Revolutionizing Restaurant Inventory Management with WISK.ai

In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guides podcast, hosts Jeremy Julian and Angelo Esposito, Founder and CEO of WISK, delve into the innovative solutions WISK offers for inventory management in the restaurant industry. They discuss the challenges of traditional inventory methods, the development of WISK's technology combining AI and user-friendly features, and the significant impact these solutions can have on managing prime costs in bars and restaurants. The conversation also touches on AI's role in the restaurant technology arena, offering insights into how modern tools can streamline operations and improve accuracy. Listeners are encouraged to explore WISK's platform and the potential benefits it can bring to their inventory processes.

00:00 Wisk

01:21 Introduction and Guest Welcome

01:30 Understanding Prime Costs in Restaurants

01:58 Introducing WISK.ai: Streamlining Restaurant Operations

02:50 Challenges in Restaurant Inventory Management

04:05 The Origin Story of WISK.ai

06:47 Digitizing Old School Processes

08:31 The Evolution of WISK.ai

12:08 Current Inventory Management Practices

14:45 Common Mistakes in Inventory Management

17:38 Receiving Product Correctly

18:59 Understanding the Inventory Formula

19:30 Simplifying Inventory and Purchasing

20:36 Handling Item Variations

22:24 The Importance of Demos

27:27 AI in Inventory Management

32:36 Whisk's Full Capabilities

33:32 How to Get in Touch and Learn More

Transcript

0:02

This is the Restaurant Technology Guides podcast, helping you run your restaurant better.

Jeremy Julian: 0:15

In today's episode, Angelo and I talk a bunch about really the vision behind Whisk and why it was created, some of the pain that he saw some of his friends suffering through as it relates to inventory in bars and restaurants over the years. Angelo and I have known each other online for quite some time, but this is the first time he and I got a chance to sit down and talk. And my goodness, he's got so much to offer. I would encourage all of you to check out what he and the team built at Whisk, how it's really changing the game of inventory management and how you are gonna do bar inventory, how you're gonna do restaurant food service inventory, and how you're going to take one of your prime costs and ensure that you are staying above board with it and that you are continuing to make money. In the right ways. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julian. I am the Chief Revenue Officer for CBS North Star. We sell the North Star point of sale product for multi-units. Please check us out@cbsnorthstar.com and now onto the episode. welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us, as I say each and every time. I know you guys got lots of choices, so thank you guys for joining us today. one of the biggest topics I talk to restaurateurs about is their prime costs. And, our guest today is gonna share with you some of the good and the bad and the ugly of, restaurants and prime costs and why they've hurt themselves and done some really cool things with, with some software that you built. But Angela, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience. let's talk a little bit about who you are first before we jump into kind of what you guys have been doing.

Angelo Esposito: 1:50

Awesome. So first of all, thanks for having me on. it's always fun, to be on the receiving side of the, of a podcast, so I appreciate that. yeah, so listen, I'm the founder and the CEO at Whisk Ai Wisk is WS K do ai. And what we do is we really just. Try to give restaurateurs their time back by streamlining a lot of the. Back of house operations. So what that looks like is think about things that restaurants are doing already, but how do we make it a lot easier? So think about inventory, think about ordering to their suppliers, maybe entering their invoices, maybe costing out their recipes, all that kind of stuff. the boring but super important stuff. The things that restaurants didn't know they were gonna do, and they're like, let's just start a restaurant. And they're like, this sucks. we try to help with all that and alleviate as much of that, stress off their plate.

Jeremy Julian: 2:37

I love that. And as I said in the intro, kind of prime costs are one of the biggest things that people struggle to figure out how to keep their arms around. Can you and I talked pre, pre hitting the record button, gimme the origin story, like where did it all come from? Because. Does every anybody really need another inventory package? and I'm teasing about it, but at the same time, does anybody really need another inventory package? There's hundreds of'em out there. They're, going back to REM max and the DOS days. I've been around long enough to remember remix from dos. in general, it's one of the hardest things, as you said, that most restaurants don't realize that they have to do. But if they don't do it, it really has an opportunity to hurt them from a business perspective.

