Scottish oriental food specialist Matthew’s Foods is a long-standing AURES customer. The supermarket and catering supplies business was first introduced to AURES POS hardware by our longstanding channel partner Roddy Mackenzie back in 2014.
10 years on, and following a period of significant expansion for his client, Roddy completed an upgrade project which saw the original AURES YUNO terminals at five Matthew’s Foods sites replaced, along with the introduction of a brand-new agile pricing and stock control system.
Background
Founded by owner and managing director Matthew Ng in 1994, Matthew’s Foods started out as a courier service supplying restaurants and takeaways across Scotland. In 1997, Matthew opened his first supermarket in Glasgow, with the premises also serving as the base for his wholesale operations.
The business grew steadily over the next 12 years, with new outlets following in Dundee in 2001, Aberdeen in 2005 and Edinburgh in 2009. Roddy, who has worked in the POS industry since 1980 when he took a job as a field engineer for Chubb Cash Registers, has been involved from almost the very beginning, having first worked with Matthew in 1995.
“I have had a long association with Matthews Foods,” said Roddy. “Same as I’ve had with many other clients over the years, you build up a relationship based on hard work, dedication and trust.”
For most of his career, Roddy worked for ACR EPOS Systems, and it was through that company that he first kitted out Matthew’s growing supermarket empire with checkout and other retail tech solutions. After a period using another supplier, Matthew got back in touch with Roddy and ACR in 2014 looking for a system with the capacity to connect to SAGE200 and update financial records from transactions in real time. ACR had recently started supplying AURES terminals, Roddy recommended the new YUNO tills, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Roddy left ACR in 2019 to launch his own business, RMEpos. After close to 25 years working together, Matthew was only too happy to stick with Roddy as his POS supplier on the brink of what was to prove to be another exciting period of expansion for Matthew’s Foods.
The Challenge
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted businesses in lots of different ways. For Matthew’s Foods, it brought new opportunities, and two new trade and retail cash & carry outlets were opened in 2021 in Inverness and Kirkaldy, followed by a third in Edinburgh city centre in April 2024.
However, as Roddy explained, cost volatilities triggered by the pandemic also pushed Matthew’s Foods into rethinking its pricing and merchandising strategy, and in particular how it could be more agile in implementing price changes in store in an efficient way.
“With the onset of Covid in 2020 and the cost-of-living crisis since then, constantly changing prices required a different approach to store shelf edge labelling as lots of time and effort was required to maintain and check labelling over multiple sites,” said Roddy. “So, Matthew and I looked for a solution we could integrate into the existing POS.”
At the same time, after many years’ hard work, the original AURES YUNOs installed at five outlets in 2014 were retired. “This wasn’t because the terminals were becoming unreliable, far from it,” said Roddy. “The decision was taken because the OS was past end of life and needed bringing up to date.
“The YUNO terminals out lived the ODP333 printers, as printing long customer and merchant receipts for seven years in a very busy seven-days-a-week environment sent them to the recyclers. They [the YUNOs] even out lived the Metrologic 7120 scanners, they were replaced after around seven years too, so thumbs up for the YUNO!”
The Solution
After showing so much durability, Matthew was more than happy to continue with a new batch of YUNO terminals, and had 10 installed in the spring of 2024. “AURES hardware offers quality and bullet proof reliability along with a smart design and a good smart appearance,” said Roddy. “Matthew is delighted and has penned in 2031 for when the terminals need replacing again!”
Along with the new YUNO terminals, Glory cash recyclers were integrated at each checkout. “The cash recyclers have been integrated into the EPOS app running on the new YUNOs. They speed up the customer experience by removing the responsibility of cash counting/note checking from the cashiers.”
As for the new pricing system, Roddy explained how they settled on a bespoke solution that combines handheld scanners with a cloud-based inventory management system. “We looked at several options and got some quotes before we came across a solution that together we could design and integrate in house,” said Roddy.
“I integrated the middleware with his retail EPOS platform and this was tested before being installed at the Glasgow site. This proved successful and has since been rolled out to all sites, improving accuracy in customer pricing and saving staff hours checking and changing labels. Used alongside Android hand held terminals and with pricing on a live cloud database, adding new lines of stock to the shop floor is as simple as scanning the product and then scanning the unique label barcode.”