Transforming Restaurant Supply Chain with Choco: Innovations in Ordering and Reducing Food Waste

This episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast features Georgie Thomas, the general manager for Choco in the U.S., who discusses the transition from DoorDash to Choco and the innovations behind Choco's platform. Choco aims to streamline the restaurant supply chain process by facilitating easier ordering from restaurants to their food suppliers and reducing food waste by addressing inefficiencies in order placement and delivery. Thomas highlights Choco AI's role in converting manual orders into digital, enhancing supplier operations, and future aspirations for predictive ordering to further alleviate waste and inefficiencies. The podcast also touches on the importance of data in optimizing the restaurant supply chain and the foundational goals of Choco in tackling food waste and climate change. Listeners can learn about Choco's operational model, benefits for both suppliers and restaurants, and the company's focus on both sectors to drive the industry's future.

00:00 Welcome to the Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast
00:32 Introducing Georgie Thomas from Choco
00:47 Georgie's Journey: From DoorDash to Choco
02:01 The Evolution of Food Delivery and Technology
03:40 Choco: Revolutionizing Restaurant Supply Ordering
20:49 The Impact of AI and Future Innovations at Choco
31:47 Exploring Choco's Origins and Mission
33:12 Closing Thoughts and Contact Information

Transcript

0:02

This is the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Helping you run your restaurant better.

Jeremy: 0:14

Welcome back to the restaurant technology guys podcast. I appreciate everyone out there for joining us. as I say, each and every time, I know you guys have got lots of choices. And so thank you guys for joining us. today we are joined by somebody in a interesting space and I don't know that I've had. Too many people that have talked about what, what Georgie is going to talk about here today. But, before we jump into what you get to do for a living, Georgie, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, and then we can talk about what you get to do for a living.

Georgie Thomas: 0:42

Thanks so much and excited to be on the podcast and thanks for having me. yeah, my name is Georgie Thomas. I'm currently the general manager for Choco, in the U S I've been in this role for about two years now. I know we're going to go deeper into that. So I'll leave some of that for a little bit later, but prior to Choco was at DoorDash for about four years. Was there pre IPO to post IPO? I've worked at a host of different startups. many that didn't work out. So I've seen all sides of the coin before. And then prior to that, I was in finance, for a bit before starting on this journey. And but yeah, the last, several years have been in food technology, which has been exciting.

Jeremy: 1:17

That's always fun when you get to, to move industries. And I always love to hear people's background. Cause, I had a guy who was like, Oh, I was a painter. And then I became a. And now I'm in marketing. I'm like, how the heck do you, how the heck do you go through all of those different, different genres? that's cool that, at least the last few years, and I'm sure DoorDash pre IPO to post IPO was, was a wild ride, for you.

Georgie Thomas: 1:37

Incredibly wild ride. it was, it was incredibly lucky experience, honestly, to be there from when I started and really pre pandemic to post pandemic. And, we saw lots of different things and lots of different ways to grow very quickly. some that were external and then other internal things for the company, but a lot of that DoorDash experience has helped me to shape, how I operate today, which has been important.

Jeremy: 2:01

I do have to share my, my one DoorDash story that, not that I haven't used DoorDash a million times, but the very first time I heard about DoorDash, we have an eight year old is our youngest daughter and, and, it was, I don't know, she's eight and a half now, but right after my wife had, right after my wife had the baby, I'm busy working, we got three other kids and so somebody did a meal train and, the meal train, somebody gave us a DoorDash, gift card or gift certificate or whatever it was, digital gift card. Digital something and my wife one day I'd never even I work in the restaurant industry I didn't even know what DoorDash was at the time eight years ago funny enough and so she orders food and the Dasher at the time called her to say they're out of whatever it is that you ordered because it wasn't nearly as and they called her and they're Sitting in the drive thru at some KFC or something saying they're out of potato wedges. Do you want mashed potatoes or you want coleslaw? And it was just, it's just a funny story when I think back about where it was then and where it's at now. And so it's amazing how many things can change in an eight year period. from that perspective,

Georgie Thomas: 2:54

Totally. And what's interesting is I think that problem might still be an issue today, like real time inventory and making sure menus are up to date. a problem from door for DoorDash, a problem even in the Choco experience as well. And obviously we'll talk about how that's one level up from there. But just knowing where everything is at any given time is surprisingly hard to do.

