystem vision that integrates external tech innovations from third-party partners to improve the user experience. Such partners range from popular food-ordering marketplaces to global payment partners, and even automated kitchen robotics. All in all, Eats365 works with dozens of partners to bring together must-have features under one platform.
Ecosystem dynamism also creates a potential challenge, with unpredictable surges in partner demand that could crash the system without the scaling elasticity to handle spikes. Lee says that with Google Cloud, this has never been an issue, thanks to the automatic scaling features of GKE and Compute Engine, both of which are needed to integrate with diverse partner architectures.
"We used to be concerned about the hardware required to run new powerful features added to our solution," says Lee. “But with GKE and Compute Engine, we’re confident in the computing power at our disposal because the system just scales up and down as needed. That makes things very convenient for us."
Winning the trust of global clients with inbuilt world-class security
Eats365 needs to offer more than a futuristic F&B solution to win the trust of multinational corporations such as global banks and restaurant chains as customers. These firms have strict due-diligence policies that must ascertain that any potential contractor is safe and secure, as well as data compliant, before onboarding.
Being able to tell clients that Eats365 is hosted on Google Cloud infrastructure, with inbuilt world-class security and data compliance protocols also gives customers peace of mind with the platform’s long-standing reputation.
"Google Cloud provides us rock-solid security in terms of key management, encryptions, and storage, and beyond that there's a psychological factor in being able to tell big clients that we're running on Google Cloud," says Lee. "They know immediately that they're in safe hands with our solution."
Powering the future of dining with smarter F&B solutions
As Eats365 continues its global expansion, it plans to provide restaurants with deep analytics, business intelligence, and customer-driven data. Through its loyalty program and customer relation management (CRM), Eats365 offers restaurants a smarter, data-centric way to understand and attract customers.
Eats365 is moving to adopt Vertex AI solutions to drive the predictive analytics that will enable it to give clients data-driven insight on food consumption trends, so they can offer tailor-made offerings at scale.
Eats365's other major initiative is automating the selling of its platform, aiming for labor and cost efficiencies as it experiences higher growth. That will involve development of a chatbot both for sales and customer support. Eats365 is now actively pursuing how Natural Language API can aid the new automated client engagement process.
"As we grow faster, we're going to need to automate a lot of our processes, as well as add new value for our customers with data insights," says Lee. "We're excited to be building these next steps for our future with Google AI solutions."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Eats365
Eats365 is an innovative food and beverage (F&B) technology provider that empowers restaurants with end-to-end solutions offering exceptional control, cost effectiveness and advantageous features. Since launching in 2017, Eats365 has expanded into 19 markets across the globe. The company has won multiple awards, including the HK Retail Innovation Award and the HK ICT Award.