Matt Khoury once celebrated a customer’s two-year relationship with Gelato Messina by pointing out what it had finally bought them: an entire gelato pop-up for an event. They had spent more than $4,500 and saved her loyalty points for the prize. For a software founder, it was an unusually edible demonstration of customer retention. For someone raised around family food businesses, it was a familiar pleasure: a regular being treated like a regular.
Khoury shared the episode on LinkedIn with obvious delight. The attraction was the experience at the end of all that spending. Points had become something a person might actually want to tell friends about. A spreadsheet would record a redemption; the guests would remember the ice cream.
As co-founder and CEO of LOKE, Khoury has spent years working on the machinery behind those moments. His company connects ordering, payments, customer information and rewards for hospitality businesses. The London-based founder’s working question is straightforward: how can a restaurant recognise the people who keep coming back, and give them a reason to do it again?
The kitchen came before the pitch
Khoury began helping in his family’s restaurants, cafes and takeaway shops at six. At fifteen, he was helping his cousin manage a nightclub. His Lebanese family’s gatherings gave food another function beyond the commercial one. Feeding people was a way of gathering them together.
That background gives his choice of industry a practical coherence. Hospitality was already part of his life before he had to explain it to a prospective customer. The leap into software changed the tools available to him; the people at the other end still had kitchens to run and guests to serve.
His route included a stretch outside restaurants. Between 2004 and 2008, he attended the University of South Australia, studying project management and economics. From 2007 to 2011, he worked as a project manager at Tagara Commercial Construction. Later roles included advising app developer Hyper Apps and serving as a director and adviser to Benny’s American Cafe & Takeaway.
Construction, an app business and a takeaway shop make an interesting set of workplaces. Each brings a different version of the implementation problem: a plan has to survive contact with the people using it. In Khoury’s later work, that concern keeps appearing in the gap between an attractive product demonstration and a restaurant’s actual working day.
A bar tab is a perfectly respectable beginning
By November 2013, Khoury and Nicholas Birrell were testing Aston Club, an app for opening and closing tabs in bars and restaurants. Their hospitality technology work together stretched back to 2010. Khoury described the benefit of developing successive businesses in the same field: experience was helping them grow faster than they had expected.
The bar tab is a modest problem with excellent credentials. Customers would rather spend an evening enjoying themselves than negotiating its payment arrangements. An operator, meanwhile, needs the money collected correctly. Software has to accommodate both interests without becoming the evening’s principal entertainment.
With LOKE co-founder Tom Booth, Khoury shared a fondness for hospitality as a social occasion. Booth’s lamb barbecues helped bring them closer. Early sales trips involved hired cars, motel rooms and borrowed couches. They visited venues, gathered feedback and adjusted what they were building. Their first technology let guests connect through social media, accumulate points and exchange them for items.
By December 2015, LOKE was based in Melbourne’s Cremorne and had announced a PayPal partnership, allowing people to connect existing accounts to its apps. A proposed $1 million fundraising was intended to support fifty new jobs over three years. Those were plans, rather than a retrospective headcount, but they show the scale of the ambition at the time.
Khoury publicly credited Melbourne’s startup setting with helping develop the company’s vision for phone payments and loyalty. He was moving between two worlds: the relatively new business of mobile commerce and the much older business of getting people fed.
Cash, gelato and the small matter of habit
In 2016, Gelato Messina offered a particularly useful test. The business was known for taking cash. Rather than simply adding conventional card terminals, it worked with LOKE on a digital wallet and loyalty app. Khoury said the introduction had come through word of mouth.
The initial hesitation was understandable. Moving directly from cash to a wallet inside an app asks a business to change a familiar transaction, and asks customers to change with it. Khoury pointed to existing deployments and comparable overseas examples as part of the case that persuaded Messina.
There is a distance between getting an app approved and getting someone to use it while deciding on dessert. The later pop-up reward offered one memorable answer to the question of why anyone would bother. The purchase came with a longer relationship attached.
