Transgourmet and VR Payment launch tgPAY, a card acceptance package sold through a foodservice wholesaler

Transgourmet, the German full-line and cash-and-carry wholesaler for gastronomy, hotels and institutional catering, and VR Payment, the acquirer of the German cooperative banking group (DZ BANK), have launched a jointly branded card acceptance offer called tgPAY. It takes standard card payments plus Apple Pay and Google Pay through the existing card acceptance rails rather than a separate wallet integration, and bundles digital receipt management, free reporting, a tipping function and integration with existing POS systems.

Transgourmet sells it as part of its food@service digital toolkit and publishes a savings calculator that models an individual operator's payment mix. Both partners describe the terms as 'attractive and transparent', particularly for credit card payments; no rates, merchant counts or rollout dates were disclosed. Stefanie Boeck (National Director Concept and Digital, Transgourmet) and Carlos Gómez-Sáez (CEO, VR Payment) were quoted on the launch.

The interesting part is the distribution channel, not the product. German hospitality acceptance is normally sold by an acquirer's own sales force or through a bank branch; here a wholesaler with an existing purchasing relationship to tens of thousands of restaurants, hotels and canteens becomes the channel, and VR Payment gets in front of a vertical it would otherwise have to win one contract at a time.

That is the same wedge SumUp, Payone and the terminal resellers compete for in German gastronomy, and it arrives with a supplier's pricing power behind it. It also puts a second cooperative-group acceptance route next to the Volksbanken branch channel VR Payment already sells through.

Whether the published conditions ever become actual rates a restaurant can compare, how many Transgourmet customers take it, and whether competing wholesalers (Metro, Chefs Culinar) answer with their own acceptance bundles.

• gastronomie-report.de
• IT Finanzmagazin, 7 Sep 2026