PayPal expands its in-app food paying services to the U.K.

PayPal has switched the Pay At Table and Order Ahead features in its iOS app on in Europe, starting with the UK, as TechCrunch reports. The services relate to the food and restaurant business, and were first announced in the US last year. They do pretty much what you’d expect by their names: Pay At Table checks users in to a location and handles payment for their meal at a restaurant, while Order Ahead lets customers to peruse a restaurant’s menu and order their food remotely.

It’s still very early days for mobile payments, with the vast majority of consumers still not convinced that it really is a lot easier to pay for things using their phones instead of pulling out a payment card or even cash. But companies like PayPal continue to lay the groundwork with interesting implementations for how and where a mobile payment might come in handy — the idea being, it seems, that if you put out enough of these, some will be bound to find traction with one demographic or another and achieve what eBay-owned PayPal calls the “beginning of the end of the wallet.” The latest development is now coming online in some of PayPal’s international markets and specifically around the business of food. PayPal is today turning on two features in its iOS and Android mobile apps in the UK, to let users order food ahead of visiting the restaurant, and using the app to pay for their food when eating at a restaurant by way of a four-digit code.