As football stadiums are increasingly redeveloped and re-branded as leisure venues, ground hospitality has come to mean more than a hasty pie or burger before the game.

Of course, not every club is fortunate enough to have a celebrity chef on its board (avid Canaries fan, Delia Smith, is heavily involved at Norwich City), however, many others, such as Arsenal, Chelsea and Newcastle now offer conference and banqueting facilities which can be hired for weddings, parties, seminars and other functions.

Since the stadium was redeveloped, Newcastle United has offered the largest conferencing and banqueting facilities anywhere in the North East, with fifteen function rooms, one of which caters for parties of up to 1,200 people. While food requirements are agreed before any event, there could potentially be many thousands of drinks orders for waiting staff to deal with. The Magpies wanted an efficient way to serve customers, without running its staff ragged.

The solution, from Uniwell Systems, was a handheld WaiterPad terminal with a touchscreen interface, enabling staff to enter drinks orders using a stylus and allocate each item to a table or seat number. Having taken the order, it can then be transmitted to an Epson SR-600 EPoS terminal at the bar, using Radio Frequency technology. Here the order is automatically printed out and the transaction is added to the customer’s account. Waiting staff can then collect the drinks order when they next return to the bar.

“It’s an extremely efficient system,” said General Manager, Jane Shepstone. “Given the size of the function rooms, it’s much faster than walking back and forth to the bar with a handwritten order, while the easy to read order print-outs minimise the possibility of human error.”