Multi-vendor order fulfillment has long been the operational Achilles' heel of the food hall model — guests juggling multiple receipts, staff fielding wrong-pickup disputes, and kitchens working in isolation. Central Park St. Pete Food Hall says it has cracked that problem by pairing Kluck, a cloud-native restaurant technology platform, with Epson America's OmniLink TM-L100 liner-free thermal label printers at every vendor stall and OmniLink mSeries receipt printers at bars and expo stations.
How the System Works
Guests at the St. Petersburg, Florida destination order from multiple food concepts in a single transaction — via kiosk or QR code — and pay once. Kluck's platform simultaneously routes each item to the appropriate vendor kitchen. Epson's ePOS™ networking technology then triggers the TM-L100 at the correct stall to print a label bearing the guest's name in real time, so every order is identifiable the moment it leaves the pass. The result: guests collect food from different stalls across the venue without confusion over whose order is whose.
"Getting orders to the kitchen isn't the challenge — it's everything that happens afterward," said Cary Hicks, co-founder of Kluck. "A single transaction needs to be routed to multiple kitchens simultaneously. 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."
Central Park St. Pete co-owner Natalia Levey framed the guest-experience stakes plainly: each kitchen runs its own menu and hours, yet the venue needs to feel like one cohesive restaurant. "Epson's printing and labeling technology helps streamline workflow and the customer experience by making pickup intuitive and stress-free, allowing guests to focus on enjoying the food rather than figuring out which order belongs to them," she said.
Operator Implications
The venue chose Epson as its exclusive printer provider, standardizing on a single hardware platform across the entire facility — a decision that simplifies vendor onboarding, IT support, and daily troubleshooting. For multi-concept operators weighing similar consolidation moves, the case study highlights liner-free label stock as a practical detail worth attention: eliminating the wax backing reduces paper waste and removes a consumable-management variable from busy kitchen environments.
For the broader foodservice industry, the deployment illustrates how restaurant technology integration is increasingly the connective tissue that makes nontraditional formats viable at scale. Food halls, ghost kitchen campuses, and stadium club-level concessions all share the same core problem — parallel production streams that must converge into a single, accurate guest experience — and cloud-native orchestration paired with networked printing is emerging as a repeatable solution.
Hicks confirmed that Kluck is already expanding the model: "Central Park St. Pete proved the concept, and we're now bringing the same Kluck and Epson solution to food halls and multi-vendor operators across the country." That rollout positions the pairing as a packaged offering for operators evaluating hospitality technology investments, rather than a one-off custom integration. Ian Livesay, product manager at Epson America, noted that accurate labeling and reliable networked printing matter whether the venue is a traditional restaurant or a multi-vendor hall — the underlying need for connected, automated print workflows is consistent across formats.
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.
