For parents with young children, it can be difficult to find a location where you can keep them entertained while also enjoying good food. But that’s exactly what The Little High Street in Birmingham offers.

Launched in January 2025, The Little High Street is a combined soft play and role play centre for children ages 0 – 5 years old. To be a real success, the founders knew they needed to provide more than fun and safe activities for kids; they also wanted to offer healthy light fare and drinks for both the parents and their children.

But operating a café/play space hybrid has its own unique challenges. For instance, the kitchen itself is small and located at the back of the building. This presented a number of logistical challenges in terms of what they could prepare and the amount of food they could store. Additionally, it made serving food challenging, as families and their children are confined to the play area once entering.

What’s more, The Little High Street found that some items on its initial menu, such as soy milk and salads, were in less demand than anticipated, generating a significant amount of food waste.

Given that the founders wanted to ensure maximum efficiency in their operations, they turned to Everything EPOS to help them design and deploy a till system that would enable them to deliver a fun experience for both children and their parents.

Transforming a Small Space with Big Possibilities

Everything EPOS’s first step was to evaluate the space to make hardware and operations recommendations. With a compact service area and a kitchen located at the back of the building, we recommended a wired network for the kitchen printer that would ensure uninterrupted communication between the front and back of house. This ensured smoother service and reduced unnecessary staff movement through the closed off play area.

Operationally, Little High Street decided to adopt a hybrid model for ordering, where guests order their food and drinks when they enter, and can return to the main entrance to place additional orders for additional food or drinks. This worked well, ensuring that orders were started quickly, without needing to have staff constantly moving back and forth through the closed off play area, while also keeping that area closed off so no young children can wander off.

Once launched, Everything EPOS’s analytics and reporting tools helped The Little High Street better understand—and deliver—what its customers want. By analysing inventory and sales data, Everything EPOS enabled the café to identify underperforming menu items like soy milk lattes, salads, and charcuterie boards, each of which generated a significant amount of waste. They removed or adjusted these items, while retaining popular and cost-effective items, such as hummus, sandwiches, and best-seller triple chocolate cookies.

What’s more, Everything EPOS’s real-time reporting helped the founders stay on top of what was happening in the business, even when physically away from the café. This enabled one of the owners to continue to manage the business while on maternity leave, without having to worry about whether or not the business was running smoothly.

Finding The Little High Street’s Recipe for Success

As a new business, it was important that Everything EPOS assist Little High Street Café establish strong and efficient operations right from the start. By helping to identify poorly selling, perishable menu items, The Little High Street managed to reduce their menu by approximately 10 percent, while also tripling sales of more popular items. Our inventory tracking and management tools also helped them ensure nothing went missing, while reporting enabled them to closely track sales to make smarter business decisions.

Ultimately, The Little High Street was able to launch—and get to profitability—faster without as much trial and error that so often sinks new hospitality businesses. Best of all, the owners can focus on the most important aspects of their business: Creating a fun and welcoming environment for people of all ages—but especially for kids!