Missing item claims: verify the order before the bag is sealed

A missing item claim is a refund a delivery platform grants to a customer who reports that something was not in the bag, and then charges to the restaurant. Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat each let a partner challenge that charge with photo evidence of the packed order, within their own deadline. Bronze checks the packed order against the real order before the bag is sealed: if an item is missing, the kitchen sees it in real time and fixes it. If the claim arrives anyway, the photo has already been taken.

What a missing item claim actually costs

The refund is the smallest part. A claim costs the food, the margin on an order you already paid to cook, the admin time to challenge it, and a rating that decides how often the platform shows you at all. The restaurants that measure it tend to find the claim itself is a fraction of the damage.

The published numbers in this market deserve scepticism. A figure of “30% of claims are fraudulent” circulates through the trade press with no traceable origin, and suppliers publish dispute success rates without saying what they were measured over. Ours is measured and we will say exactly how: 83% of the disputes Bronze submits are won, calculated over disputes resolved in the last twelve months, not over disputes opened, from Bronze’s own operational data across more than 450 restaurants and 5 million verified orders. More than €2.2M recovered to date.

Why photo evidence alone is not enough

Photo evidence answers a claim. It does not stop one. A recording of the packing station knows nothing about the order it is filming, so it cannot tell anyone that the second burger is missing while the bag is still open. Everything it offers arrives after the customer has already received the wrong order.

There are three common ways to produce evidence, and they fail differently. A fixed camera over the pass records continuously and asks nothing of the team, but the retrieval cost per dispute is brutal: the time of the order, footage not yet overwritten, and an angle where the open bag is visible rather than a packer’s back. A phone app that photographs each packed order produces exactly the right image, and depends on compliance holding up during the twenty minutes when it matters most; photo compliance decays under load, and the peak Saturdays it slips on are where the disputes come from.

The third way is to compare. A model reads what is on the packing station and cross-checks it against the order that arrived from your POS or from the aggregator, item by item, before the bag is sealed. It is the only approach that can flag a mismatch while the order is still in the kitchen, which is why the photo becomes a by-product rather than the point.

We wrote the long version of this comparison, with the limits of each approach stated honestly: refund evidence: fixed camera, phone app or computer vision.

How the check works at the packing station

The order arrives in Bronze from your POS or from the aggregator. Your team shows the assembled order to a tablet on the pass or to a phone in hand, and a computer vision model compares what it sees against the order line by line, marking what is missing, what is extra, what was swapped and whether the packaging matches the product. The median verification time is under one second.

Nothing else changes about the way the kitchen works. The only new gesture is showing the order to Bronze, and the analysis runs in parallel while the team carries on, so several orders can be verified at once at peak without blocking the screen. Where the packing station is fixed, the tablet sits on a stand at the pass. Where it is not, the same check runs from a phone.

Bronze is not a POS, an EPOS, a KDS or an integrator. It connects to the ones you already have and covers the moment none of them watches. Your POS knows what was ordered and your kitchen display knows what was cooked; neither checks what is inside the bag.

Disputing on each platform

Each platform runs its own window, its own portal and its own list of reasons charged to the partner. The evidence they weigh is the same: an image that identifies the order, shows the items, and was clearly captured before dispatch. Bronze files the dispute with that image attached, watermarked and stamped with its capture time, and more than half are handled without your team touching anything.

The rules are worth knowing in detail, because the deadlines are short and they differ:

• Deliveroo refund disputes: the seven partner-liable reasons and the 7 day Partner Hub window.
• Uber Eats order error adjustments: where the adjustment appears in your payout and the 30 day window to contest it.
• Verifying in the kitchen or claiming afterwards: which of the two recovers more money over a year.

Questions we get asked

See it on a real order

The fastest way to judge this is to watch the check run on an order like yours. A demo takes twenty minutes and we look at your own claim volume before anything is installed.

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