Smart Dining Through QR Technology: Building a Contactless Order Management System for Restaurant Efficiency

Scan & Dine began as a response to a straightforward problem — the gap between how easily people manage complex tasks on their phones and how unnecessarily cumbersome the simple act of ordering food at a restaurant remains. What emerged from the development and evaluation process is a system that addresses this gap not through technological complexity but through thoughtful simplicity. The findings of this study confirm that a QR-based integrated ordering system can meaningfully improve restaurant efficiency, reduce errors, enhance customer experience, and increase revenue — all without requiring significant capital investment or technical expertise from the restaurant operator. The broader implication is significant. As restaurants navigate rising labour costs, evolving customer expectations, and increasing competition, digital tools that are genuinely accessible and genuinely useful represent a critical strategic asset. Scan & Dine offers a model for what that looks like in practice. Future work will explore the integration of AI-driven menu personalization — where the digital menu adapts based on a customer's order history or time of visit — as well as multilingual menu support for restaurants serving diverse customer bases, and deeper analytics dashboards to give restaurant owners actionable insights from their order data. The restaurant industry is not going to be transformed overnight. But one table, one scan, one seamless experience at a time — it is already changing.

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