Multi-vendor food halls have a fulfillment problem that single-concept restaurants never face: a guest places one order, three kitchens fire it, and someone still has to figure out which bag belongs to whom. Central Park St. Pete Food Hall, a multi-concept dining destination in St. Petersburg, Florida, moved to close that gap by standardizing on Epson OmniLink TM-L100 liner-free thermal label printers at every vendor stall and OmniLink mSeries receipt printers at bars and expo stations.
How the Stack Works
The hardware runs on top of Kluck, a cloud-native restaurant technology platform that allows guests to order from multiple concepts in a single transaction — via kiosk or QR code — and pay once. Kluck's platform routes each sub-order to the appropriate vendor kitchen simultaneously, and Epson's ePOS technology triggers label generation at the correct stall in real time. Every item prints with the guest's name directly on the label, a detail that sounds minor until operators consider the volume of parallel orders moving through a busy food hall on a Friday night.
"Getting orders to the kitchen isn't the challenge — it's everything that happens afterward," said Cary Hicks, co-founder of Kluck. "We designed our cloud-native platform to orchestrate that complexity behind the scenes. Epson's solutions allow us to automatically generate labels at the correct vendor location in real time, ensuring every item is clearly identified and ready for pickup without adding extra steps for staff."
Operator Angle
For food hall operators, the back-of-house configuration matters as much as the guest-facing experience. Central Park St. Pete selected Epson as its exclusive printer provider, standardizing on a single hardware platform across the entire facility. That decision simplifies deployment, reduces the support surface area, and gives the operator a uniform troubleshooting process regardless of which vendor stall is involved — a meaningful operational advantage in a venue where each concept runs its own menu and hours.
Co-owner Natalia Levey framed the guest experience goal plainly: the food hall was built so guests could explore multiple concepts as easily as they would a single restaurant. "Epson's printing and labeling technology helps streamline workflow and the customer experience by making pickup intuitive and stress-free," she said, "allowing guests to focus on enjoying the food rather than figuring out which order belongs to them."
The food hall segment has expanded steadily as developers and operators seek formats that aggregate culinary variety under one roof, distributing risk across multiple vendor tenants rather than concentrating it in a single concept. That asset-light approach for individual vendors creates operational complexity at the venue level — precisely the coordination problem that networked POS labeling is designed to solve. As off-premise and kiosk ordering volumes grow across foodservice broadly, the fulfillment accuracy challenge Central Park St. Pete faced is increasingly common in high-throughput, multi-concept environments.
Kluck confirmed it is now taking the combined Kluck-and-Epson stack to food halls and multi-vendor operators nationally, using the St. Pete deployment as the reference model. For operators evaluating similar builds, the technology decision — standardized hardware, cloud-native orchestration, name-printed labels — reflects a broader industry shift toward integrated POS and kitchen-display ecosystems that reduce reliance on staff coordination at the pickup counter. Food hall developers scouting the next market would do well to study how multi-concept venue operators are structuring their tech stacks before the first vendor signs a lease.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