Jeremy: 3:15

it absolutely is. and systems aren't the best, the best indicators of what's going on within the stores. we. My history. And for all of those longtime listeners, they know that we've got a point of sale and our point of sale sends to Uber Eats are, out of stocks from the store. So if they use this system to track their out of stocks, it sends it up above store to all of those third party DSPs to let them know. But so many don't do that today. enough about the DoorDash experience. Talk to me a little bit about what Choco does and how you came to, to move from DoorDash over to Choco and what real problems are you guys solving now? within that world. Cause I, I'm sure our listeners would love to hear.

Georgie Thomas: 3:51

Yeah, absolutely. yeah. talking about Choco first, right? So Choco is one level up in the supply chain from where DoorDash was enabling ordering from consumers to restaurants. What Choco does is enable, ordering from restaurants to their food suppliers. and so what's interesting about that is, in the U. S., the average restaurant might have anywhere from Three to five different suppliers that they, work with on a, on a pretty regular basis and the actual ordering process is super manual. So that might involve, calls for one place, maybe an online portal and in another place, texting another guy. Literally faxing some people. I didn't even know faxing really still existed, but it does. and so it could be a pretty, confusing and disorganized way to manage ordering, especially, from your background, you understand like in the kitchen, you have multiple people, Who are building an order together. You need to track that order. And if someone's just texting that order to their guy at the fish place, that's hard to really understand where that's going. that was one of the key insights that went into, building Choco in, in, in the first place. that it was a very inefficient process from restaurant to a food supplier. And then on the flip side of that. Food suppliers, because it was also inefficient for them to take in those orders, it, it became a pretty like costly and error prone process. meaning that they had to have a scores of labor of people to actually take these orders in process them themselves, make sure there weren't errors. A lot of times there were, they'd have to reach back out to the restaurant. Enter that back into their backend system and officially process that. and you can tell just by all those different steps that I laid out, there's a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. And so that's, really where Choco started was how do you make that process super easy and simple? And, it's important to know, like, where the founders came up with this idea. although it's rooted in the relationship between restaurant to food supplier, it's actually based off of this idea around climate change and the biggest thing impacting, Climate change today, or one of the biggest factors impacting it is food waste, and, people talk about food waste in a lot of different parts of the supply chain, but a lot of that really happens at the level from food supplier or distributor to restaurant, and it's because these ordering processes are super manual and hard and are error prone. So one of the biggest impacts that we're trying to make with this technology as well. Is to reduce food waste and have an impact on climate change, as well.

Jeremy: 6:25

So tell me, help me understand a little bit more, Georgie. Why is that, that, that so much of the waste comes from distributor to the restaurant. If I order a case of chicken breasts, I ordered a check case of chicken breasts. Like why is that adding any more to the supply chain or any more to the waste? metric. If I'm ordering a case of chicken breast or a box of tomatoes or whatever those things might be, help me understand why that inefficiency is creating so much waste.

Georgie Thomas: 6:50

Yeah, absolutely. So I think it goes back again to how manual it is to order, for most people today. So when you think about, someone who, might be leaving a voicemail and saying that they need that, case of tomatoes or, X amount of chicken breasts or something like that, but someone hears that incorrectly. On the voicemail and then process that incorrectly. That happens a lot of time, right? And you have different voices, you have different accents. There's a lot of different ways to interpret actually what's coming from a voicemail like that. a lot of times people will say, I need, tomatoes or I need this tomatoes. I need two cases of tomatoes. How many different kinds of tomatoes are there? and without knowing exactly what that person has ordered in the past and trying to search through the catalog of the supplier, Very easy to make a mistake there. so there's just a lot of ways without having, this true, like e commerce like experience that could be pretty easy for an error to actually occur. and, that, that can happen either again, from. The way the order is actually being placed or the way the order is being received at the food supplier and how that's being entered into the system.

Jeremy: 7:59

Okay. So I get that on the waste of, Ordering the wrong things. I guess there's also the supplier side of things, which again, having been in the restaurant space for a long time, they order a case of tomatoes that are supposed to be X amount of size, but they realized that they don't have that size tomato on the shelf and they've now got to substitute that tomato. talk to me a little bit about what it is that you see both from the data side and just Overall, you know because substitutions happen all the time Not only do things get missed because they're you know Which we can talk a little bit about the missed orders the over orders because I think that also happens But I think we'll get into each of those but talk to me even about the substitutions because I think substitutions that i'm looking for, one pound chicken breasts and I get You know, three quarter pound chicken breast or whatever that might be that happens. And because the pack size is different or the box is different, that causes strain within the supply chain. So talk to me a little bit about that.