At Zeus Street Greek, the proposition included ordering ahead, earning points and paying at the counter by saying your name. Khoury described the company’s hospitality knowledge as a way to identify problems for both businesses and customers. The ambition was visible in that small interaction: a phone payment could still leave room for someone to speak to someone else.
The queue has a vote
Another application took the idea to a football stadium. LOKE worked on NAB Dash, combining a mobile wallet with ordering and pickup for Australian Football League spectators. Location technology helped identify when a customer approached the collection point, so the merchant could receive a notification.
The service launched at Metricon Stadium, home of the Gold Coast Suns. Its design also restricted location-triggered activity to customers who had purchased, reducing irrelevant messages. That detail matters. An app that knows where you are still needs a useful reason to interrupt you.
In New Zealand, Hawker & Roll planned a dedicated takeaway window for orders made through its LOKE app. The 2017 announcement paired mobile ordering and payment with a physical place to collect the food. Khoury welcomed the chance to develop the customer experience with the restaurant. The window supplied a useful reminder: eventually, even a digital order needs somebody to hand over lunch.
These projects put his work at the junction of software and service. A reward can be appealing; a payment can be convenient. The customer still encounters a queue, a counter and a member of staff. Their experience supplies a fairly unforgiving verdict on whether the system works.
Listening is part of the product
At a London seminar with executives from City Pub Group and Comptoir Group, Khoury described the difficulty of getting customers to adopt ordering and payment technology. His emphasis was on understanding how guests interacted with a business, allowing staff to improve service and operators to encourage repeat visits.
“We want to give our operators that level of sophistication.”
Matt Khoury, discussing enterprise technology for smaller hospitality groups
That aspiration also set a demanding standard. Smaller operators would need to use the tools within the realities of their own businesses. A feature that added work elsewhere in the restaurant would have a cost, however handsome it looked on a screen.
Khoury and his team worked with Auden Hospitality on precisely those practical difficulties. Auden put LOKE into one of its operations, then helped examine implementation obstacles, integrations, the people involved and features that needed attention. Khoury credited the collaboration with improving the service for clients and their customers.
It is a revealing episode because the work happened inside an operation. The product had to be used before its shortcomings could be addressed properly. For a founder whose career began around venues, there is a pleasing consistency in returning to one to find out what needs fixing.
His own account of leadership puts weight on the team. In his 2020 year-end message, Khoury described persistence and innovation as collective work, dependent on people with shared values. He credited colleagues rather than an individual founder for the company’s achievements. The language was expansive, but the underlying point was concrete: a founder cannot deliver every customer’s experience himself.
Pizza brings the argument to scale
LOKE’s current work includes a much larger American restaurant estate. Guinness Ventures, which first invested in 2021, describes a platform increasingly focused on US enterprise customers. Jet’s Pizza, a chain of roughly five hundred locations, is a central example.
The deployment brought ordering, loyalty, payments, customer records and marketing together. Existing loyalty balances were preserved during the move from the previous provider. That is a consequential detail in a business built around regulars. A customer’s accumulated rewards represent a promise; changing software should leave that promise intact.
The scale introduces plenty of unromantic work. LOKE’s Jet’s Pizza testing instructions cover trading hours, delivery zones, menu accuracy, scheduled orders, card payments, tips, printed notes, refunds and staff training. A working payment screen is only one item on the list. The restaurant has to be ready to trade.
That checklist makes a useful companion to Khoury’s ambitions. It shows what a broad claim about better hospitality requires on the ground: the right store details, an order reaching the till, a ticket printing correctly. Customers tend to notice those things most when they go wrong.
Khoury’s story keeps returning to the same relationship, at different sizes. A family takeaway, a gelato shop and a pizza franchise all depend on people choosing to come back. His work gives that relationship a digital record. Its value is settled later, when the customer decides where to eat.