The Best Pizza POS Systems for Restaurants in 2021
If you own a pizza parlor, pizza window, or food truck that specializes in pizza, you know how unique your food ordering needs are compared to other types of restaurants.
Selling pizza almost always requires a high degree of order customization, and for many pizza restaurants, delivery plays an especially crucial role in sales.
For that reason, most pizza entrepreneurs are better off investing in a POS system that has features that were designed specifically for a pizza establishment, instead of using one designed for general restaurant use.
In this article, we’ll break down what features make a pizza system especially useful, and suggest six of the best options on the market for you to explore further.
Features to Look for in a Pizza POS System:
Todays’ web-based, digital POS systems have come a long way from standard cash registers. You can expect much more than solid financial reports and a smooth checkout system, including features like:
- Online ordering – Many small pizza parlors may still consider online ordering a feature that’s simply nice-to-have in their point of sale system. We’re listing it here first because we consider it a must-have. As we wrote in our post on the advantage of an online ordering system, giving your customers the option to order for themselves is a convenience that customers increasingly expect restaurants to offer — and that includes pizza restaurants. Especially after COVID-19, customers have embraced the conveniences of online ordering and are more likely to patronize restaurants that make it super easy to order online.
- Customized ordering for pizza – Unlike the ordering systems for other restaurants, customers ordering pizzas should be able to essentially build their meals from scratch, adding any ingredients they want and placing them on different halves of the pizza — and even breaking the pizza down into smaller components! Customers should also be able to add and remove ingredients from set or specialized pizzas on the menu, and be able to customize things like sauce and crust.
- Delivery and driver management – If there’s any type of restaurant that typically relies on delivery, it’s a pizza restaurant. Look for a POS system with robust delivery features, including the ability to assign orders to third party drivers or to in-house drivers. The best POS systems for pizza restaurants will have an app specifically for drivers to use, and the ability for managers to track drivers on their routes. Customers should get notifications of drivers’ progress and be able to rate and give feedback on their delivery experience.
- Loyalty and referrals – Many Americans order pizza regularly, so choosing a system that encourages your customers to order from your store each time they order a pizza can have big payoffs. Look for a POS app that allows customers to automatically earn points with their purchases, as well as rewards for referring friends or making certain purchases.
- Customer analytics – This is another core POS feature that’s just as important to pizza parlors as it is to fine dining restaurants. Access to the right data can help you analyze customer order trends and understand your customer’s needs by observing how orders change according to factors such as the customer’s location, the time of day or week they order, the types of food they order, and more.
- Ingredient tracking and costing – The profitability of your pizza business will depend on many things — the ability to attract new customers and then deliver a consistently excellent experience that keeps them coming back, for example. But it’s difficult to stay profitable if you aren’t charging the right prices for the items on your menu. Good POS software can automatically calculate the profitability of each pizza, salad, calzone, or other meal on your menu, and adjust as raw ingredient prices fluctuate over time. You can even design your menu to emphasize the most profitable menu items.
- Ability to handle growth – Many pizza entrepreneurs have dreams of eventually expanding their brands, opening more locations or even starting a pizza shop franchise. If this is you, it’s best to choose a POS system that can grow along with your restaurant and is built to accommodate multiple locations and rapid expansion.
The Best Pizza POS Systems to Consider
With those features in mind, here are several pizza POS systems that we consider to be the best available today.
Truffle POS (Recommended)
Truffle POS is one of the best premium players on the pizza POS scene.
We purpose-built our iPad point of sale with pizza restaurants in mind — with slice-by-slice customization, delivery dispatch, and built-in online ordering.
We know how customers are incredibly loyal to their pizza places, so we built a customized loyalty program that helps you connect with your fans and promote your brand.
Customer loyalty is especially important for pizza restaurants, which makes it an important pizza POS feature, too.
Our platform is completely scalable, and it comes fully equipped with the latest features like driver delivery guidance, online table reservations, delivery management, and food locker pickup.
We’ve designed Truffle POS to work with the most commonly used POS hardware. Our hardware compatibility team will even work with yours to find the best use for hardware that you already own. This minimizes the intimidating upfront costs that smaller pizza shops can face when adopting a new POS system.
Finally, we work with a variety of major payment processors, including Moneris, First Data, Chase Paymentech, and Global Payments, so you can choose the one that works best for you. We offer our customers exclusive rates through Global Payments.
Pizza POS System by Revel
Revel Systems’ Restaurant POS System was among the first cloud-based POS to be designed for the iPad. This startup was founded in 2010, is headquartered in Atlanta, and serves some of the largest restaurant franchises in the world.
Revel offers a POS system especially for pizza restaurants and other specialty food businesses, which include coffee shops and quick service restaurants.
It has both standard and advanced POS features, including loyalty, gift cards, online ordering, and customer relationship management. It also has a comprehensive inventory management system included.
