It has practically just started its journey, but Yumminn has already received two awards for having been identified by experts in the hospitality sector as a startup with the potential to revolutionize restaurant bill payment. It is not a mobile application that needs to be downloaded, but it is a system that allows you to review and pay the bill from your phone in a matter of seconds, without having to wait for the waiter to bring it to us. In addition to reducing the workload of waiters or avoiding having to queue at the checkout, this methodology has other great advantages: it incentivizes tips and allows automated splitting and management of payment in case diners want to pay one by one, avoiding the usual messes that occur in these situations.
The mastermind behind this kind of Bizum for the hospitality industry is Christian Campillo, a Barcelona executive who until now had developed his career in the luxury sector, to which he has been linked for fifteen years as a L'Oréal executive. Campillo, a graduate and MBA from Esade, worked for the French cosmetics and perfumery conglomerate in Miami, in the travel retail unit, that is, in the sales channel in airports. Subsequently, he was expatriated to Brazil, where he was in charge of eight L'Oréal departments in the country, with 180 employees under his charge.
It was in Brazil where Campillo realized the opportunity to transform some dynamics of the restaurant sector that he saw as inefficient and unsatisfactory for users. After working simultaneously at L'Oréal and on the conception of his business idea, he finally took the plunge: he left his position and his career in the multinational to move to Barcelona, where he created Yumminn with four other partners and with the support of the accelerator Oryon Universal, led by Victor Giné.
In 2021, Yumminn launched a platform that, in addition to allowing bill payment, was very focused on the digitalization of restaurant menus, a need that had become widespread as a result of the pandemic. Its initial strategy was for Yumminn to also serve to choose dishes, so that from the restaurant table the order would go directly to the kitchen, reducing the waiter's role to a minimum. However, they realized that this value proposition was not well accepted or valued by hospitality professionals, so Yumminn quickly pivoted to focus exclusively on being a platform to simplify payments and build customer loyalty.
With this new model, at the end of 2021, Yumminn raised a pre-seed round of 420,000 euros, with the support of Enisa, Oryon Universal, several industry business angels, and Antai Venture Builder, the startup factory led by Miguel Vicente and Gerard Olivé. According to Campillo, after the summer Yumminn will launch a seed capital round, for an amount yet to be defined, which will allow its system to scale.
In fact, the company based in 22@ is in full acceleration phase and is hiring sales representatives to expand to the rest of Spain, starting with Navarra, Valencia, the Basque Country, and Andalusia. Currently, Yumminn employs fifteen people, will soon be twenty, and by the end of June the team will have increased to thirty collaborators. The goal is to begin internationalization in the second half of the year, so they are already analyzing various countries.
"Today, 80% of payments in restaurants are already made with cards; in two years I am convinced that in all restaurants payments will be made through systems like the one developed by Yumminn because they help restaurants improve their service and increase diner satisfaction," explains Campillo, who has just participated for the first time in the Alimentaria & Hostelco fair with his own stand.
According to Campillo, with the widespread use of cards, fewer and fewer people are leaving tips. "Yumminn allows digitizing tips, since before formalizing the payment we ask if you want to donate an amount for the waiters, an element that allows increasing restaurant tips by 55%, with the consequent increase in staff motivation," he assures.
To access Yumminn and pay the bill in 13 seconds, you just need to scan a QR code drawn on the table. The platform integrates into the restaurant's management system, so you can immediately see the bill, decide whether to pay it in full or only a part, leave a tip or not, and pay with a credit card installed on your mobile or with Apple Pay and Google Pay systems. Yumminn, which is not a credit institution, manages the transaction through the Adyen payment platform, which is the one that actually collects and, within one or two days, deposits the money into the establishment's account.
For each payment made through Yumminn, the restaurant must pay a commission of 0.9%, an amount that is higher than the current collection system with bank dataphones. "The fee is higher, but we simplify the restaurant's management, which saves on physical dataphones and having to worry about whether they have battery, ink, or paper. But the great advantage is the ease and speed with which accounts can be settled and the fact that waiters are freed from the tedious task of going for the bill and collecting at each table. They can dedicate that time to improving room service and better recommending some dishes or suggestions from the menu, which increases the average ticket per table," argues Campillo.
Yumminn has been one of the winners of the second edition of the Horeca Challenge ---promoted by Mediapro, Damm, Familia Torres, and PepsiCo--- and has been proclaimed best startup in the recent edition of the Fòrum Gastronòmic de Girona. In addition to being a payment method, it also wants to operate as a loyalty tool for establishments, offering discounts (cashback) based on the spending made for future visits to the restaurant.