Georgie Thomas: 8:55

Definitely. and again, I think this is where it neatly fits into what we're doing today at Choco. So one of the major things that we do, when we're working with different food suppliers is that, once, a restaurant places their order, through the app and we'll talk more about Choco AI, which is totally, a different way, but still works in a similar way. we have built integrations from our own technology into the E. R. P. S. Of food suppliers.

Jeremy: 9:20

Oh,

Georgie Thomas: 9:21

that's a two way system that we're able to pull data in from their own system. And then we're also obviously able to push orders over to them. So with some people were able to pull real time inventory and status and availability and say, On the app that this could be out of stock, et cetera. and in those cases, we can also suggest substitutions for the restaurant based off of what the supplier is saying, or based off of order history with the restaurant as well. So there are ways within the product for that to happen as well. but even when the, order gets placed from the restaurant, let's say for instance, we don't have that inventory for whatever reason. That still goes to the supplier that has a final step to confirm the order. And when they go in to confirm the order, they can then see Oh, wait a minute, they placed it for this case. Tomatoes are actually out of tomatoes. That's our step to then go and call the customer and say, Hey, we are actually out of this, we could do a substitution with this. And, what we've heard from suppliers is that they would actually prefer that in a lot of ways, because it initiates the conversation and make sure that they can have an order that actually. Gets placed and goes through. but those are the two different ways. we've seen substitutions play out.

Jeremy: 10:34

oh, that's funny that you bring that up because I'm not going to pick on DoorDash because you were there, but. I had a similar situation with Instacart. my son's off at college. And, he was, he lives in, he lives up in the north where it's cold. we live in Texas, but he was up and he's going to school in Minneapolis and it was cold and he was missing something. I don't remember what it was, but, so I went on Instacart and I wanted to go. Order him some, some product to get delivered to his dorm room, but they ended up substituting in the wrong product and it ended up being more expensive. And at the end of the day, like we left it in the hands of whoever that shopper was, which I think happens in these current situations is whoever's going and picking the orders just picks a different, instead of picking, these red tomatoes are picking the Roma tomatoes and they're just substituting Roma tomatoes and they're not going to, They're not going to ultimately get the product and now back to your, waste. If the restaurant is on top of it, oftentimes they're not going to receive that product in, and it's going to have to now go back on the truck, and all of that, that costs to both to the business and to the environment, getting that product that's now been out on the truck and going back into the warehouse and all of that is probably part of the problem. Is that a fair assessment?

Georgie Thomas: 11:42

Very fair assessment. And, and that can be. all the more true, I think, as you go into, like higher end fine dining establishments as well that are really into the, they're specifically calling out the ingredients on their menu, right? So it has to be that specific thing. And you, and we do have quite a few of those who use Choco, today, Michelin star, restaurants that, are really relying on this to be accurate and reliable. and if it's not, then, that's an issue for how they operate.

Jeremy: 12:09

Got you. So Georgie, let's start as a restaurateur. So before we get into the AI components of it and the show wouldn't be a show unless we talked about AI for a few minutes'cause everybody wants to talk about their new AI stuff. But before we jump into the ai, I'm a restaurateur. I. how, what does it look like when I'm using your guys product to go out and place an order? Is it pulling usage data and suggesting? Is it just giving me a pick list like a, product catalog that I can go order from? Talk to me a little bit about what the user experience is when I'm going to place an order on a Tuesday afternoon to be delivered on a Wednesday.

