Frictionless Food & Beverage

Soccer has a food and beverage problem

Soccer compresses food and beverage demand into a very short window. Matches run through a 45-minute first half, a 15-minute halftime, and a 45-minute second half with no timeouts or natural commercial breaks. That means most purchasing happens at halftime, and in a 22,500-seat stadium, that creates an extreme speed problem.

In a traditional stadium model, fans can still be waiting in line well after the second half begins. That means missed match action, frustrated fans, and a poor overall experience. For a club that wanted to be technology-forward from the start, that was not good enough.

The food program made that even harder. We partnered with more than 25 local food brands across the stadium, each with its own menu, pricing, and operational requirements. That made the experience more differentiated, but it also made the operation harder to manage.

Extending halftime in practice

We recognized early that no single solution was going to serve 22,500 fans in 15 minutes. So we changed the approach.

The goal was not to get every fan their food within halftime. The goal was to effectively extend halftime in practice by making purchasing fast enough, distributed enough, and flexible enough that fans could still get what they wanted and get back to the action without missing too much of the match.

That meant designing for different fan behaviors, seating locations, and purchase types. Instead of forcing everyone through the same concession flow, we built multiple ways to buy and connected them through the same app, payments, and operator workflows.

The product system we built

To reduce friction at scale, we built a connected food and beverage system across several channels:

1. Mobile Order Ahead. Fans could order food and beverage in advance from 16+ locations, skip the line, and pick up when ready.
2. Grab-and-Go Markets. Fans could enter using the CITY app or a credit card, shop without scanning individual items, and exit with purchases tracked automatically. Average transaction times were under 90 seconds.
3. Self-Serve Kiosks. Kiosks gave fans another fast path to order while allowing operators to focus staff on food production and fulfillment instead of line management.
4. Cashless Payments. We made the stadium cashless from the start, limiting payment to the CITY app and credit cards to reduce operational drag and speed up transactions.
5. Operator Tooling for Food Partners. We built tools that allowed food partners to manage inventory, update menus in real time across digital channels, and request assistance when needed.

Taken together, this was not just a set of features. It was a coordinated way to spread demand, reduce bottlenecks, and help the whole stadium move faster.

The results

It worked.

By distributing demand across multiple channels and making transactions easier across the stadium, we effectively extended halftime in practice. Fans began placing many Mobile Order Ahead purchases before kickoff, lines reduced materially, and the food and beverage experience became one of the strongest parts of matchday.

More than 25% of matchday transactions were completed through the CITY app. Fans reported 95% satisfaction with the food and beverage experience, both in process and quality.

The result was a faster, more flexible model that better matched the pace of soccer, supported local partners, and made the CITY app a more useful part of matchday.