It started behind
the counter.

Wait — why was I flipping bento?

Fair question. Back in March 2025, I took a sabbatical year to finally try the things I'd always meant to. One of them was F&B — and I figured if I'm going to learn it, learn it where the bar is high: somewhere with a lot of expats and genuinely good dining. Not too luxurious, not too casual — the kind of place regulars keep coming back to.

Strolling around Mont Kiara, I walked into a Japanese bento shop. Japanese-owned — and you could feel it. Authentic, right down to the details. I liked it immediately. So I rolled up my sleeves and stayed.

The food was loved. The ordering wasn't.

A lot of our regulars were Japanese. For them this food isn't a trend — it's home, it's legacy. And yet the one thing they couldn't stand was ordering it. It was right there on GrabFood, but they'd rather walk in — or fire off a quick WhatsApp as a heads-up: "on my way, please prepare a bento set for 12:30, coming now."

Then came the payment dance. To settle it over WhatsApp, I'd key the amount into our POS terminal, generate the DuitNow QR on the screen, snap a photo of it, and send the picture back so they could pay. Every order. By hand.

That stuck with me. When the people who love your food the most are avoiding the way they have to order it — and you're photographing a QR off a screen to get paid — something is broken. And it isn't the food.

A menu that travels — and nudges.

There was no simple way to hand someone a voucher, or to nudge a first-timer to be brave and try a new dish. I kept thinking: what if the menu could live on a pamphlet, a poster, a namecard — scan it, order, done — and carry a little coupon that says "try this one"?

That's exactly why MakanQR's QR works off paper, not just the table. Hand out your menu like a flyer, and let a discount do the talking.

One regular stood out.

There was a customer I'll never forget. He had his own way of having his bento — a specific packaging he liked, and he was particular about the presentation: swap this item for that one, arrange it just so. Same price every time — we never charged extra for the swap. It was his order, and his alone.

The trouble was, that order lived in our heads. The staff who knew him knew it by heart. But the day a new staff member started, that knowledge was gone — unless someone remembered to pass it on. His "usual" wasn't on any menu; it only existed if you knew to ask.

That's the gap I want to close in software: capture those special, off-menu preferences so they don't walk out the door when a staff member does. New staff should see it on day one — "this regular has a usual, here's exactly how he likes it" — flagged as special, kept off the public menu unless it's asked for. The shop remembers, even when the people change.

The kitchen opened my eyes.

The back of house is where it clicked. A Japanese kitchen is a machine — so well-structured that an apprentice can run a station solo within a week. But here's the thing nobody expects:

the biggest overhead isn't food spoilage. It's the cashier.

We even tried pulling kitchen staff over to handle payments — but that just moves the problem onto the people who should be cooking. To me, the manual keying-in is the part that should quietly disappear into software. No bulky kiosk. Just cook, serve, done.

Don't kill the cashier. Free them.

Here's the moment it really clicked. Every order keyed in by hand at the till was a chance to get it wrong — sometimes a slip of the finger, sometimes the system itself rearranged the buttons so the item you'd tapped a hundred times was suddenly somewhere else, and the wrong dish went to the kitchen. Across a full day that's wrong orders, remakes, refunds — a headache that travels all the way up to HQ.

So the goal became simple: zero in-store manual orders. Let the customer's own phone place the order, exactly how they want it. No mis-keys, no rearranged buttons, no "sorry, that's not what I ordered."

But this part matters: that doesn't mean getting rid of the cashier. The cashier job shouldn't be eliminated — it should be enhanced. Freed from punching in every order, the same person can do the work that actually grows a stall: crafting promos and marketing material, looking after customers, and handling just the cashier open and close at day's end. Same wage, higher-value work.

Inspired by the yatai.

My north star is the yatai — the old-school Japanese street stall where the cook prepares your order right in front of you, hands it over, and that's the whole transaction. No machine in the middle. Just food, and the person who made it.

Technology shouldn't bury that — it should bring it back. MakanQR takes the cashier grind off the floor so the people behind the counter can do what they came to do: feed you.

When I said goodbye.

I'd planned to stay about three months — just long enough to learn the ropes. I made it six. By then I felt I'd learned what I came for, and it was time to chase the next endeavour. What a way to spend a sabbatical year — it led straight into building what I'm working on right now.

Before I left, I wrote the team a heartfelt goodbye letter. One line still sums up how that kitchen felt:

"My time in the kitchen never felt like a job — it felt like an apprenticeship."

— from my farewell letter to the team

And the spirit I want MakanQR to carry comes from a line by Yuji Kojima — the ex-fitness-coach-turned-F&B-owner who first sparked my curiosity for Japanese cuisine. It's the whole reason I build:

「ユニークな方法で人や社会を元気にしたい」

"I want to energize people and society in a unique way."

— Yuji Kojima. note.com ↗

That's why MakanQR exists — to energize the people who feed us, in our own small, unique way.

Terima kasih 🙏

None of this clicks without the people who let me in and taught me the ropes. A special shoutout to:

• 🍱 Yoshimi san — who interviewed me and gave me the chance; the multitasker who ran two shops across the MK area
• 🍱 Shige san — the Boss, a.k.a. Sensei; appears like a ninja the moment he spots a flaw in a dish
• 🍱 Tom san — The Drunken Master; performs best when the orders flood in and everyone's in a panic
• 🍱 Bryan san — the Magician; you order, and somehow it's already prepared
• 🍱 Punitha san — the Janitor; keeps everything spotless for every walk-in

Thank you for the lessons, the patience, and the bento.

I offer my tool with an open heart.

— Rapha, Founder of MakanQR