How Dines helped Kings Lynn Corn Exchange grow bar sales by 20% and rewrite what regional theatre F&B can look like
From auditorium to interval bar, an all-in-one POS and payments system built for British regional theatre.
The Challenge
How to grow secondary spend via F&B
The Kings Lynn Corn Exchange is a 700-seat Grade II listed theatre with a two-screen cinema, run by Alive West Norfolk on behalf of the borough council. Three or four live shows roll through every week, a full pantomime fills December into January, and the cinema covers the days in between. From West End touring productions to local comedy clubs, the building rarely stands still. For a regional theatre, every visit has to count commercially. Ticket revenue is shared with promoters and distributors, which leaves F&B as one of the few high-margin levers the venue actually controls. Most front of house managers will recognise the setup the Corn Exchange had before Dines. The till system had been installed years earlier and never really kept pace with how the venue had changed. All four tills were wired together so tightly that if one crashed, the others went with it. Adding a new product to the menu was a fiddly manual job, and one nobody wanted to be doing during service. The end-of-day report gave a single sales figure - and little else. The bigger problem was the lack of usable data. When you're being asked to defend stock decisions, argue for more staffing, or explain why a show underperformed commercially, working from memory and gut feel doesn't get you very far. Tom Cundy, who runs front of house at the Corn Exchange, decided it was time for a change. Dines came through as a top option on the back of detailed market research and a recommendation from a contact at Delfont Mackintosh Theatres.
The Solution
Partnership with Dines
Dines went live first on mobile ordering for the comedy clubs. The venue runs those cabaret-style, with the audience seated at tables in the round. QR codes went on every table, two staff covered 300 people, and the queues that usually built up at the bar didn't appear. That convinced the team to bring Dines onto the main bar too. Which raised the question every FOH manager wants a clear answer to: how long is the rollout going to take? One day. One person from the Dines team came up first thing in the morning, and by mid-afternoon the venue had four new iPads on the bar, two printers wired in, and a team about to serve a show on a system they'd seen for the first time that morning. The shift ran cleanly. From there the footprint grew across the building at the team's own pace. Dines now runs the cinema kiosk on two iPads, and a fleet of handhelds takes interval drinks and ice creams to wherever the audience is sitting. It also handles a problem most POS systems struggle with. The Corn Exchange is a heritage building with thick walls and Wi-Fi blind spots that no router upgrade is going to fix. Dines detects when the connection drops, switches to offline mode automatically, and keeps payments running. The team doesn't have to think about it.
“You think changing your POS is going to be a horrific procedure. It was far from it. I was worried about how the team would take to it, but on day one they picked up the iPads and just said, oh, actually that is really easy.”
Tom Cundy
Front of House Manager
The Results
The numbers since the switch tell a clear story
Bar sales on a like-for-like comedy show are up 56%. Overall bar revenue on a typical show night is up 20% from the till alone - before counting QR-code interval pre-orders, which have opened up a category of secondary spend the venue couldn't really capture before. Curtain-up no longer gets held back by queues at the foyer bar. And the venue's most recent customer NPS sits at 88 out of 100, up from 81 the year before and from the low 70s in 2021 - a shift Tom attributes in no small part to what Dines has done to the flow of the building. The bigger change shows up in how the building actually gets run. Decisions that used to come down to memory and gut feel now run off historical sales of the same show the last time it came round. Lines that aren't selling get pulled. Repeat shows get stocked against what people actually drank. And Tom walks into operational meetings with hard numbers in front of him.
“We always had a habit of overstocking, because everything was anecdotal. Now I can pull the data, see what actually sold last time a show came round, and stock to match. The panic ordering has gone - it's been tremendously transformative. The numbers are one thing, but the bigger shift is in how we run the building. There's no way we'd go back to the old system, and there's no way we'd switch to a new one now.”
Tom Cundy
Front of House Manager
What's Next
Looking ahead
The Corn Exchange team is already mapping out what comes next. They're preparing to roll out an Everyman-style seat service for higher-ticket cinema screenings - Royal Opera House and National Theatre Live among them - with staff using handhelds during the twenty-minute advert window to take food and drink orders before the film begins. Nothing comparable exists at any other cinema in the area. For a venue this size, that's a rare chance to offer something genuinely distinctive, and the Dines handhelds make it practical. Tom is also keen to put Tilly - the Dines AI tool he helped shape at the Dines Futures Forum - to work. The data the system already produces has changed how decisions get made. Layering an AI assistant on top, one that can pull reports and surface patterns without anyone having to chase them, takes a real chunk of admin off the FOH manager's plate and puts time back on the floor. Tom is also already recommending Dines to his colleagues and wider network for a number of new and exciting opportunities.
⬅ Back to all case studiesSee how Dines works for your venue.
Pick your venue type and we'll show you exactly what gets easier.
Book a call