Case Study: Japanese Tea Garden achieves faster service, doubled tips, and real-time data with CAKE from Sysco

Upgrading from Cash Register to Point of Sale Technology Opens Doors to Data

San Francisco’s historic Japanese Tea Garden Tea House serves about 900 guests a day and regularly sees lines of 30–35 people, but was operating on a basic cash-register POS that offered no order history, inventory tracking or easy reporting. Manager Tak Matsuba needed to speed service, reduce human error and improve staff earnings while preserving the Tea House’s traditional experience.

After adopting CAKE’s touch-screen POS with a customer-facing signature and tip prompt, ordering was streamlined and menu items were preloaded, giving Tak real-time sales and inventory data. The result: lines fell 30–50% and order time was cut in half, staff tips roughly doubled, 1–2 hours of daily reconciliation were eliminated, and Tak gained remote visibility to make smarter purchasing and staffing decisions.

Japanese Tea Garden

Tak Matsuba

Manager