For a sector that spends as heavily on technology as it does, UK hospitality has never had a straight answer to a simple question: is any of it actually any good? There are review sites. Trustpilot, G2 and Capterra all carry hospitality software, scored largely by the people who bought it rather than the people who use it, and in some cases by whoever a vendor could persuade to leave five stars. What has not existed until now is a score given by hospitality, for hospitality, by the people standing in front of the till.
For years the only feedback a technology supplier got came from the person who signed the contract. This is the first time the people actually running the systems, in the kitchen, behind the bar, on the front desk, have been able to score them.
The Stacked Intelligence Scoring Index, published this week, is the first attempt at one. It scores each major technology category out of 100 using three inputs: operator satisfaction weighted by how many operators rated it, whether the category is being bought or quietly abandoned, and how much real choice a buyer has. It is built from 558 verified operator reviews and 3,053 reported tool records from 550 UK operator brands. The market, across the six categories with enough evidence to rank, scores 72.0.
Inventory is the gap between what operators say and what they buy
The clearest signal in the quarter is also the most uncomfortable. Inventory and stock sits bottom of the ranked index at 67.6, on the lowest satisfaction of any category at 3.31 out of 5, and its share of the operator stack fell 18.7% in the three months when food cost was the thing every operator said they were worried about. No inventory vendor with meaningful review volume clears 3.5.
That is a gap worth naming. Drought-driven vegetable inflation ran through the summer, foodservice prices rose again in August, and the category built to control food cost lost ground.
This fall is partly an artefact of a young dataset. This is the first quarter the numbers have been exposed, and the decline has already moderated from the 29.9% recorded three weeks earlier. The direction, though, has not changed.
Legacy is the drag, not technology itself
The more encouraging finding is what sits at the other end. Payments scores 75.9 on the most robust evidence in the index, 181 reviews and satisfaction of 3.98. Point of sale is the only ranked category gaining real share this quarter, up 8.9%, on 244 reviews across 14 scored vendors.
Read together, those two numbers suggest the modern end of the stack is supporting operators rather than holding them back. Where technology is blocking progress, it tends to be the legacy tail: older systems that integrate poorly and were bought for a business that no longer exists.
Training is being bought hard, and nobody has agreed what good looks like
Learning and development leads the index at 76.8 and is the least settled category in it. Competitive intensity of 95.9 is the highest of any category, with 59 distinct tools across 103 mentions, which means almost nobody has consolidated on a supplier. Its share of the stack grew 4.2%.
The driver is cost. Replacing an employee has never been more expensive, and consistency is impossible when a team turns over. Operators are buying training technology faster than they are agreeing what it should do.
Nobody can buy their score
The detail likely to interest suppliers most is that marketplace tier has no bearing on score, rank or inclusion. The six category leaders split evenly across Stacked’s three commercial tiers, two Lite, two Promote, two Approved, and several of the leading vendors are not Stacked partners at all. Stacked also excluded its own best-looking number. Finance and accounting scored 84.9, higher than anything in the ranked index, and was left out because Stacked holds scores covering just 14.3% of that category’s real tool mentions. Including it would have lifted the headline index from 72.0 to 73.9.
The data is in this article is gathered through the Health Check on the Stacked website, at events and on podcasts, and by an insight team that visits sites in person. Coverage is currently London-weighted and moving into the regions. The index will be published every quarter, with Q4 2026 carrying the first full quarter-on-quarter movement.
Chris Fletcher is founder and chief executive at Stacked.