Georgie Thomas: 12:41

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a great question. And, again, the way we get introduced to, a lot of restaurants now who are using, the app and the platform are through their food suppliers. so we are signing agreements with those food suppliers. They say, Hey, here's this list of restaurants that we want you to go and on board and get to use the app. and when they do that, they're actually providing us with a lot of data On what those restaurants actually order. So we will look at the last three to six months of order history for a particular location, and then use that to build a specific order guide for that restaurant before we've ever even talked to them. Now, in addition to that order guide, what they also have access to is, the full catalog of the suppliers as well. And so for, the suppliers, they really see this as actually a huge benefit and a way to upsell. to, to the restaurants because a lot of times the restaurants are like, yeah, I'm ordering my four things from here and that's what I do. And wait a minute, I didn't even know that they carry all these different things that are available. And the, but those are the two different, ordering experiences. And then basically. Once we have those order guides set up and the catalog set up, we have someone from our onboarding team who will reach out to the restaurant and then walk them through how to place their first order. what we seen in general is that just like with anything, it takes a few orders for this to become a habit, right? And so our onboarding team is with them every step of the way until it feels like that habit. And then, once it becomes sticky and it is a habit, then they, They will be able to do that on their own. the one sort of difference with that's our normal flow from our premium supplier to our restaurant. Restaurants can actually also order from any supplier that they work with today, even if they're not an official partner on Choco and once, once they, are onboarded through the initial relationship, through this premium supplier, what they can do is they're like, Hey, okay. I came in through my fish guy. But I got my dairy guy, I got my produce guy, I got my paper guy. And so what they'll do is they'll send us invoices for a certain period of time. And we can use those invoices as well to create order guides for those different, suppliers. And although we won't have a, a premium partnership between ourselves and those suppliers, we can still send orders on behalf of the restaurant. And for the restaurant, that's really where it becomes like a pretty big, time saving where they can do all of their ordering in one place.

Jeremy: 15:04

Yeah. And, I can imagine that, that, and even for the suppliers, if they know that they're going to consistently get things in the same way, it's going to end up being good, Talk to me about, talk to me about the flip side of that, which is as a supplier, they're getting consistent orders, but if I'm us foods and I know that you're now putting through Choco Cisco in front of this consumer, Cisco and us foods being, The two largest broad liners in the U S how do you combat that? Because, oftentimes, and I, and we've had a couple of people on the show in the past who have done the analysis of their statements and figured out that if they would have bought this from us foods, and we'll probably talk about that later, but it's like us foods was cheaper on this item at this day and, Cisco might've been cheaper on that same item. Three days later, how do and again, that's one of the arguments even about third party delivery service providers is I go on there and now I'm going to convert somebody that was going to order from, Wendy's. They're going to change them to order from McDonald's because McDonald's was paying DoorDash more money to send the order to McDonald's, and similar, how as a supplier, would I have some level of understanding that, that I'm not going to lose market share because of what you guys are doing with them?

Georgie Thomas: 16:10

Yeah. And so great question. We get this question all the time, as you might imagine. So I think, one important key point. We are not a marketplace, so you can not go on as a restaurant and then try to find a new supplier you've never worked with it, even if it was, so take the example you were just saying, let's say you are ordering from us foods and then you're like, Oh, you know what? I'm interested in what Cisco might have to offer. If you don't have a customer number with Cisco, we won't. Enable any ordering between the restaurant and a new supplier. So it really is about existing relationships, for restaurants and their suppliers. And then the other piece is that again, because it's not a marketplace and it really is about. The ease of ordering to their existing people. What we do is, even as you are like building your orders, you always build them one by one or supplier by supplier. So there's not like one joint unified cart that then you check out with. and that's really to, again, prevent some of this same sort of like price comparison shopping. It is much more about, making sure for the people you work with that this is an easy way to, to order.

Jeremy: 17:20

okay Yeah And I could see if I was ordering from Wasserstrom and I'm ordering from Cisco and they both have POS printer paper that they're both on They're available list of items But if you guys don't allow them to compare that you got to do a lot of work to go do that quite frankly without Choco, you could have done it anyway by going on to the order guide from Cisco's website regardless.

Georgie Thomas: 17:39

Exactly.

Jeremy: 17:40

That

Georgie Thomas: 17:40

Yeah, that's exactly that. We want to keep the same level of friction, frankly, as if you're doing it manually.

Jeremy: 17:47

So talk to me about contract pricing. Cause that's one of the other big things that, that I know people struggle with this contract pricing, larger organizations, they work in contract pricing, chicken breasts or X amount, for their entire chain, they're, they're running a chain of 40 restaurants and they've gone to us foods and said, we're going to buy this amount of chicken and you're going to sell it to me for all 40 of my stores for this, that kind of price. And I know. That sometimes there's some margin increase for the suppliers in that regard, because they may not keep that contract pricing and sometimes it's less and sometimes it's more, but regardless, it's a problem and reconciling that as always a challenge. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys can help solve that if you guys even do.

