Interactive food court: new opportunities for stores in Shopping malls

The digitalization of mall’s restaurant areas presents many benefits for both visitors and stores. It has been found that, depending on the characteristics of the shopping and leisure mall, almost 30% of all visitors enter the food court and spend an average of about 30 minutes there.

The atmosphere of this place of leisure is important for restoring the emotional state and psychological stability of Ukrainians. Besides, staying in the mall should be as rational as possible, because modern people are grateful when their time is valued.
Recently, the first interactive food court in Europe was launched in Kyiv.

The opportunity to get visitors interested in new technologies affects the increase of visitors of the restaurant area as well as of the whole mall, which opens up a unique opportunity and chance for stores located in the mall to attract an active audience and to increase income, because the potential buyer is already in the mall, and this is already half the battle for making purchases.

Due to the fact that the arrangement of the restaurant business in shopping malls has hardly changed for decades, the appearance of ultra-modern tables with a multi-touch surface and the ability to order dishes directly from the table literally looks like a revolution in interaction with visitors. Fascinating emotions from interesting content and the new service form a positive experience and a desire to return with family and friends, and most important is, that while enjoying their favorite dishes, people view store’s ads, energized for spending time in the mall.
A noticeable traffic increase in the interactive food court area and the visitors’s willingness to spend more time there promotes to quality communication with brands and potential buyers. And this promotes to an increase in the average check and in the number of purchases in the mall. Flexibility in the advertisement placement and in the variety of its demonstrations (in particular, the advertiser can order an ad on tablecloths or in games for the period he needs and which corresponds to his audience) using the most influential advertising effect of the “captive” client (Captive Audience Marketing) is an additional advantage for advertising.

The interactive food court “mentally” immerses visitors into the mall atmosphere, “removing” them from the Internet and providing full integration with the real mall environment using a large high-quality screen (2300 cm2), which is much more attractive and useful than a smartphone. In addition to being tens times larger, the screen transmits photos and videos with the best 4K surface resolution (3840×2160 pixels), which is high image quality and an important advantage for the brand.

The functioning of the interactive food court in the LAVINA MALL showed that the synergy of innovations and the classical approach has no limit: if the client is interested in the store’s advertisement and he wants to find it, then the consultants serving the interactive food court will show him the best route. Next in line are the new technologies of the European Internet of Things, which will form digital ecosystems in retail in the future, from which everyone will benefit.