The £14 phone order vs the £20 kiosk order: Gareth Montgomery on why kiosks outspend phone orders
At Dished Live '26, Gareth Montgomery of Chipmongers in Northern Ireland shared a striking before-and-after: phone orders averaged £14 and took over six minutes each. Kiosk and online orders average over £20 with zero wage cost attached. This article unpacks why the channel you use to take orders has a direct impact on what customers spend, and what independent operators can do about it.
There is a number that should stop every takeaway operator in their tracks.
Six minutes.
That is how long it used to take Gareth Montgomery, owner of Chipmongers in Northern Ireland, to process a single phone order. Six minutes of staff time, at a cost of wages, for an average order value of £14.
Now, with self-service kiosks and online ordering handling around 85% of his orders, that average has climbed to over £20. Zero wages spent on taking the order. Zero minutes of staff time tied up on the phone.
Same customers. Same menu. Different channel. Very different result.
Gareth shared this at Dished Live '26, Flipdish's flagship hospitality event, and it is the kind of stat that sounds almost too clean to be true until you understand why it happens.
Why phone orders produce lower spend
Think about what a phone order actually involves from the customer's perspective.
They are on a call. Someone is waiting on the other end. There is a quiet but real pressure to get through the order quickly, not keep anyone waiting, not faff about. So they order what they know. They skip the upsells. They forget the extras. They say goodbye.
It is a transactional experience designed, unintentionally, to minimise spend.
Compare that to browsing a kiosk or an online ordering page at your own pace. There is no one waiting. There is no awkwardness. The full menu is right there in front of you. The suggested add-ons pop up at exactly the right moment. You have time to think, "actually, yeah, I will get the loaded fries."
That is not a trick. That is just giving customers the space to spend what they actually want to spend.
The wages equation nobody talks about loudly enough
The £14 to £20 jump is compelling on its own. But Gareth's point about wage cost makes it even more significant.
A six-minute phone order is not just six minutes. It is six minutes of a staff member's time that could have gone on food prep, on quality checks, on looking after the customers already in the building. In a busy service, that is not a small thing.
Self-service kiosks and online ordering do not just increase average order value. They redirect your team's attention towards the things that actually require a human. The things that build loyalty. The things that bring people back.
At Chipmongers, roughly 85% of orders now come through without any staff involvement in the ordering process at all. That is not a reduction in hospitality. That is a reallocation of it.
What this looks like for a typical week
Let us put some rough numbers around this to make it feel real.
Say you are taking 500 orders a week. At £14 average order value, that is £7,000 in revenue. Shift the majority of those to a channel that averages £20 and, assuming a similar split to Chipmongers, you are looking at closer to £9,500 or more. On the same number of orders. With less staff time absorbed by the phone.
That kind of uplift does not require a new menu, a bigger site or a marketing campaign. It requires a change in how you invite customers to order.
The upsell that does not feel like an upsell
One of the reasons kiosk and online ordering drives higher spend is that the upsell happens at the right moment, framed the right way.
On a phone call, asking "do you want anything else with that?" often feels like a prompt to wrap up. On a kiosk or ordering app, a suggested addition feels like useful information. It appears when the customer is already in the mindset of choosing. It does not interrupt anything. It just sits there and says, "people also add this."
The psychology is different. The outcome is different.
Operators using Flipdish's online ordering can configure these suggestion prompts to reflect their actual menu logic, so the right extras appear alongside the right dishes. That is not a gimmick. It is just good merchandising, the same logic that has driven retail for decades, applied to your menu.
"Quality is the biggest driving factor"
It is worth being clear that none of this works without the fundamentals in place.
Gareth was direct about this at Dished Live '26: quality is the biggest driver of return visits. No ordering channel, no loyalty scheme, no push notification will bring someone back if the food was not worth coming back for.
The kiosk and online ordering numbers are impressive precisely because Chipmongers already had the quality right. The technology removed friction and revealed the spend that was always there, sitting just below the surface of a six-minute phone call.
If you are looking at these numbers and thinking about what changes to make, start with the product. Then look at the channel.
What independent operators can do right now
You do not need 10 sites or a dedicated growth team to act on what Gareth shared at Dished Live '26. Here is where to start.
Look at what percentage of your orders currently come through the phone and what your average order value is on those versus any online orders you already take. If you do not have that data yet, Flipdish's reporting tools can help you get it. That gap, whatever it is, is the opportunity.
From there, the path is fairly clear. Move customers towards channels where they can browse at their own pace, where upsells happen naturally, and where your staff are freed up to do the work that actually requires them. Online ordering, kiosks and a well-configured loyalty programme are the three levers that Gareth, along with fellow panellists Onkar Singh of Dave's Fish and Chips and Hamza Mujtaba of Legends Dessert and Burger Bar, all pointed to at Dished Live '26.
Six minutes and £14, or under a minute and £20. The maths is not complicated.
Hear more conversations like this at Dished Live '26
This insight came straight from the floor at Dished Live '26, Flipdish's flagship event for hospitality operators. If you want to be in the room where operators like Gareth, Onkar and Hamza share the numbers behind their decisions, tickets are available now.