Angelo Esposito: 3:14

look it, it's one of those things that in every other industry it's like super obvious, but in the hospitality industry it's ah, it's okay. It's the way it is. it's fine. And I always give the analogy of, take, I know a Best Buy style store. Like you're selling computers, right? It's not that hard. It's like you're looking at. To make it simple, you have, I don't know, let's just call it an iPhone. iPhone 15. Great. All the same color. Cool. So you got 10 of those. the end of the night, you check your inventory. You got eight. Oh, so we are missing two. Let me check my sales. Oh, we sold two. Perfect. Makes sense. But in the restaurant and bar world, the reason it's so hard and such a pain is because you're not just dealing with one-to-one, right? iPhone equals iPhone, you're dealing with hamburger equals some beef and a bun and a this and the sauce. And the sauce was made in a pre-match. And so where a cocktail, it could be many different things. So it's, you're buying raw items and then you're building a finished product. So because it's very hard to track, All this to say the origin story of Whisk, really when we started, we now do food and beverage fully, but when we started it was really focused on beverage. And I always joke around like sometimes with some of my teammates whisk got me good. I started off with a project and here I am 10 years later. But the project at the time was I wonder if I could help my friends in the industry with their bar inventory.'cause I realized they were doing it often, like either weekly, some of them even more often. But at the very. minimum weekly. It was taking hours upon hours and they were using pen and paper Excel. And so I started going around and say, okay, maybe it's just this nightclub friend. Let me talk to this high end restaurant. It's no, he's doing it like that. Okay, let me talk to this hotel for sure. A hotel's gotta have a system. It's no, they're also doing Excel. And what I realized, at least at that time, 10 years ago, it wasn't a budget thing. They all, a lot of these restaurants were nice. They were busy. They had the budget. It was, I think the tech was not. Easy enough to use back then that a lot of people tritech and then they're like, forget it, and went back to pen and paper or spreadsheets. So when I started, it is funny, but I started as a project to say, I wonder if I can make something. That's better than pen and paper and Excel that people would use. And so that was the mission, super hyperfocused. It was just inventory and just bar inventory. So it was very much hyperfocused on here's a bottle. What's the best way to figure out what's inside of this?'cause most people just look at it and say, ah, it's about a 0.3, it's about a 0.5. The old tenting method. And that was it. That's where it started. And then it evolved and we can get into it, but at the core of it, that was why, how Whisk was born.

Jeremy Julian: 5:39

It's so funny'cause I try and remind people that are not restaurant people and any of our longtime listeners know that I'm going on close to 30 years working in restaurants. It's really a manufacturing facility inside of a restaurant. It's manufacturing, it's a, the car manufacturer's got seats and steering wheel and tires and rims and all of that kinda stuff. Very similar to the restaurant, but people don't think of it that way because to your point, it's a bottle of tequila, it's some orange juice. It's all of these different components that will make up that drink and they have to manufacture them on the fly, which makes it really challenging because the other thing that most people don't realize that aren't in the restaurant industry is that. Your prime costs. Ultimately moving them one single point on a restaurant, doing a million dollars in sales is a whole lot of money that's going to your bottom line and not managing those things is huge. Talk to me a little real quick, Angela. where did the bar stuff come from? Was it just'cause of your friend group? Is that, you said that it, was it because you, you really like high-end tequila and you were, you knew if I can help these guys out, they'll give

Angelo Esposito: 6:37

give some.

Jeremy Julian: 6:38

service on Saturday

Angelo Esposito: 6:39

not, no. Yeah. Funny enough, IW Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question. funny enough, I was actually working on a, another startup, before this. and it was actually at the time, this is, I don't know, maybe 2012, but at that time, or maybe 2013, at that time, it was, a guest list app. and again, now it sounds like, nah, this is so easy to do, but back then it was somewhat novel. It was basically just digitizing so you could see the theme. I'm just trying to digitize old school processes or processes. so I, the original app I was working on was basically, a digital guest list. So the idea was like a lot of places have a guest list, like an open table, but more for the night lifestyle places, just to make it easier to track who's coming. If you've got a bunch of different promoters, they could update it on their phone. Everything's synced. You're building a CRM, you could. Remarket to people.'cause I found even the coolest places in the coolest cities just had clipboard with a pen and paper. And it's yeah, throw it out at the end of the night. I'm like, that's crazy. They're not keeping any of the data. So I was working on that and that's when I started seeing this kind of trend. like I was getting close to all these different bars and working with them or whatever. And I'd see people at the end of the night and the night, I'll never forget that. It really hit me was I saw someone doing it. They were going one by one, eyeballing. He had a pen and paper with his clipboard. It was like stains all over the paper.'cause the bars wet and whatever. And I'm like, what are you doing? Huh? I'm doing the inventory. How often do you do this? And in that case it was every night.'cause it was more of a nightclub. how long does it take you? Three hours? I'm like, you do three hours every night. So I'm like, okay, it's gotta be important. And that's when it started. And then I started talking to other friends in the industry, Fine dining, restaurant, hotel. Lemme talk to casual dining. And I saw this recurring trend that it's man, yes there's some systems that exist, but nah, it's just easier. I'll go back to pen and paper. And so that was a challenge. Can we make this as easy as pen and paper, but better? And it's hard. It's hard'cause pen and paper is free form anything. I see something, I just write it. So it was a, I know it sounds silly, but it was a hard challenge. Like how do I make this easier to adopt than pen and paper?

Jeremy Julian: 8:31

Yeah. So talk me through that process because I think, 10 years ago, technology isn't even where it is today. The iPhone had just come out, like even having a phone in your pocket that can do these things. I remember early days'cause again, I remember, working on inventory packages where it would sync offline because you'd go into the walk-in or you'd go to the dry storage. But wifi 10 years ago sucked. the battery life on these

Angelo Esposito: 8:52

yeah. That too. Yeah.

