Curbside pickup, a Zayos field guide

A grey sedan is parked outside your restaurant with the engine running. Inside the car is a woman who paid for her food nineteen minutes ago and has been waiting for six. Inside the restaurant, her bag has been sitting on the shelf under the heat lamp since 6:40. Nobody in either place knows about the other.

Curbside pickup is takeout where the handoff happens at a car instead of a counter, which adds three requirements a counter never had: a signal that the customer arrived, a person free to walk outside, and a reliable way to identify the right vehicle.

Notice what is not on that list. Taking the order is not the hard part, and any ordering platform can put a Curbside button on a checkout page. Everything that goes wrong lives in the last fifty feet, between your shelf and their passenger seat, and almost none of it shows up in a software demo.

It is worth doing well because curbside is your highest margin fulfillment method after dine in. There is no courier, no marketplace commission of 15% to 30% base or 25% to 35% blended, and no delivery risk. The customer is doing the driving. All you owe them is a handoff that does not waste their time.

This is the only genuinely hard question in curbside, and the answer is per item, not per restaurant. Fire on order and short cook items are perfect while long cook items back up the line. Fire on arrival and the customer waits in a car for the food to start, which they will tolerate for four minutes and resent at nine.

Fire on order for anything under about eight minutes of cook time. Fire on arrival for long cook items, for scheduled orders, and for anything that dies in a bag.

The professional answer is a hybrid, and it is what most good kitchens end up doing without writing it down. Start the components with the longest cook time when the order lands, hold them, and finish and assemble when the arrival signal comes in. A braise, a rice, a roasted protein all hold. Fries, tempura, a crisp sandwich and anything dressed do not, and those are the items worth building your whole curbside timing around.

Whichever you choose, write it on the wall by the pass in two lines so a new cook on a Saturday does not have to guess. Curbside timing that lives only in the head of the person who designed it is curbside timing that breaks the first time that person takes a day off.

Most independent restaurants sit in a strip mall or on a street with shared parking and no authority to paint anything. Curbside still works, it just moves from spot numbers to landmarks. Pick one obvious meeting point a stranger could find on the first try, describe it in plain words in the confirmation message, and ask for the make and colour of the car at checkout instead of a space number.

A landmark a stranger can find beats a numbered space they have to hunt for. Two spaces by the blue door is a better instruction than spot four.

If you can reserve two spaces, put them where a runner can see them from inside without walking out, because a runner who has to go outside to check will stop checking by the second week. If you cannot reserve anything, accept that some handoffs will happen in a lane and make them fast: bag on the passenger seat, name confirmed, gone in fifteen seconds.

How does the handoff stay accurate?

Name plus the last three digits of the order number, printed on the bag label and on the ticket. Have the runner say the name and let the customer confirm it, rather than asking the customer to announce themselves, which is both faster and catches the two identical silver SUVs case before the bag leaves your hand.

Do not build an identity ritual for a hummus order. The exception is alcohol, which needs a real ID check at the car window, by someone trained to do it, every time, with no discretion given to a runner who is in a hurry. If you sell alcohol curbside, that check is the whole compliance story and it belongs in your staff training rather than in your software.

Curbside runs as a fulfillment option on your own branded ordering site, alongside pickup, delivery and dine in, on your own domain. Because it is a pickup order, the diner pays the $0.99 pickup service fee at checkout and nothing else. Zayos takes no commission, so the restaurant keeps 100% of the food revenue and 100% of the tips on every curbside order.

Curbside tickets land on the same kitchen tablet as your live pickup and delivery orders and, on Operator plus Marketplace, your Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub tickets ingested through Otter. One queue, one expediter view, one 86 flow. That is deliberate: a separate curbside screen is a screen that stops being watched.

Customer messaging runs from the customer record you own, with SMS through Twilio and email through Resend, so the accepted, ready and handed-over updates go out without anyone picking up a phone. If you also run QR ordering at the table, it is the same menu and the same customer book behind both.

Zayos is $499 per location per month for Operator, $599 for Operator plus Marketplace, and $699 for Concierge. Month to month, no setup fee, no contract. The diner-paid service fee is $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine in and 10% on catering, and the restaurant never pays it.

Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach is live on Zayos and taking orders today. Storefronts are built and ordering opens at launch for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke and Yalla Market. We are a Fort Lauderdale company, most operators go live in under two weeks, and the first direct order usually lands within a week. See how it works or the pricing page.