Dine With Aria

The restaurant industry runs on disconnected tools — one system for orders, another for the kitchen, another for payments, and a spreadsheet for everything else. The result is manual errors, lost tickets, slow table turnover, and zero visibility for management across multiple locations.

Brad Garrett, Aria's CEO, came with a clear vision: build a single, unified platform that digitises the entire order lifecycle — from the moment a customer scans a QR code to the moment a kitchen ticket is fulfilled and payment is processed. The engineering challenge wasn't just building the product. It was building it to enterprise-grade standards from day one, so that when restaurants started onboarding, the infrastructure would never be the bottleneck.

We architected and engineered a full-stack, multi-tenant platform consisting of three interconnected portals and a high-performance API layer.

The Customer Ordering App allows diners to scan a table QR code, browse the menu, place orders, and pay without staff interaction. The Restaurant Portal gives front-of-house and kitchen staff real-time visibility of every order in flight. The Admin Portal gives operators and managers a live view of sales, inventory, and staff performance across all their locations from a single dashboard.

Security and authentication is centralised through Keycloak, giving Aria enterprise-grade access control across every portal and user role. Payments run through Stripe. Integrations with Deliverect allow Aria to be used with a vast range of POS systems. The entire system is containerised with Kubernetes and deployed on AWS — built to scale horizontally as Aria grows its restaurant network.

Aria launched in March 2026 as a fully deployed, integration-complete platform — ready to onboard its first restaurant partners from day one. No phased rollout, no MVP with missing features, no infrastructure that needs rebuilding before scale. The system that went live is the system built for scale.

Based on Aria's market research and analysis of comparable QR ordering deployments, restaurants adopting systems like Aria have reported measurable improvements across their core operational metrics.

Purple Softworks is now actively supporting Aria's South Africa go-to-market — bringing the platform to the food service industry in a market where QR ordering infrastructure is still nascent and the opportunity for first-mover advantage is significant.