Jeremy Julian: 8:53

So it was like, it was hard. again, to your point, I think it has to get done because that one or two points of margin make a huge difference. And technology is constantly evolving. And today it's significantly easier than it was 10 years ago. But even in that, it was hard. So talk me through why did you think that you could solve this with the technology that existed 10 years ago? Because, it's continued to evolve and I'm sure the product that you would almost be embarrassed about from 10 years ago now you're like, oh, I should have thought it, but thought about it this

Angelo Esposito: 9:23

yeah, no, a hundred percent. look, first off, to your point about the percentage points I think people sometimes don't realize, so just to emphasize like one point off a million, in revenue is 10 K and on average Ws. we typically can drop at three to 5%. We have cases where it's been six, seven, 8%, but realistic it's three to 5%. improvements in, in cost of goods. And, that's on a million in sales. A lot of our clients are doing two to 3, 4, 5, 6. So it's it's a lot of money. And sometimes what people don't realize is when you save, call it 25,000 or 50,000 in your bottom line, what's really powerful is you have to give or take on the type of restaurant, but multiply it roughly, let's say by four or five. To, to

Jeremy Julian: 9:59

In top point

Angelo Esposito: 10:00

exactly. To reach

Jeremy Julian: 10:01

cost savings.

Angelo Esposito: 10:02

And that's what people, yes. People forget that They're like, oh.

Jeremy Julian: 10:06

you saved, it's$4 less in revenue that you have to

Angelo Esposito: 10:08

exactly. that's the one gap in that. I just wanna emphasize, because this could be great for your audience potentially, but sometimes people forget that they're, okay, let's just work on this marketing campaign and we'll do this in this and get an X amount of guess. And hopefully that'll bring in a hundred thousand. But cool, a hundred thousand sales maybe is, let's say 25,000 in bottom line. So just not to confuse the two. But anyways, back to the core question. I think it was a bit of naivety. I was a bit naive. I was like, oh, I wonder if I could do this. I, if I knew so much about tech, I would've maybe been more scared and been like, oh, this is impossible and there's giants out there, and how can I do this? I was just like naive and I think because I was doing it more as like a project I. It made it palatable. I was like, okay, I wonder if you know the iPhone's out now. It was like the, one of the earlier ones, I think it was even maybe an iPod touch, and I was like, all right, I wonder if we could do this. And the concept was simple. I was like, I wonder with the phone, if we could point the camera, scan the barcode, if it could detect the image, okay, pose it up and then we can wait with a Bluetooth scale. And so that, that's where we started. And. The first while we hit was like, I guess we gotta build a database. So I started going to some of my friends' restaurants and bars and weighing the most common bottles. So I'd be like, Hey, can I come buy a closing or opening? And I'd weigh empty bottles, I'd weigh full bottles and I'd build the, start building the database. So think of all the typical, or popular, vodkas, gins, whiskeys, your typical. So at least I have a starting point. and that's how it started. It was like building this database. And for me, what got me really excited is once I saw. the first few restaurants, like with a very shitty basic app, but using it and enjoying it and saying oh wow, this is pretty good. I knew I was onto something. I knew it was a long way to go.'cause the app was very basic, but just that initial thought of pointed to the bottle. It knows it's a seven 50 ml, I don't know, CAS Amigos, Blanco. And then being able to place on the scale and be like, oh, there's 4.2 ounces left. Just that was magic. What I didn't realize back then was that's 5% of it, and then once you open the door, it's like, what about my ordering and my invoicing and my point of sale and my recipe? And I was like, that's when it went from my little project to okay, we gotta turn this into a real thing,

Jeremy Julian: 12:08

I love that. walk us through what, when you walk into a client that doesn't have whisk, doesn't have whisk, or quite frankly doesn't have anything, you're now, 2025, you walk into a bar nightclub. What is the most typical thing that you see? Is it the still the pen and paper and then somebody goes back to the office and puts in a D Excel and hopes that it's right and maybe pulls point of sale? Is that kind of the normal, because I want you to talk to our listeners out there that probably are sitting in their shoes going. crap, that's me and I wanna see a future that's beyond where I'm at

