A $6 colada and a $220 lechon, out of the same window. Zayos charges nothing on either.

Most cuisines have one ticket size. A Cuban kitchen in Miami has two, and they are nowhere near each other. At one end is the window: a cafecito, a colada shared around an office in thimble cups, two pastelitos on the way to work, a croqueta at 10am. At the other end is the family order, and in December it is enormous, because Nochebuena on the 24th is the single largest meal on the Cuban calendar and half the neighborhood is buying lechon by the pound rather than roasting it themselves.

A percentage fee is wrong for both. On a $6 window sale the marketplace math never worked, which is why that trade has stayed on the sidewalk in cash for fifty years. On a $220 holiday pre order the percentage is enormous and buys nothing, because the family placing it has been coming to you since before the app existed.

A commission is a finder’s fee. Nobody discovers a Cuban restaurant in Miami through an app on December 22nd.

The problem with Nochebuena is not demand, it is capacity and timing. You can only roast so many pounds, and everyone wants pickup between 3pm and 6pm on the 24th. Handled by phone, that is one person taking orders on a notepad for three weeks and a parking lot at 4pm that looks like an evacuation.

On your own site it becomes a product with rules. Lechon is sold by the pound with congri, yuca, plantains and salad as modifiers. You set a lead time, and you set the total pounds available, so the storefront closes the window when the ovens are sold out instead of when you notice. The guest picks a fifteen minute pickup slot, pays up front, and the tablet prints the day in run order. The 10 percent catering fee is paid by the guest at checkout, so a $220 order still puts $220 of food revenue in your register.

The holiday pre order is the highest margin order a Cuban restaurant takes all year, and it is the one most commonly handed to a platform that charges a percentage of it.

The same mechanics carry the rest of the calendar: Mother’s Day, communions, quinces, a Sunday family order, an office floor that wants forty croquetas at 9am. The catering setup is the same one we build into every Zayos storefront.

One restaurant is live and taking orders on it today: Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, which keeps $48k+/yr that used to leave as marketplace commission at roughly 3,000 orders a month. Seven more storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale company, about 30 miles north of Little Havana.

There is no Cuban restaurant on the platform yet. We would rather say that than hand you a reference that does not exist.

Most operators are live in under 2 weeks and take a first direct order within a week of signing up. Plans are month to month with no setup fee, so the way to test this is to test it, not to take our word for it. Start with what Zayos is, then the pricing, then how it works.