LG Uplus’ Restaurant Lab gives small business owners a boost

[Courtesy of LG Uplus Corp.]

South Korean mobile carrier LG Uplus Corp. is accelerating its efforts to help small business owners with digital transformation by expanding its ‘Restaurant Lab,’ a restaurant which it operates to directly experience solutions for small business owners, to a second location.

The company aims to increase its customer base by 150 percent within 2024 and achieve cumulative sales of 200 billion won ($147.27 million) by 2027.

“We did not have very many opportunities to experience store solutions directly,” a company official at the second Restaurant Lab in Yongsan District, central Seoul, said on Friday. “We focused on understanding the actual experience of business owners by managing everything from opening to operations.”

LG Uplus opened its second location, ‘Fabri Kitchen,’ in collaboration with Michelin-starred Italian chef Fabrizio Ferrari, in April 2024, following the opening of its first Restaurant Lab, a dumpling shop, in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, the previous year.

Fabri Kitchen serves as a test bed for all six types of LG Uplus’ ‘Our Store Package AX Solution,’ including AI phone services that respond to customer inquiries, reservation and line management, table ordering, and kiosks.

“When customers are seated after waiting through our waiting service in front of the store, our table order system get the information and recommend dishes based on the menu items they ordered last time,” the official said, emphasizing the connectivity between services.

Launched in April 2024, LG Uplus’ Our Store Package AX Solution has secured over 12,000 stores as customers as of August, and the company aims to grow by 150 percent to reach 30,000 stores within the year.

“We are also preparing a feature that automatically checks when a no-show occurs for a reservation and informs staff when a reservation is made under the same phone number again, detailing when the no-show happened,” a senior official in charge of the company’s SOHO AI Services team said.