Georgie Thomas: 18:23

Yeah. pricing is a very interesting issue because, again, if you're thinking about it more from the supplier perspective, it's something that they're pretty protective over again for these reasons we're talking about. And, not a race to the bottom and not enabling a lot of price comparison, et cetera. what we enable for our premium suppliers is basically we give as much price transparency as they want to have. And that could mean you have specific pricing down to an individual unit. if that's how it's negotiated and that's, and we just obviously just need that price list and who what's applicable to who, or there's some cases where suppliers actually don't show pricing, because they choose to basically keep price off the app and they share that separately. and then we don't enable pricing. So it's basically somewhere within that spectrum, for what the supplier wants,

Jeremy: 19:13

okay. Yeah, and very true story. Years ago, I was working with In N Out, and they actually don't share what they buy tomatoes for because they never want the quality of the product to change, or at least they didn't back then. They wanted you to slice the tomatoes the same way every time, whether tomatoes were really expensive this week or really cheap this week. Cheap this week. They wanted the same product to be the same product and to meet the brand standards, regardless of what the food cost was that day. Whereas other brands I've seen them put less salt on fries when salt's more expensive or whatever, you know, last piece on this side, on the restaurant side, how do I reconcile the orders that come in? So I know that I placed this order. It's easily gotten there. Do you guys do anything for the reception of that order? Is it the same way that you always do? The truck shows up to the back and you have an invoice and you just check it off. Or do you guys do anything to reconcile what the invoice did with, with what they had ordered?

Georgie Thomas: 20:00

Yeah, it's a great question. So a couple of different things there. Number one, when that supplier goes in and they confirm the order, because you remember that's like the final step there, there is an email confirmation that, the restaurants will get. So then you'll see, what was, or if they have to take something out, then you'll see what's taken out, et cetera. so that's the first step. And then the second step is we have something called delivery check. And basically as the restaurants are receiving the goods that they have ordered, they can go through item by item and say, this was good. This was good. Actually, this was missing or this was damaged. And then they can complete that check and send that back to their supplier. So it starts basically the, do I get a credit? Is there a second run sort of conversation, but that all can be captured within the app itself.

Jeremy: 20:44

Okay. Those are all great questions. And I'm sure you get asked every day, on how, how these things go. AI, how is AI influencing what it is that you guys do? Cause, again, like I said, when you brought it up earlier, it wouldn't be a restaurant technology guy show if we didn't bring up AI in some way, shape or form. And it feels like everybody's got, and it's fantastic with what it's helping people do. And I do want to share a previous episode, had a guy that's doing AI for inventory counting. He's using computer vision, not even, AI, he's using computer vision where you can just take your iPhone and it'll look at the shelf and say, you should order this. And then he doesn't give the ability to order it. That's where you guys would come in, but at least says you should order six cases of tomatoes and three cases of, cause you got a par level in the system and then it, it doesn't, doesn't actually order it to the broad liner to whoever your supplier is for that product. But how was AI influencing what you guys are doing?

Georgie Thomas: 21:32

yeah, first of all, I got to talk to that guy. It sounds, that sounds like an interesting opportunity for us to.

Jeremy: 21:36

is fricking awesome. I was, he showed it to me and I got on his website. I'll share it with you offline and his episode should be releasing in the next couple of weeks. So it'll come out a couple of weeks before, before, your guys's episode comes out. But, but I'd love to, I'd love to share that with you offline, but, how has AI really influenced, what it is that you guys are doing?

