Restaurant Questions, Answered.

Setup is intentionally minimal. Connecting Square is one click on Square's own page, no new account or password, and takes about a minute. Your only ongoing task is putting out the branded table tents and coasters we supply; guests scan the QR code, rate the dish, and the data flows to your dashboard automatically. There's nothing for your staff to install or maintain, and editing your menu in Square re-syncs on its own. SmackLip is actively working to enable connection to Toast, Clover, Resy, and OpenTable.

The first 50 restaurants to sign up use SmackLip for free for 3 months, then receive a lifetime discount of $79/mo. One-time reports are priced separately on the reports page.

SmackLip doesn't compete with those, it shows you something they can't. Yelp and Google average your whole restaurant into a single star rating, so a 4.3 never tells a chef which dishes pulled the average up and which dragged it down. SmackLip rates dishes, not restaurants, on a structured rubric (Salt, Acid, Heat, Doneness and more), giving you a per-dish read you can act on at the kitchen station.

Diners rate on structured taste axes rather than writing free-text reviews. This is designed to give you an actionable read on a dish rather than a restaurant-wide star score. It does not eliminate abuse or guarantee any particular rating outcome.

Review the provider’s authorization screen for the exact permissions before connecting. Ask the partner team which menu, order or reporting capabilities are supported for your pilot; this page does not establish the current integration scope. You can revoke provider access. Connecting a POS is optional and should follow your restaurant’s data policies.

No. Per-dish data is yours to see, shown anonymized in aggregate, never sold, and never used for cross-restaurant ad targeting. Per-dish revenue is visible only to the restaurant that owns it, never to other restaurants and never to diners, and that boundary is enforced at the API layer, not just by policy.

SmackLip is preparing for public launch; no launch date or active diner volume is promised here. Seeded catalog entries are not active restaurant partnerships. Ask the partner team about current pilot access, coverage and collecting dish-level data.

Fair concern. A few facts to weigh: SmackLip is an incorporated Delaware C-Corp with a filed U.S. provisional patent on the rating method, the Square integration is already built and sandbox-verified, and the partner dashboard is live behind a real owner login today. The first 50 restaurants to sign up use SmackLip for free for 3 months, then receive a lifetime discount of $79/mo. Ask the partner team about account terms before deciding.

There's almost nothing for staff to learn. Diners self-serve: they scan, rate, and get matched picks without any staff involvement. If you choose to run offers, composing a taste-matched “Tonight only” promotion takes about 30 seconds, and redemption is a simple in-app flow. The dashboard is for you to read insights, not a system your team has to operate.

The intended flow is simple: guests scan a coaster or table tent, follow the available app-access instructions, complete any account and onboarding requirements, and rate a dish. Those ratings help refine personal picks for next time. Ask the partner team for current pilot and beta access rather than assuming an open public launch.

Discount apps push blanket deals to everyone and erode margin. SmackLip lets you compose offers by verified taste profile, so a clear-out goes only to diners whose palate matches the dish. SmackLip's modeling puts taste-matched offer conversion at roughly 12–18%, about 4× a blanket discount, which means you can move inventory with far less margin given away.

Offers are optional, and the bigger margin story is waste, not discounts. US restaurants waste an estimated $25–30B of food a year, about 4–10% of food purchased (ReFED / WRI, 2024). SmackLip's Food Waste Toolkit forecasts prep from the demand heatmap and triages waste-risk dishes; in SmackLip's modeling an ~8% waste trim recovers roughly 2–3% margin per plate, before you run a single promotion.

It's arguably more useful for independents. You likely rely on intuition about who your guests are and which dishes work; SmackLip turns that into data, an anonymized aggregate taste profile of your guests, dietary mix, and a day-of-week and group-size demand forecast. Those are decisions a small operator makes constantly, and the dashboard makes them with evidence rather than guesswork.

The pilot's one-click path is built on Square first because the integration is already sandbox-verified, and Toast is next on the same menu-and-orders pattern (with Resy and OpenTable on the roadmap). You can still pilot today using table tents and coasters to collect dish ratings; the financial and revenue panels simply light up later, once your POS connects.

Three things: (1) sign in with Square via the private connect link, one click; (2) set out the branded table tents and coasters we supply; and (3) check your dashboard as the numbers fill in. That's it, there's no app for you to install, no contract during the pilot, and you can revoke the Square connection whenever you want.

Today the panels are populated with demo data so you can see exactly what you'll get, but the data layer is structured to switch to live the moment a POS connects, and because the Square integration is already built and sandbox-verified, that switch is real, not hypothetical. As your guests rate dishes, your panels fill with your own numbers.

From launch, SmackLip commits 1% of revenue to food-bank partners under its 1% Pledge, tying operator success and food-waste reduction directly to fighting food insecurity. For many restaurants that's also a credible, data-backed community story they can share with their own guests.

Completely reasonable. Reach out to partners@smacklip.com with any questions before deciding. The first 50 restaurants to sign up use SmackLip for free for 3 months, then receive a lifetime discount of $79/mo.