In February 2026 I spent 17 days in China. One of the things that stuck with me was how Meituan and Weixin handle food ordering. You sit down, scan a QR code on the table, and order directly from your phone. No waiting for a waiter to take your order, no paper menus, no friction. It just works, and it works everywhere.
I came back to Spain thinking two things: those two giants have conditions and an ecosystem that nobody else can replicate, but the core idea is simple enough that I could build a version of it. And I happened to have a good excuse to try, since I was going through a selection process at Supabase at the time and wanted to build something real with the product rather than a toy demo.
So I did.
QR Table Ordering (I still have no name for it!) is a SaaS platform where restaurants get their own digital menu and ordering system. Customers scan a QR code on the table, browse the menu, and place their order from their phone. No app to install, no account to create. The kitchen gets the order in real time.
The core runs on Supabase. Each restaurant is isolated with Row Level Security, so no customer or restaurant can ever touch another’s data. Orders flow through Realtime subscriptions so the kitchen display updates the moment a table submits. Edge Functions handle the business logic that shouldn’t live on the client.
The URL architecture uses capability URLs with JWT and RBAC: the QR code on each table encodes a short-lived signed token that grants scoped access to that specific restaurant and table. Customers get a frictionless experience without authentication, and restaurants get proper access control without managing user accounts.
The frontend is React. I’m building this in public at @vpx_tech.