Georgie Thomas: 21:51

Yeah. and obviously, what's so cool about AI is that there's such broad use cases for how AI can be applied, right? It can truly accelerate many different parts of the business and, whether that's internal or external, but I'll start with where we see the biggest use case today. And then I can talk about some of the stuff we're building on for the future as well. The biggest use case that we see today is in, on the supplier side, the ability of a supplier. To, process orders that are what we call manual or non digital, and turn them into a digital order. so what I mean by that is, look, when we go through our normal onboardings, and we have people go through the app, people who like the app, they really love the app and it turns into a habit, but in general, we get to, 75, 80 percent of a customer base, in terms of converting them to that. And the main reason for that is. You're just always going to get a certain number of people are like, I'm not downloading another app and I'm not changing my process. the way I order is the way I order. And, we would be like, what do we do with this remnant piece of, of ordering they're still coming through in these manual ways. Cause if you're processing Thousands of orders a week, and it's still 20 percent 30 percent that are coming through in a manual way, you're employing a lot of people to actually go and do that. And what our AI technology does is it's able to take anything that comes through email, voicemail, SMS, call, and really turn that into, a digital order. That then also gets integrated back into the ERP. So what's cool about that is for that 25 or 30 percent who are like, no way. Now not only downloading an app, we don't have to get them to download it. Now we don't actually have to change anyone's behavior. We can get that all still processed in the same way. and it's still very similar in that, once that information comes in, Choco AI basically will read all the data from that and show you what the, whatever the input was, and then compare it to an output. And so there's still one final check for, a reviewer, who can then say, this looks good. I'm ready to accept the order and it gets sent to the ERP. so again, it's not, going down to zero. Seconds to process an order. But for one of the, like a produce supplier, we launched in New York. they had some orders. Some of these orders were 65 pages long,

Jeremy: 24:14

Oh, wow.

Georgie Thomas: 24:15

that they have to go through. huge orders. And it would take them 13, 14 minutes for one order to process it. And they can do it in 10 seconds now. So it's just a, it's a massive time savings. And then obviously the error reduction, that, that comes along with that. So that's a huge. piece that we've seen and has really accelerated the business over the last few months because it gets our ability to, penetrate a supplier's customer base to a hundred percent pretty quickly.

Jeremy: 24:44

Yeah, on the flip side, not even on the flip side, I guess in addition to that, have you considered any of the predictive stuff for both the supplier and the restaurant side? every Tuesday you order two cases of chicken breasts. should I put it in your cart already? No different than, Every time I freaking log on to Amazon, it's Hey, your batteries are dying on your blink cameras. You should probably buy some new ones. have you guys done that at the restaurant side? And then really at the supply chain side, how do I make sure that I've got everything that they need? These guys went to order it and now it doesn't have it. Have you guys tried to plan with the predictive side on both sides?

Georgie Thomas: 25:13

Yeah, on both sides, we have, and I'd say we're probably, we're a little bit earlier, I'd say on the restaurant side from like some of the data that we need to really build out the predictive part, but part of what you can do on the restaurant side, at least through the app is, You can also, keep, keep track of inventory, not through computer, but it is, it's a little bit more manual shelf to sheep process, but once, once you have that, and then you're keeping that up to date versus pars, et cetera, exactly what you're talking about, it's pretty easy for us to then go into, when an order should be placed and potentially even enabling auto ordering. So people don't really have to worry about it as much. on, and then on the other side of that, on the supplier side, right? there is the ability to say Hey, we can look at this massive amount of pretty large aggregate data and look at some market trends to say. These specific products for this geographic area are getting ordered a lot, or we know from seasonal data that there should be a spike in this kind of product. And, so that should be something that you want to be aware of as a produce person or as a fish person or something like that. we are definitely looking on either side there.

Jeremy: 26:21

that's, that is, that's quite frankly, it's really interesting and, it'll be interesting because data at the end of the day is going to end up winning a lot of the time. So it'll be interesting to see how much data you guys are able, at its core, yes, yes. DoorDash back to your previous life is a, is a, means to capture data at the end of the day, really, Facebook is a data company. all, everybody's really a data company. So I think it's really interesting. It'll be interesting to see what else also, what are the things you guys can glean from it? Korean food's really taken off in a certain region or Indian food's really huge in a certain place or any of those kinds of things. Cause they're ordering some of those kind of products that you weren't getting in certain areas. So it'll be interesting to see what that, what that looks like for you guys.

Georgie Thomas: 26:57

Totally. Totally. Yeah. it's super interesting already. And again, as we continue to grow, it just gets more interesting, which is cool.

Jeremy: 27:04

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Georgie Thomas: 28:30

Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, I think for us, we are focused on, hopefully this isn't a cop out answer, but both sides of the equation and both stakeholders. I think both are really important for how we grow the long term value of the company. I think there are different ways for us to grow. Get to that long term vision though. And I think, right now what we're seeing is the fastest way for us to get our technology out there is through the supplier side and really through Choco AI, technology. so we're going pretty quick to market here and we're seeing very fast adoption from a lot of folks in different areas, in that, and I think that will help us for the short to medium term as we develop that product out more and, And think about more ways that it can impact what a supplier is doing. But, ultimately, the company exists because the ecosystem grows as we get more and more restaurants who also use us as well. And, again, for that initial part we talked about, before. Restaurants can start with one relationship from the supplier they start with, but then they can branch out to three or four more. And so you see this flywheel effect happen pretty quickly. and that's what really grows things at scale. I think we want to be able to support both stakeholder groups in the future. But we have choco AI for suppliers in the near term.

