Sbarro plans POS and payments upgrade at nearly 300 U.S. restaurants

Sbarro plans to adopt NCR Voyix’s Aloha Next point-of-sale system and Voyix Pay across nearly 300 company-owned and franchised restaurants in the United States under a multiyear agreement announced October 14.

The pizza chain wants a common technology environment for its restaurants and the teams overseeing them, with centralized data management and greater visibility across operations. CEO David Karam said the agreement builds on Sbarro’s existing relationship with NCR Voyix as the chain grows. The announcement did not specify installation dates.

A slice business in different settings#

Sbarro’s operating model spans more than the mall counter. In a September interview with PMQ, Karam described the brand’s core business as impulse purchases of pizza by the slice, with most sales involving direct customer engagement. He said the bulk of new openings were outside mall food courts, including convenience stores and travel centers.

Those venues also bring a different kind of franchise owner. Karam told PMQ that convenience-store and travel-center franchisees generally own and operate the host business. Sbarro supplies a restaurant offering alongside their fuel and retail operations, giving the franchisor a supporting role within a business with several sources of revenue.

The balance of walk-up and digital sales varies, too. Karam told PMQ that delivery might represent 7% of sales in malls, while reaching as much as 25% in convenience stores. He also described Sbarro’s own online delivery and carryout ordering alongside its use of third-party delivery services.

The chain reported 38 domestic and 63 international restaurant openings in its January account of 2025 development. Its development list included convenience stores, travel centers, military bases, casinos, universities, airports and neighborhood locations, as well as malls. Sbarro also described a new restaurant design allowing smaller, more flexible footprints and incorporating updated technology and equipment.

Central management, local operation#

NCR Voyix’s general platform documentation describes software management across a chain alongside applications running at individual locations. Central tools let a business configure, deploy and update applications across its restaurant network. They also support monitoring deployments and restoring an earlier software version. The platform provides shared services and interfaces for connecting the supplier’s software, a customer’s own applications and third-party systems.

At the restaurant, the company says its Voyix Edge application engine lets software run locally, with cloud-based management. The design is intended to support continued operation when a network connection is disrupted.

The company also describes its restaurant software as modular: applications can be adopted individually or together, allowing restaurants to add capabilities without replacing their entire technology stack at once.

Following the payment beyond checkout#

NCR Voyix’s broader payments offering extends beyond the terminal where a guest taps a card. Its restaurant payments documentation distinguishes Voyix Pay, its processing service, from Voyix Connect, the gateway that routes transactions and handles reporting, configuration and monitoring. Both sit within a broader offering that connects payment functions with the point-of-sale system.

Voyix Pay’s listed capabilities include multiple funding options, risk management, and integrated chargeback and dispute management. The wider restaurant payments offering includes reconciliation reporting, alerts and centralized analytics. Those functions cover the movement and tracking of payments as well as their initial acceptance, linking the checkout transaction to work handled by restaurant finance teams.

The wider payments offering supports in-store service, online ordering, mobile ordering and kiosks. The same documentation describes encryption and tokenization that remove cardholder data from the POS and support transactions such as refunds and card-on-file payments.

Different paths to the same platform#

Pizza Ranch has already set a year for beginning its move to Aloha Next. In July, it named NCR Voyix its exclusive POS technology partner across company-owned and franchised restaurants. The agreement includes Aloha Next, Voyix Pay and services. Pizza Ranch Chief Brand Officer Jon Moss said the chain expected to begin rolling out Aloha Next in 2027.

Pei Wei’s May renewal took another approach. It reinforced the chain’s existing POS platform, including Voyix Connect, while making Aloha Next available under the agreement. NCR Voyix described that arrangement as preserving continuity and optional access to future capabilities.