The Covid-19 pandemic hit hard into the restaurant business; now, during the new openings, all restaurant owners have to face new and different problems. One of them is about the menu and wine list: how to let the customer experience a valuable choice? A lot of different solutions are arising now in this area of services; we decide to meet one of the first company that – more than 9 years ago – started developing one of the first Digital Wine List on the market. Sergio Cocco is the founder of WineAmore Srl, an Italian company based in Bergamo, that is now experiencing a boost of customers due to the new needs after the Covid-19 lockdown.
“From 2011 we offer to the restaurant owners the possibility to have their wine-list onto an iPad; this tool offers to customers an interactive and multilingual experience while choosing the wine, with efficiency benefits for the restaurant. During these years we collected several important clients, generally tech-addicted sommeliers and restaurant owners. Now the request of our service increased a lot, thanks to the fact that iPad can be easily disinfected.”
What is your target and what kind of request are you receiving?
“ Our service has been developed to satisfy high level restaurant and hotels: wines and foods are proposed on an iPad and it is possible to put all necessary information allowing interactivity and customized design. We do not want to compete with those services that allow to download menu of wines and dishes on personal smartphones; our service has been developed over the years to fit most of the requests of restaurants that owns important wine-list and menus. Some of our historical clients counts more than 1.000 different wine-labels on their list and over the years they learned how to exploit the most from our powerful tool: suggestions, pairings, different languages descriptions. All this with a stunning design and a simplicity of usage
How Covid-19 affected the request of your services?
“Actually we are now receiving requests from owners that in the past were suspicious about the usage of such technology in their place; now they are almost obliged to look at digital services, and we are happy to see how they are astonished when they understand how easy and flexible is our service. Of course, we can leverage on a lot of years of experience, and thanks to this we have now a valuable and friendly product; moreover, we continuously developed new features and now we can offer a warehouse management tool and the possibility to have also the Food Menu on the app.
Which are the advantages of your service?
“The great advantage of our service in these days is that an iPad is easy to disinfect, and so it is a valuable solution for re-opening. Added to this, there are also all other advantages: monitor of the wine sales thanks to warehouse management, customization of pictures to adapt to different situations, quick update of availability & prices avoiding any printing, possibility to suggest and boost specific wines. Our clients experienced growing sales after starting the usage of our service”.
How long does it take to have the service ready and running?
“Generally it takes only few days to prepare the customized account: we need to receive some pictures to fit the design and then all contents (wines, food dishes and prices); after this, we set-up the app thanks to our experienced customer-care team. Then, with just few tips, restaurant owners can manage the list by themselves easily”.