Stream the full conversation with Victor Lugger on the Extra Serving podcast above.
The pandemic might have pushed Victor Lugger to create a payment app, but he argues that paying at restaurants has always been a bit broken.
Asking for a check. Getting a little slip of paper. The back and forth with a credit card. “It seems insane,” said Lugger, the cofounder of the Europe-based restaurant group Big Mamma and the restaurant payment app Sunday.
“Paying in a restaurant has just always been this bad moment, and we just never challenged or questioned it. When you get to think about it, paying at the restaurant doesn’t feel any better than hailing a cab in the streets,” he added. (And we all know that hailing a cab in the streets has gone through a transformation.)
Lugger created a QR-code enabled payment product for his restaurants amid the pandemic. But what he thought would be a temporary solution turned out to have massive benefits for his restaurants and guests, he said. Guests appreciated the convenience of paying for their meal by phone at their own pace, eliminating the need to ask their server for a check. Servers loved having more time to interact with guests by eliminating the need to travel back and forth from tables with a card reader. It helped that guests were tipping more using this payment product, too.
“If my staff loves it and if my guests love it, we start to have something,” Lugger said. After seeing the reaction in his own restaurants, which include Ober Mamma in Paris and Gloria in London, Lugger began outsourcing the tech to other restaurants, eventually raising $100 million with a goal of bringing the app to North America. (Big Mamma is opening a restaurant in the States soon, too. Their first U.S. location will be in Miami, Lugger said.)
Today, the company works with over 3,000 restaurants in the U.S. and Europe. The current iteration of Sunday app is far more than a QR code on a table. Diners paying with Sunday can split checks, communicate with the restaurant, and leave reviews on Google. Restaurants can integrate Sunday into their POS systems, gather diner insights, and turn tables faster. And the main piece of technology restaurants need to use Sunday is already in most customers’ pockets, Lugger argues.
“We’re not adding technology to restaurants,” he said. “We are just transforming 20th-century technology, which is a credit card processing machine, with 21st-century technology, which is your phone.”
