Egyptian Startup 'Touch-Less' Is Helping Usher Restaurants in a Post-Quarantine World

A so-called ‘great equaliser’, the COVID-19 pandemic is actually far from. We’ve seen restaurants pivot, scale, expand or falter throughout this pandemic. But perhaps the most fascinating are the ones born not just during it, but from it.

As the world slowly opens its doors, people are finding themselves maneuvering a phantom menace while armed and armoured with sanitisers, gloves and masks. However, the ‘new normal’ is now expanding from work-from-home and Zoom calls, to reviving economies and industries that have been hibernating for months. The F&B industry is particularly tricky , thanks to the added challenge of taking contactless precautionary measures across the board.

“We saw an opportunity during this crisis. We saw a world becoming increasingly jittery with contact, be it with other people or objects, and then it really hit us... QR codes,” co-founder and CEO of Touch-Less Mostafa Medhat tells SceneEats.

Founded amid the Coronavirus outbreak, Touch-Less is an Egyptian startup leveraging the demand for the swift and seamless integration of contactless technology that can help both customers and businesses navigate their way through the new ‘new normal’. Touch-Less helps restaurants, cafes, hotels and shops (among other businesses) migrate certain experiences online so that the contact jitters are curbed. 

“QR codes, in essence, are a call to action. It’s right there in the name, Quick Response. It’s an instantaneous method that provides access to all sorts of features, and now is it’s time to shine,” adds Medhat. “No more disposable menus at restaurants, brochures and guides at malls, or quality surveys at hotels; you can have a holistic ecosystem for your business and all a customer has to do is point their camera at a code.”

In this effort to realise this existing technology’s full potential, Touch-Less is, quite literally, rebranding QR codes. They’re not just aiming to have those maze-looking black and white blocks scattered all around, but they’re developing a system so that their designers and software engineers can create QR code that fit a client’s branding guidelines. 

There’s also a B2B benefit that sets Touch-Less apart, in that it provides a business with detailed analytics to help, say, a restaurant track which meal was ordered most on a specific day, what are the peak hours, were there more clicks on the Facebook or Instagram profiles or how performance reviews during specific hours can give insight what’s working and what isn’t.

 “What was even more optimal is that our launch coincided with restaurants in Egypt’s opening their doors again - which was also no sheer luck. I spent months concerned if we’d be able to be up and running by the time the service industry is revived. But it was perfect. The day people were rolling into restaurants again, we were there. Installed and fully-functional for all to see and experience.”

You can find out more about Touch-Less by visiting their website right here.