Angelo Esposito: 12:36

Yeah, that's totally fair. Listen, the truth is, I would say, generally speaking, most industries still very much call it Excel or spreadsheet. So pen and paper and maybe spreadsheet generally. So that's still our biggest competitor, quote unquote. Like even some of our direct competitors, that's 10, 20% of the time. Oh, this person comes up there. Why you better, why you different? Ah, it depends on your case. Okay, cool. Fine. But 80% of the time they're using, Pen and paper spreadsheets. I've seen a shift post, C-O-I-D-I think because everyone was locked down and had time and figuring his stuff out and realizing the value of managing their cost of goods really, There's a little more, I would say like education around it. Like even I feel it within the company, there's less like, why should I do inventory? It's not that talk track isn't there anymore. so definitely people are more aware and shopping for it. So that percentage I would say has gone up of people who are like very much aware. but the one thing I would say is we try to focus on people who are doing something. So what I mean by that, if they're doing pen and paper in Excel, that's fine.'cause the intention's there, it's not ideal. It probably takes long, it's probably inaccurate, but. Those type of restaurants always end up loving whisk, or the majority. There's always, you can't please that one. But generally end up loving Whisk. Where we've had issues and we've learned this, the hard way is if someone's doing nothing. Because if you're doing nothing, yeah, I don't do inventory, I don't need it now number one, I gotta educate you, train you, whatever. But now your staff also resents risk'cause they were doing nothing. Now they're doing something, so there's no appreciation. I was spending zero minutes on this thing, now I'm spending an hour. Whereas the minute they're, ah, whisk guys, I hate it. But if they were doing something, there's usually a big appreciation.'cause man, I was spending six hours a week, now I'm spending two hours or two and a half hours a week. So they're happy. So I would say generally we try to focus on people who are doing something. But to, to your point, it's still very much manual. and that looks like paper and spreadsheets. Typical restaurant, I would say is probably going around with a piece of paper, then entering into a spreadsheet and then sending it to the, head office or to the bosses or whatever, with little to no understanding of why they're doing it. They're just, oh yeah, I count it, sent it, I'm done. which I think is also a gap. The more you can empower your staff on why they're doing it and what it means, I think generally the better you can do as a restaurant.

Jeremy Julian: 14:45

and the other piece that I would love for you to, dig into a little bit deeper on is you talked about getting, so you've got the actuals, you got what's still left in the bottles. You talked about how you guys are tracking those bottles. But a lot of times, there, there's a lot of different ways or reasons why inventory might be. Off. You've got over pours, you've got under pours, you've got theft. There's a lot of different ways, and I think a lot of times, at least what I've seen when people are using Excel. They look at it and go, oh yeah, I'm just off. And they never go figure out the root cause of the problem. Talk me through that because I think all too often, and again, part of the desire for this, I'd love for people to check out, whisk, no questions asked, and they need to learn that, you know what? Some of the stuff, even in Excel, and pen and paper, there's times that your staff is doing the wrong thing and costing you$10,000 a year because they're overp pouring the whiskey or whatever it might be.

Angelo Esposito: 15:33

yeah. Listen, an analogy I give sometimes is like pulling back the curtain, right? It's like you are using excel. It's hard to find the mistakes and when there is a mistake, there's this, there's this mentality where it's okay, look, there's probably a mistake, but it's fine. It's probably just a mistake. Our beverage cost or food cost is outta whack, but it's probably just a mistake. And then when it's good. You assume it's good. So there's this natural bias, and I've seen that happen unfortunately also with sometimes third parties. Don't get me wrong, third parties could be great, but the, I've seen that similar bias happen where you have a third party company come in and count for you. And when the report makes sense, you're like, cool, thank you. And the report doesn't make sense. You're like, you guys messed up somewhere. So there's like this kind of just natural bias. I'm like, data good. Yay. Data bad. It's a mistake. so what I recommend is this, what the typical mistakes I see is a lot of systems out there including pen and paper, but even some. Of our main competitors still rely on like shelf to sheet. So like I got this sheet, it's just maybe instead of a paper Excel, it's now their system or whatever. But it's still like I'm entering in this table. What I see in front of me, and I'm trying to add things up, is I got some tomatoes here and some there, so I'm like, okay, one case there too. And I'm typing where I think whisk. is different is we built it with the intention that number one, you could split up the work. So you could be 10 people counting. Everyone goes to the separate area and everyone's counting. Everything's sinking in real time. Number two, it works offline. So if there's areas like a fridge or whatever, where wifi is week, it works. But number three, and this is the shelf to sheet part, you don't have to count shelf to sheet. Our philosophy is forget the shelf to sheet. That makes sense. If you're stuck on paper or in Excel. With whisk, we tell people, count what In the order. You see it? If I'm gonna in my pantry, I see, I don't know, tomatoes. Okay. And then next to it I see something else. Okay? And I just keep going. And then later if there's more tomatoes, there's more tomatoes. But most people force you to go shelter sheet. And that's where a lot of the mistakes are made.'cause you're trying to add this and this, then you forgot that you counted that. So all this to say we're big fans of trying to make it as easy as possible. So scan or search what in the order. You see it if it's if it's open, you can use our Bluetooth scale. If it's closed, you can use our visual mode. You can count by the case. You can count by the unit. That's it. That's all

Jeremy Julian: 17:37

Love it. So the flip side of that and where I see things come up and I've watched people get in almost fist fights because they're not gonna make their bonus'cause they didn't hit their

Angelo Esposito: 17:46

right. Right, right.

