On Monday, May 12, 2025, Lightspeed Commerce Inc., a leading commerce platform for restaurants, announced the launch of new tools designed to give British hospitality businesses a competitive advantage. These tools use personalized insights to help operators optimize pricing, opening hours, and staffing, leading to improved profitability in a highly competitive market.
One of these new tools, Benchmarks & Trends from Lightspeed Restaurant, provides powerful insights for restaurateurs by allowing them to track and analyze their performance against competitors. With this tool, hospitality businesses can see their local market’s average sales, hourly orders, food and beverage mix, pricing, sales per hour, sales per cover, table turn time, and more. This data unlocks valuable insights that can drive smarter business decisions.
Benchmarks & Trends addresses the need for restaurant owners to stay competitive in the ever-evolving UK market by providing a deeper understanding of their own performance and how they measure up against local competitors. These insights can help boost revenue, streamline operations, and give businesses a competitive edge in a crowded dining landscape where customers are always seeking the best dining options.
Dax Dasilva, CEO and Founder of Lightspeed, recognizes the importance of technological advances in the restaurant industry and their potential to improve the bottom line. Dasilva stated, “When you own and run a restaurant, researching your peers so that you can compete and give your restaurant the edge can take time that could be otherwise spent being present in the day-to-day. With Benchmarks & Trends, we’re not just providing data-driven insight and essential market information needed to increase performance at the click of a button, but building confidence in how the people behind the businesses can use these insights as a competitive advantage.”
Benchmarks & Trends offers tailored insights to restaurateurs, providing a clear view of how their restaurant compares to others in their area. This tool also allows for meaningful comparisons by measuring performance against peers using data that accounts for business size and adjusts daily, giving relevant insights whether running a small café or a larger establishment. Additionally, Benchmarks & Trends provides smart forecasting, access to up to four weeks of historical data, and machine learning-driven forecasts, helping operators anticipate trends and make informed decisions with confidence. Streamlined operations are another benefit, as the tool allows for the identification of peak hours, optimization of staffing, and keeping everything running smoothly to ensure the best possible experience for customers.
Until now, Lightspeed has been supporting restaurateurs in turning data into growth opportunities through Advanced Insights. With the launch of Benchmarks & Trends, Lightspeed is taking the next step in data and insight evolution by providing localized, real-time data. This allows restaurateurs to see exactly where they excel and where adjustments could drive greater success.
Hani Nakkach, the Founder of Aubaine, has been part of early tests for Benchmarks & Trends and remarks, “Lightspeed Benchmarks & Trends is so easy to use and saves me a lot of time. While my Finance team gives me data to analyse our own performance, we don’t have visibility into the broader market and Lightspeed bridges that gap. Being able to see things like benchmarks for key metrics like pricing and table turn time, the tool lets me quickly do a ‘health check’ on the business and spot areas for my team to focus on. The food and beverage split is also really helpful in identifying changes in customer behaviour.”
Another early adopter of Benchmarks and Trends is Dominique Fernandes, Head of Operations at vegetarian restaurant pioneers, Mildreds and mallow. Dominique says, “With Lightspeed’s Benchmarks & Trends, we don’t have to manually research what competitors are doing anymore. Before, we’d look around just to get a sense of how other restaurants are performing and how they are pricing their items. Now Benchmarks & Trends gives us those insights instantly, and we can rely on real insights and make confident decisions to maximise our success.”
Lightspeed Benchmarks & Trends is currently available for a limited number of existing Lightspeed customers and will be available to all merchants in the UK in the coming weeks. The company will be showcasing this new tool and other recent product innovations, including Lightspeed Tableside with Mobile Tap and a consolidated Item View in Lightspeed Kitchen Display, at Lightspeed Edge, the world’s premier hospitality tech summit, in London today.
Trusted by Michelin-starred restaurants and thousands of leading establishments worldwide, including Mana, DaTerra, Bubala, Mildreds, and Aubaine, Lightspeed is dedicated to empowering its customers with the tools they need to grow.
Derick is an experienced reporter having held multiple senior roles for large publishers across Europe. Specialist subjects include small business and financial emerging markets.