Groupon acquires Breadcrumb to connect with local restaurants

Restaurant and hospitality point of sale startup Breadcrumb has joined the Groupon family. The Chicago-based online couponing firm has acquired the New York-based startup, Groupon reported Tuesday in a blog post.

Unsurprisingly, the amount of the deal was not disclosed. According to Groupon’s announcement, the company is excited to help “build affordable and intuitive products that make it easier for local merchants to manage their business,” Mihir Shah, Groupon’s vice president of mobile, wrote in the blog post.

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Similar to mobile payment service Square, Breadcrumb runs its point of sale system (POS) with iOS apps. This keeps costs lower because businesses aren’t stuck buying pricy cash register equipment. At a restaurant, Breadcrumb can manage an entire patron’s order from the time they walk in the door to when they pay their check.

Breadcrumb also has a time clock, shift scheduling capabilities, and payroll tools to manage employees. And because no startup these days would be complete without them, Breadcrumbs comes with analytics to track business costs and customer information.

Groupon alludes that it will integrate its services into the Breadcrumb POS system. The daily deals site has also been testing a mobile payment to rival PayPal and Square and might take a few pages from Breadcrumb’s book to round out its service.

The daily deals site assures that Breadcrumb will continue to operate for “new and existing clients.”

Groupon has made more than a dozen acquisitions in the last year, including travel site Uptake; Hyperpublic, which aggregates place and deal data; and Adku, an e-commerce data firm.

Waitress carrying dishes image via Shutterstock