The before
La Cantina opened in 2023 in Capital City, Lilongwe. By early 2026, the restaurant was doing 80–110 covers a night across two services — but the operations had not kept up.
The setup before Letts:
- A USB-tethered POS system from a Dubai supplier
- An accountant’s spreadsheet that owner Bashir maintained on Sundays
- A separate notebook for inventory and supplier deliveries
- Three personal mobile-money wallets for accepting Mpamba, Airtel Money, and cash
- WhatsApp threads for Letts Eat orders coming through the kitchen
Each of these worked in isolation. The seams between them were broken. By Bashir’s own admission: “I was working until 1 a.m. on Sundays just reconciling tickets to receipts to bank deposits.”
The decision
In February 2026, Bashir met with the Letts onboarding team after seeing a demo at a hospitality industry event in Lilongwe. The pitch wasn’t about features — it was about the seams.
“Three separate tools means three separate logins, three separate weekly tasks, three separate places where mistakes hide. The Letts pitch was: one system, no seams. That’s what I needed to hear.”
La Cantina committed to a 30-day digitisation. (We later turned this into a public playbook.)
The 30-day rollout
- Week 1 — Audit and prep. The team mapped every tool, audited the menu, costed every dish to ingredient level. This became the foundation for recipe-driven inventory.
- Week 2 — Hardware and staff. LettsPOS terminals shipped same-day from Lilongwe. The most senior server was trained first on a Tuesday lunch shift.
- Week 3 — Live + Letts Eat. Full live cutover on Day 15. Letts Eat went live on Day 20; orders started flowing into the kitchen display same evening.
- Week 4 — Operations overhaul. Daily P&L set up in LettsOS. Suppliers connected via Letts Marketplace. Promotion rules configured for happy hour and weekend specials.
What changed
“We were running three different tools before Letts. Now everything talks. Service is 30% faster, theft is down 80%, and I get a P&L every morning.”
The numbers, three months in:
But the qualitative changes are what Bashir mentions first:
- The Sunday-night reconciliation is gone. Daily P&L hits his inbox by 9 a.m. Every morning. Inventory variance is one number.
- Service speed at rush. Split bills used to take 4–5 minutes per group of 6+. Now 30 seconds. Tables turn faster.
- Letts Eat became 32% of revenue. Orders flow directly to kitchen display; no tablet juggling, no missed orders.
- Staff onboarding is 1 hour, not 1 week. The previous POS took a week to train; new servers on LettsPOS run lunch shifts on day one.
What's next
La Cantina is opening a second location in Blantyre in Q3 2026. With Letts already running multi-location for retail customers like Surge Stores, expansion is now mostly real estate and recipes — not technology.
Bashir’s parting note for restaurant owners considering the move:
“The thing I didn’t expect: when your tools talk to each other, you stop being the bottleneck. I used to be the integrator — between the till and the books and the supplier list. Letts integrated those for me. Now I run the restaurant.”
Products used
- LettsPOS — point of sale, kitchen display, Mpamba + Airtel Money native
- LettsOS — inventory, finance, daily P&L, supplier reconciliation
- Gula Marketplace — consumer ordering through Gula Meals, restaurant listing
- Letts Marketplace — verified suppliers, automated POs
Want to dig deeper?
- The full 30-day digitisation playbook — based on La Cantina’s actual rollout
- Letts Commerce for Restaurants — vertical landing page covering rush-hour POS, recipe-driven inventory, kitchen display
- Talk to our restaurant team — happy to share more case-study detail under NDA