One feature of special interest to pizza restaurant owners is the program’s robust driver management program, which comes with navigational and tracking tools that include GPS mapping. You can assign multiple orders to a single driver, and access plenty of reports and data about delivery. Revel’s Pizza POS can also incorporate with third-party delivery apps easily if your restaurant uses them.
Revel also lets users build their own pizzas, and the system can adjust prices accordingly based on which toppings and sizes the customer chooses.
HungerRush Pizza Management System
HungerRush is a relatively new brand, released in 2020, but it’s a cloud-based evolution of what was a legacy POS called Revention — which was designed specifically for pizza restaurants. However, HungerRush now has products for other concepts, including nightclubs and fast casual restaurants.
HungerRush strives to make it as easy as possible for your customer to order via their smartphones, and even allows users to modify their online store in ways that best fit their brand. Plus, like other great pizza POS systems, the system makes it possible for customers to modify their pizza orders any way they like.
The system comes with a fully-featured delivery management solution that allows managers to handle orders, drivers, and routes in real-time, and it even integrates with Google Maps to provide more accurate tracking and reports. In addition to its in-house fleet management features, the system also offers easy integrations with third-party delivery marketplaces.
HungerRush comes with a full loyalty and customer relationship program, and users can reach out to customers (or groups of customers) with targeted offers and news.
One unique advantage of HungerRush is the system’s ability to easily accept delivery payments right at the door or point of delivery.
Toast POS
Revel Systems’ Restaurant POS System was among the first cloud-based POS to be designed for the iPad. This startup was founded in 2010, is headquartered in Atlanta, and serves some of the largest restaurant franchises in the world.
Revel offers specialty POS systems for pizza restaurants and cafes, and it also has a retail POS system.
It has both standard and advanced POS features, including loyalty, gift cards, online ordering, a kitchen display system, and customer relationship management features. The program also uses an open API, so it’s easy to integrate with plenty of third party apps to add even more functionality to the program. Revel also has drive-through management features and kiosk ordering features, which may have special appeal for certain types of restaurant franchises. With Revel Enterprise®, users can manage multiple locations from a central cloud dashboard.
However, Revel has yet to add features for online reservations or smart locker for food with your POS system, and users are limited to using iPads for their point of sale stations.
Toast
Toast, Inc. is a cloud-based restaurant software company based in Boston, Massachusetts and founded in 2012.
Toast doesn’t have a pizza-specific product like the other POS systems we’ve listed here, but it’s one of the most popular POS products for restaurants on the market, and it does have a robust set of affordable features that can make it a serious contender for certain pizza restaurants despite its lack of pizza-specific features.
It has a full set of online ordering features and takeout and delivery features. Customers can customize their orders any way they like, and meal modifiers show up clearly in the kitchen display system for the back-of-house staff.
Toast also offers robust options for customer loyalty, marketing, and even staff payroll — but many of these services are available as add-ons with separate pricing.
SpeedLine
SpeedLine has been specializing exclusively in pizza point of sale since 1990, and it may have more pizza-specific features than any other POS system on the market.
However, SpeedLine still runs entirely on local hardware and not on the cloud, which can mean that installation costs are significant and can get complicated — and that reports and data may not be available remotely in real-time.
SpeedLine’s most impressive features have to do with delivery, and include the ability to customize delivery zones, optimize routes, and even visualize delivery progress as it happens live.
With SpeedLine, pizza restaurants can customize their own online menus and give customers the option of ordering any combination of toppings and pizza sizes and portions.
With the “last order recall” feature, your staff can remind call-in customers what they ordered last time and easily repeat the order, saving you time and effort.
The system also enables you to issue a variety of coupons and offers. It also has a full inventory system, a kitchen display system, and a customer loyalty program.
Speedline even has what they call a “Conversational Ordering” feature, which lets your staff enter items and toppings in any sequence so you don’t have to re-start the order when you get new information.
Square for Restaurants
Most people recognize the POS system Square because it was one of the first POS systems to make it super easy for small businesses to accept credit card payments with little more than a smartphone.
The square-shaped card readers plugged directly into an iPhone’s audio jack to make accepting payments super simple.
The POS system has evolved a lot since that time to become a fully featured POS system for both retailers and restaurants. Although it doesn’t have a program specifically for pizza restaurants, square POS aims to serve restaurants of all types, always with a primary focus on speed and efficiency.
Square POS has robust features for online ordering, kitchen display systems, team management, and payroll. It also integrates with plenty of third party apps.
The main benefit of Square POS is that it can accept any type of payment quickly and securely, whether you want to collect orders online, at customers’ tables, or at the checkout counter.
It doesn’t have any delivery features, though, which makes it a better fit for pizza venues such as pizza food trucks, pizza windows, or other “slice shops.”