Jeremy Julian: 17:46

is that they received product in incorrectly through the back door. They received a case when it should have been a box. And that also will throw off your inventory.'cause it's saying you should have 16 of these, you should have a case of wine. You should have 12 bottles of wine. And you really only received one bottle of wine. You ordered one bottle of wine. But you, you received it into the system. As a case. Talk our audience through, your experience in watching people because if you order it properly, but you receive it in wrong, it's in the system incorrectly. and that's where you got a lot of those variances.'cause that's what the system says you should have. But then when I go to count, I'm off by 11 bottles And now a word from one of our sponsors. Every restaurant operator understands the chaos of a restaurant kitchen during the meal rush. Restaurant technologies, oil, total oil management solutions, an end-to-end automated oil management system that delivers filters, monitors, and recycles your cooking oil, taking the dirtiest jobs outta your kitchen and letting your employees focus on more important tasks. Control the kitchen, chaos with restaurant technologies, and make your kitchen safer. No upfront cost. To learn more, check out RTI dash i c.com or call 8 8 8 7 9 6 4 9 9 6.

Angelo Esposito: 18:55

Yeah, you nailed it. I could tell you've been in the industry 30 years.'cause you're hitting all the points we see all the time. Look, the truth is, this is how I like to explain it to restaurants and to people listening is the formula is a formula, right? So whether you're using whisk pen and paper. A third party, it's guess what? They're gonna count your beginning inventory, they're gonna add your purchases, they're gonna subtract your ending inventory, that's gonna give'em the, what we call consumption. Some people will call usage whatever, and then we compare that to the sales. But the sales are speaking a different language, right?

Jeremy Julian: 19:22

Yeah, they're theoretical.

Angelo Esposito: 19:24

the recipe to convert the theoretical, and that's what we call the famous actual versus theoretical. So no matter what, you'll need that. Our philosophy is we think of each of those points and we're like, how can we make them as easy as possible? So on the inventory, we spoke a bit about it, but it's okay if it works offline. If it works real time. If I can use the camera on the phone, if I can just count in the order, I see it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. It's great. That should be easier. On the purchasing side, you can't get easier than just snap in a picture. So for us, when invoices come in, all you have to do is you take your mobile app. Snap a picture of the invoice or multiple pages of an invoice and submit it. That's it. The AI does its thing and then we have a human team internally from WS that reviews it. You can also upload it. You can also forward it via email. And also we have some EDI integrations with the bigger suppliers like GFS and Cisco and US Foods and that kind of thing. But even that aside, any invoice, just snap a picture. What's nice about Wsc is that human review, to your point, is where we really make sure there's no mistakes, because that's where everything goes outta whack. On the beverage side, it's easier generally,'cause it's usually by the unit, by the case. The sizes are usually similar, seven 50 ml, one liter, that kind of thing. Cases of beer, cases of one. Where it gets tricky is the food side, where a lot of people fall short, but. We built this specifically from the ground up is what we call item variation. So not to get too technical, but this happens a lot. So I think you're a listener. Yeah.

Jeremy Julian: 20:43

and you get products that get shipped in, breast chicken, breast sizes are different because they're out of it at the warehouse. sorry. I'll let you keep going.

Angelo Esposito: 20:49

no, that's perfect. But you're nailing it. You're nailing it. So that's exactly what happens is it's either they're, they, ran out, so they send you different size, or sometimes you order tomatoes from supplier A and supplier B, or sometimes it's the same supplier, but different pack sizes. So it's different distributor codes. Most systems handle it very. Basic, which is just oh, if this tomato was this distributor code, and this one's a different distributor code and different pack size, so it's just a new item, which is a pain. Whisk has the ability to merge. Not merge,'cause you still want them separate, but to link them, I should say, to a master item. And the master item is in your recipe. So if you have a hamburger and a slice of tomato is, I don't know, 22 cents. now if you just received a different pack size of tomatoes. With most systems, you now have to go in, take out that tomato, replace it with a new tomato from the other vendor so you can have an accurate recipe cost. With whisk, it's just gonna pull it automatically'cause it's linked that master tomato. I know that seems super technical, but it's super

Jeremy Julian: 21:41

No,

Angelo Esposito: 21:41

Yeah. Common. Yeah,

Jeremy Julian: 21:42

both pack sizes and especially in these replacements, you now get stuck. Is that gonna be the new product? I actually heard something that is almost embarrassing. You talked about not. Replacing that item, but linking that item. I heard some really well known systems don't even keep historical pricing on that previous item. So it's it's all just what is real time that I paid on this invoice today. And with the fluctuation even, we're recording this in March of 2025. I. The fluctuation of the cost of eggs has gone up, up and down so significantly over the last three months. can you imagine it only being at the cost that it was, that you bought it today versus what you bought it two weeks ago for? So