Jeremy: 29:53

and I think at the end of the day, the restaurants probably are okay with their methods today, but the suppliers are not. So they're going to gravitate to it more because they recognize the efficiency. They're dealing with, thousands of partners, whereas the restaurant might only have their own. 30 items that they order from the supplier. Whereas the supplier has thousands because they're servicing so many different restaurants. So for them, the there's going to be a lot more efficiency gains, so they can give it away essentially and cover the cost through their efficiency gains. And if the restaurant benefits too, now it just does create that flywheel effect like you were talking about.

Georgie Thomas: 30:25

Totally. And, again, what we can find, at least for right now, is that, we have single points of contact at the suppliers that help to push us out, which makes the adoption a little bit easier when we're going through that angle.

Jeremy: 30:39

so how do people get in touch? How do people learn more? Do they just need to call their us food reps and say, why don't I have this already if they're not already using you guys as and I'm saying us foods, I don't even know if you guys are integrated with them, but

Georgie Thomas: 30:49

yeah.

Jeremy: 30:49

if people want to engage with your platform, where would you suggest they go and how do you, how would you suggest they learn more about how to already have what you guys have been doing for a while?

Georgie Thomas: 30:57

absolutely. choco. com. if you're a restaurant, it's just choco. com backslash restaurants. there's a get started or get in touch button that you can click and then fill out a little, information. You'll get contacted within 24 hours. And then on the food supplier side, it's choco. com backslash suppliers. Same sort of button there, form to fill out and then we'll get back to in 24 hours. And, yeah, I think the nice part about the way we operate, I have a team of folks that are based in the U S although we are a European company based out of Berlin, we have a team of folks that are, mainly in Chicago, but also, remote throughout the U S and we are there for either restaurants or food suppliers, every step of the way to, to get, set up and going. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy: 31:41

was going to ask, but I don't want to sound foolish. Cause you had said I run the U S division and I was like, I didn't realize you guys were international. I had read the, the CV, but I didn't necessarily read, I didn't necessarily go digging on the European side, Talk to me before, you talked about your founders and I'd love to wrap up with this. Your founders, really were trying to solve. this problem of food waste, do you have the story of where that even came from? Where they just get frustrated watching so much stuff get thrown away or where did that come from?

Georgie Thomas: 32:06

Yeah. so our founders, worked at rocket internet in Germany. a pretty famous accelerator incubator, and it worked on a lot of different tech businesses, previously, and then, got that urge or that itch to, to start their own thing. And what was interesting is, they just stopped and instead of just launching something, they researched for a while. and the main thing that they were trying to research was what are some of the biggest, hardest problems to go out and solve today? And food waste is pretty high up there in terms of how hard it is to solve and then how big an impact it is. And so that's where like the beginning part came from. And then it can, then with that realization, it's like, all right, if you have food waste, how do you impact food waste in a meaningful way? And that really evolved into what Choco is today. Yes.

Jeremy: 32:53

And, funny enough, they, everybody that gets into restaurants thinks it's easy. Oh, it's going to be so simple. And it's you know what? There's a lot of complexities as you learn in your DoorDash days. And I'm certain he learned, you learn here at Choco that there's a lot of complexities that happen. They're miniature manufacturing. Plants all over the country and there's hundreds, thousands of them in every city. how do people get in touch with you? and, I guess just you directly before we, before we wrap up, if, if they wanted to contact you and ask you any follow up questions, Georgie,

Georgie Thomas: 33:20

Yeah, absolutely. So they could just email me directly. my email is just Georgie, G E O R G I E dot Thomas at Choco, C H O C O dot com.

Jeremy: 33:30

Awesome. thank you very much for educating our listeners. as I said on the onset listeners, I know you guys got lots of choices, so we appreciate you guys spending time with us each and every day. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you should. Whether that be on YouTube or on your favorite podcast player, do Also, the newsletter goes out once a month on the first of the month, gives you a summary of everything that happened. Georgie, thank you so much. And to our listeners, make it a great day.

33:53

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