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Industry solution

Cashless Canteen & Cafeteria

Q: How does it stop buddy-meals?

Each meal is tied to a live face or fingerprint at the counter, so one person cannot collect meals for others. Optional one-meal-per-shift rules block duplicates.

Q: Can it deduct a cashless subsidy automatically?

Yes. Meal events post in real time to your canteen, POS or ERP system over the API, which can deduct the employee subsidy or wallet balance per transaction.

Q: Is it fast enough for a busy counter?

Face recognition identifies a diner in under a second and runs from a terminal, a counter CCTV camera (CatchCam) or a laptop webcam (FaceUp), so multiple counters keep moving at peak.

Q: Will it work with our existing canteen software?

Yes — the gateway is software-agnostic. It posts clean JSON to any endpoint via REST or webhooks, so it connects to your canteen app, POS or ERP without replacing it.

Q: Can diners pay by ID card as well as face?

Yes. The same counter accepts an RFID or ID card, a face or a contactless fingerphoto. Whichever they use, the gateway identifies the diner and your POS shows their meal plan and the eligible items to choose from, then debits the right wallet or subsidy.

Run a cashless, fraud-proof canteen — identify every diner by face or fingerprint at the counter, auto-deduct the meal subsidy, and stop buddy-meals, across every shift.

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The challenge

What makes Cashless Canteen & Cafeteria hard

Cash and paper tokens are slow at peak and leak revenue
Buddy-meals inflate headcount and subsidy cost
Manual meal counts never reconcile with payroll or the caterer
Multi-shift counters need sub-second throughput
Diners must pick the day's meal items and have them billed to the right person
No per-diner audit trail for finance

How Cams solves it

The right modality for the job

At the counter, a face terminal, an RFID or ID card, or a contactless fingerphoto identifies the diner in under a second. The moment they're recognised, your POS pulls up their meal plan and the day's eligible items to choose from, then debits the wallet or subsidy automatically. Every meal event streams over the Cams Web API and Hybrid Push into your canteen software, POS or ERP to reconcile counts in real time. CatchCam turns an existing counter camera into a recognizer, FaceUp runs it from a laptop webcam, and ThumbsUp captures a fingerphoto on a phone — so the line keeps moving with no cash and no paper tokens.

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Integration. Push every meal event to your canteen/POS/ERP in real time via Callback or Hybrid Push, or pull on demand with the REST API. Deduct subsidy, enforce one-meal-per-shift, and export to payroll.

Recommended

Products that power this

ENGINE

Face Match Engine

Server-side face enroll, 1:1 verify, and 1:N identify over REST — with built-in ArcFace embedding, SCRFD detection, alignment, and anti-spoofing.

Explore ENGINE

Stream Engine

Turns a CCTV, RTSP, or ONVIF video stream into face-recognition attendance — one punch per person per appearance, with video that never leaves your network.

Explore APP

Finger AI

Contactless fingerphoto attendance — a phone camera captures a fingertip, the server extracts an ISO 19794-2 template, and Cams matches it 1:N.

Explore SERVICE

Hybrid Push

The universal integration layer that delivers real-time attendance from ANY biometric device — verified or not — to any application or ERP in under 500 ms.

Explore

Cams hardware

Purpose-built devices for this use-case

📝

Cams CanBio34 canteen terminal

Specs & purchase on camsbiometrics.com

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Try it live

See it work in your browser

Run a real biometric capture right now with the FaceUp web tool — no app, no sign-in.

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Cashless Canteen & Cafeteria — Cams demo

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Proven at scale

100%device brands

200+ERP / HRMS integrations

100+countries

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