Angelo Esposito: 22:19

keep that history. Yeah, it's super important. Yeah. We keep the history, but it's true. I'm glad you called it out.'cause there's a lot of, and by the way, biggest recommendation to people listening if you're in the market or you're not. Ha, either you're not happy with your current system, even if it's pen and paper, or you're just in the market or you're curious. I say this full transparency book, a demo with Whisk and. Book a demo with a few other people in the industry because what makes a difference is the demo and on the demo. This is my biggest advice I can give people listening is don't be shy to really ask, how does this work? Can you show me that when I receive different tomatoes, can you show me? Can you show me? Show me is the key word. Because where most competitors, and I've seen this. We'll get people, is they, it's more of a high level presentation, right? It's less of a demo, more of a presentation. It's less of the how. It's more of just the output. Here's all the nice reporting. Owners will buy it, and then the people implementing are like, man, this sucks. I really encourage people do the demo and ask the how. So you set inventory is faster. How do you do it? Okay. Mobile app scan. Oh, Bluetooth scale. Okay. You mentioned invoices, but how? Show me. Show me recipes. How you said integration.'cause some people are gonna say POS integration and they mean export the sales and upload it. It's oh, you actually have an API integration. Show me how that works. So in general, whether they go with wisk or not, that's my bigot advice.'cause in the industry, going back to that formula, everyone does the same thing on paper, which is hard for us'cause it's hard to market. But everyone will tell you, Hey, yes, we do inventory. Yes, we help you order. Yes, we help you invoice, and yes, we help you recipe cost, et cetera, et cetera. So from, I get it from a buyer's perspective, you're like, oh, they all do the same thing, but this thing is better half the price. I'll just choose that. I wouldn't want to be so naive to say yes. They're just happen to be exactly what you do when they're half the price. So that's where I recommend people really take the time, book the demo. You don't have to book 20, pick your top three that you're looking at. Book the demo, see it for yourself, and then make the best decision for you and your team.

Jeremy Julian: 24:14

Yeah, and there's two other pieces of advice on that I would suggest. Before you book the demo, define your

Angelo Esposito: 24:20

Yes.

Jeremy Julian: 24:20

Are you doing just bar inventory? Are you doing full theoretical? Are you doing down to slices of tomatoes or am I just doing the protein that's on the patties? Because unfortunately, I think people try and bite off too much. They go from zero or they go from pen and paper to biting off too much'cause they got a new system now and it's gonna make life easier. And then they give up after. It's like the diet, by February 15th, nobody's dieting from their New Year's resolution. Same idea with inventory. The other thing I would tell you is just to be careful that you don't just go with your broadliners suggestion, because unfortunately the broadliners have been known to play around with pricing from time to time. Contract pricing doesn't necessarily get honored, whereas somebody that's independent of your broadliner, and I'm not suggesting that they're all bad, but they need to be held accountable to both the contract pricing and. To what those items are, whereas you guys can help them with that as it goes into those things. So those would show the pieces of advice that

Angelo Esposito: 25:09

that's no. Yes. A hundred percent agree. A hundred percent. and just to echo the first one,'cause that one, I, I so passionate about that one that I made a YouTube video about it. But literally, I tell people don't, sometimes people get lost in the demo. And the best example is like when choosing a POS, but same thing with inventory. But they'll be like, oh, I'm looking at this and this. And then they end up getting distracted with bells and whistles. I tell people, write down what's your top, like non-negotiables. If you're, if the most important thing was like. I gotta be able to split the bills easily. But someone else is showing you about, I don't know, their online ordering. don't get distracted, stay focused. cause no one's gonna do everything amazing. So stay focused. And so our example would be like if someone's a full service restaurant and they have a wine program and they have food and then someone else is maybe a has one or two little features that might be a little better than Whisk on the food side. But I don't know, 50% of your sales are coming from MO alcohol. Maybe you're gonna lean towards Whisk'cause that's important to you. Agreed. And yes. Take that advice.'cause that's really something I've seen people make a mistake on over and over again.

Jeremy Julian: 26:07

and I tell people all the time,'cause we do sell P oss. Write down what Wsc can do when you're looking at it. Because unfortunately by the time you're at, you threw your third demo. You're like, was it Wsc that did it their competitor that did that? And then they come back to your implementation team and go, you showed it to me. It's we don't even have that feature, so I promise you we didn't show it to you.'cause that happens a lot in the

Angelo Esposito: 26:24

Yeah. and you know what, I'll throw in,'cause this actually just happened recently. I won't name the competitor, but there was a big established competitor of ours. And, I was disappointed to see it, but I guess it's the industry. one of our clients that we're working on was like, Hey, they sent me this comparison sheet, whisk versus X and can you take a look? And I took a look and I was like, this is sad.'cause like half of is just Wrong. yes, we do this. Yes, we do that. Yeah, we do. And I walked the client through it. I'm like, you remember the demo? We do this. We have a mobile app. I showed you the invoice. So in a way it kinda worked in our favor.'cause then they're like, oh I guess this competitor's kinda lying, which didn't sit well with them. but it goes to show you just to go back to book the demo for yourself because anyone can create a quick cheat sheet comparison and say what they want. And unfortunately not everyone's super truthful. So I hate for clients to just look at a cheat sheet, let's say, between your P os and other Ps and say, oh yeah. XPOS told me this, so I guess I won't book a meeting, So definitely do your own due diligence. Don't just trust a competitor's cheat sheet.'cause you know it's probably gonna be biased.

