Australian developers are using QR codes to help event attendees skip long lines for beer or snacks at music festivals or sporting games.

The local startup, ExpressQ, enables event attendees to pre-order and pre-pay for their food, drinks, or merchandise for easy collection at an allocated time.

Event organizers can set up a food and drink menu or item list prior to the occasion, which consumers log onto through a ExpressQ app on their smartphones.

When customers reserve the items they want and pay for them, they receive a QR code unique to them, to make sure somebody else doesn’t redeem their goodies.

This QR code can then either be printed off or simply kept on the smartphone to show to vendors when it’s time to pick up goods.

Businesses can set up a separate sales point for ExpressQ customers, meaning those in the regular queue benefit from reduced wait time too.

Inside Retail understands the app will be launched in the next month at several large-scale music festivals and sporting venues.

The app is not unique to the world, with markets as far away as Estonia having similar apps, such as Qminder, which allocates numbers to customers.

In Australia, there’s a similar app for cafes called Beat The Q, which launched last year in Sydney and allows its users to search for nearby participating cafes.

Brisbane-based startup, Txt 4 Coffee, also offers a similar format, however, neither it or Beat The Q uses QR codes.