That's one powerful sandwich

Someone must have been a really big fan of Glee‘s Grilled Cheesus episode.

VentureBeat is reporting that Jonathan Kaplan, who previously founded the company behind the Flip camera, is starting a chain of grilled cheese sandwich and soup restaurants. “Good for him, grilled cheese is awesome,” you may be thinking. And yes, grilled cheese and soup is an awesome combination, but we’re not sure if it’s $10 million good. Someone at Sequoia is though – they’ve given Kaplan enough money to open 20 stores, which cost between $500,000 and $1 million to open.

Well, at least it’s better than Milanoo.

Seriously, the famed venture capitalists (who’ve funded companies like Google and Apple) probably got involved more for the mobile food aspect. The Melt – great name, by the way – is aiming to push users to ordering and paying via phone, where they’ll receive a QR code that can be redeemed at the restaurant. The Melt will have five restaurants in the San Francisco area by November with plans to open 500 locations over the next 5 years.

We know that food trucks are a big driver of mobile payments, so the premise doesn’t sound far fetched but we think the real money would be in the ordering technology. The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen generated plenty of excitement in San Francisco last May, so it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the menu, but as delicious as they can be grilled cheese sandwiches everyday would probably get old (not to mention a bit unhealthy). Being able to get in and out of a restaurant with a QR code during the lunch time rush actually sounds pretty good, but only if it’s an option for the times when someone is in the mood for salad or a burger or anything else besides grilled cheese and soup.

If it catches on, maybe The Melt will be the case study for the technology, but that’s where our faith in this idea lies.

Sorry Grilled Cheesus.

The Patty Wagon, an LA food truck serving burgers

Food trucks are catching on in many cities around the country, and their growing popularity may provide a boost to the mobile payment industry as well.

Business Insider interviewed Ross Resnick, founder of food truck tracking site and iPhone app Roaming Hunger, and he sees food trucks as the perfect type of business for mobile payments.

“The mobile food scene is all about less infrastructure. Square [ed. note: a mobile credit card reader and application for the iPhone or iPad] can provide all these tools remotely for a vendor, all they need is this little apparatus. I have one myself, it’s pretty turnkey.

The biggest problem I’ve seen, anecdotally from all these trucks, people find [Square] so interesting that they hold up a line.  They want to know about what it is, they ask questions. But I haven’t heard of any pushback or anybody not trusting it with a credit card. It’s very meaningful for mobile vendors, it’s just amazing,” Resnick says.

Roaming Hunger actually makes most of its money through providing software to other companies and organizing events with food truck vendors. If they can become the defacto place to go to find out where food trucks will be and when they’ll arrive though, we could see a future for the company as a distributed OpenTable, where they handle some portion of payments for people who want to place advance orders or guarantee that a certain dish will be waiting for them when they make it to the truck. While it’s a slightly different variation on the mobile food trend, if the people cooking on sites like Gobble (and SuperMarmite in France) are paying attention it wouldn’t be surprising to see systems like Square powering more pop-up dining experiences.

In a bit of interesting food truck trivia, if you’re an aspiring chef you may find it more cost effective to start a food truck rather than a restaurant: Resnick estimates the startup cost of a food truck to be $50-150k, or about 20-30% of the cost of opening a restaurant. If that sounds good, then take your money and truck and head West; truck for truck LA and San Francisco are more into food trucks than New York.