Jeremy Julian: 27:22

Absolutely no different than the conversation about the, about the broadliners, in your guys' name. and it wouldn't be a podcast in 2025 unless we talked about ai. How is ai, and you chuckle, you have your own podcast. I. a AI is a big thing, and I know that more and more people are integrating AI into their applications. You've been around since, AI existed 10 years ago, but nobody knew about it. Now it's like a, it's like everybody wants to AI it. And I just got done with the multi-unit restaurant, tech show in Vegas last week, and everybody was all about ai. It's explain to me what ai, but talk to me about how a AI is playing a part in inventory, both machine learning. As well as computer vision, as well as large language models, like those are the three that everybody's been talking about. And how are you guys thinking

Angelo Esposito: 28:06

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a really interesting question. It's funny, I was talking to someone today and I was just saying it's like. AI is like a love hate.'cause on one hand it's like such a buzzword that sometimes it's like easy to turn your head away and say ah, I don't wanna hear about an ai. But then sometimes you'll get deep into some stuff and you're like, wow, this is, I'm living in a moment. It's like when the internet came out, like it's such a. Critical moment that you're like, I don't wanna miss out. So I want to be more involved in AI'cause I want to see what's possible. So I'm leaning more towards that camp'cause I see so much potential and we've been implementing in many ways and ways. So the way I see it is, listen, AI and restaurants in general, there's so many different applications where obviously my brain is more, leaning towards all the back of house stuff.'cause that's what we do. So when I think about ai, I think about it from an inventory perspective, maybe from invoice processing, from maybe recommending recipes. So specifically with Whisk right now and futuristic right now, what we do. Is we implemented AI when it comes to the invoice, processing. Historically, we used to just use basic, basic, it's still cool technology, but we used to use, object, character recognition, OCR, try to read it. Now, we actually use large language models and based on the invoice, if it's, Cisco or GFS or this, it could read it instantly. It could detect if it's scratched out with a pen and things like that. So that's one area that's been really nice and we've been leveraging it a lot and it, the invoices get better over time. So there's like that kind of. Again,

Jeremy Julian: 29:21

the accuracy is likely gonna be so much better than the OCR stuff.'cause the OCR stuff came out in

Angelo Esposito: 29:26

Exact. exactly. And the cool thing is when we get volume going back to machine learning, it gets better and better. so if it's a larger distributor, it's better.'cause we have so many clients, let's say, I dunno, GFS or Cisco scanning those invoices. So those just the learning model just. gets, learns faster, I guess is the short answer. So that's one obvious one. a second one was more of just more, a way to help with cleaning up their account. So detecting, duplicates, recommending when to merge things, on the recipe side, being able to see suggested recipes.'cause no matter anyone's gonna have their own recipe, but be able to see like in general, this is how you make an old fashioned, but now you can make your old fashioned with your product in house. and then the third area, and I've seen. Other people do. This is more on the inventory side. On the inventory side. For now, we're still very much mobile app, real time. There's a lot of cool tech, but it's not really AI on our side where I've seen people get into the computer vision stuff and it's been interesting. It's been one of our visions, but it's hard to execute, but is the idea of going around with, RayBan glasses or meta glasses I should say, or whatever, but with a camera and being able to the computer recognize what's in front of'em. I've seen some interesting applications. I would argue like accuracy is important and you nailed it before, like one invoice is wrong, one item variation is wrong. So full on food, beverage, inventory right now, I still think it's tough for a regular restaurant. Where I see it having been done is, I think there's use cases, like if you think of maybe catering, I've seen someone do it for airlines. So with airlines, when you open up those things, maybe like hotel, mini bars, those type of things seem to be a bit easier'cause all the mini bottles are there or things are prepackaged and the camera could just detect. Okay,

Jeremy Julian: 30:57

Yeah, there's a lot less variance in, in all of the different things.'cause even as you get to multi-units, the bar layout is gonna be different between them

Angelo Esposito: 31:03

there's a lot. So I've seen, that one, I'm still like, it's still early. Like I know people are like, oh, look, I, you can just. Point your camera tells you. Yeah, that one I think is like less accurate. I've seen good applications, like I said, in airlines and what you can see, so don't get me wrong, there's really cool stuff happening. you think about casinos, they've had security cameras that could detect what's, what people are pouring while they're punching. So the tech is super interesting. where we wanna head towards, and this will be a glimpse, hopefully by the time this is out, it'll be live, is, we wanted to get towards a full on like video inventory. so you're just talking out loud and videoing and then whatever. But then what hit us is what if we can do whisk audio inventory? So this is low key, but the idea is you walk around, you're just like. Two cases of tomatoes. okay, I got three and a half jars of, one liter, milk, whatever. And you're just talking out loud because we have their invoices in our system. We could use, transcription, language models to, like whisper whatever to transcribe, audio into text and then match that text with what they have in it. So that's one area that's. Not existing yet, but that we're testing out, I'll call it alpha version. so hopefully by the time this comes out, maybe it's yes, it was success or people hated it and no one wants to do audio inventory. so we'll find out.

Jeremy Julian: 32:12

That's really cool though. I hadn't considered that. We actually had, you alluded to the computer vision stuff. the founders of Nomad Go, were on the show and they've got some unique, computer vision stuff that, you know, as everything does, they've got a vision that, that they can help make inventory easy and they're working on it and we'll see how it, pans out. I think, is there anything I missed, I guess as far as whisk and where you guys are at, other than, love to let the, listeners know how to get in touch with your team to, to

Angelo Esposito: 32:36

a hundred percent. Look, the one thing I'd say,'cause I know just by default we ended up talking a lot about, the bar side. So one thing just to emphasize is Whisk started on the bar side and then about five years ago we launched the food side. So Whisk. Now, today, sometimes people don't know this, but really to emphasize, it's not oh yeah, we can, if you have some bar snacks, we could do, no, we can go full on food. multi-unit QSRs or a full on full service restaurant, food menu, batches and prep items, and they create their own aioli and this, and I buy my fish and I yield, my yield is the. not to get crazy, but we do all that. just to be clear, I just wanna emphasize to the listeners out there, we do full on food and beverage management and we help with everything, inventory, ordering, and w related. And the nice thing is we integrate with about 60, point of sale system. So that's just to really just emphasize,'cause I know by default I always give beverage examples and cocktail examples, but we go full on, on the food side and have food only clients as well.

Jeremy Julian: 33:31

Love that. how do people get in touch? How do people learn more? How do people book that demo that you alluded to

Angelo Esposito: 33:35

Yeah, super easy. So the easiest way wisk.ai, so just WIS k.ai, everything's on the website. My philosophy's like the website should be so easy that we don't have to create sales material that's separate. So you can find all the details, the feature pages, the demo page there, there's a book of free call at the top. one, one thing we've been testing after hours speaking about AI is a ai qualifier, which is. Been pretty fun. during hours of course we're gonna answer. and we made it clear it's a bot. We don't want people, we're not trying to trick people. It's just Hey, it's after hours. We're not here. Instead of leaving us a voicemail, if you wanna just see if you're a good fit, just talk to our bot. So we just launched like a week ago. We got a couple recordings. It's been interesting, but we short answer Whisk ai. You can book a call, we'll talk to you to make sure it's a good fit. And then if we think you're a good fit, is we book a demo and the worst case scenario is you're like, no, I don't like it. The best case is you get to see it for yourself. It's something you think you can see yourself using and great, right? But like it's really a no pressure demo. So that's one thing we emphasize. We're really not that team that's gonna call you 75 times, it's like book the demo, see it for yourself. If you like what great. If not, don't worry. There's no strings attached.

Jeremy Julian: 34:44

Love that. and as I said earlier, I know you've got your own show. You wanna plug that for

Angelo Esposito: 34:48

Sure. Yeah.

Jeremy Julian: 34:49

those that want to learn more about, what you do.

Angelo Esposito: 34:50

absolutely. so like I said, websites, wist.ai, and the good thing is we try to put everything there. So you can also find the podcast there, under like resources. All the podcast episodes will be there and you can watch the YouTube if you like, video, or you could listen to it on, Spotify, apple, et cetera, et cetera. the podcast is called Whisking It All. whisking it all. And the idea is we meet with, restaurant. Tours, bar operators or just people in the industry as a whole, whether it's tech related or not. So we've had people that, operate 200 franchise locations to just like a guy, a hospitality group that might have 15 locations, two tech related businesses. we're gonna have you on the show soon, this that'll be fun. Or maybe by the time this airs, maybe you'll already have been on the show. but yeah, so if anyone wants to check that out, W ai, you'll find the podcast, you'll find the resources and. If you wanna follow me on LinkedIn, I post a lot of hospitality style content, you can follow me, Angelo Esposito on LinkedIn. And I also, this is less well known'cause it's just, I do more just for me and to help people. But angelo esposito.com, all I do is I post learnings of me building the business with my team, so like hiring people how to do this, delegating better, how to be less stressed. So I just, every week, every Sunday I post an article. So that's more just if anyone wants more. Business advice, I post it. It's free angelo esposito.com, but if not everything can be found on a whisk ai.

Jeremy Julian: 36:09

thank you for like I said, when you and I, before we hit the record button, I've been watching your journey over the last couple years. You've had some people that one, one have been on the show, two friends of mine, and so I reached out just to say, Hey, how do I learn more? Because at the end of the day. Whether people use Whisk or not, a lot of the principles of what you talked about they have to do in order to run a successful restaurant. So thank you for that education. to our listeners guys, thank you guys for hanging out with us this week. if you haven't already subscribed, please do so on your favorite player. Angelo, thank you so much. And to our listeners, make it a great day.

Angelo Esposito: 36:37

Thank you for having me. This is great.

36:40

Thanks for listening to The Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Visit restaurant technology guys.com for tips, industry insights, and more to help you run your restaurant better.