The Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast brought to you by Custom Business Solutions
Restaurant Technology Podcasters... Drawing from years of combined experience in restaurant technology, implementation, and marketing, The Restaurant Technology Guys are here to help you run your business better. Check them out www.restauranttechnologyguys.com
Jeremy literally grew up in the Restaurant Technology Industry. His family is the founders of Custom Business Solutions, Inc. and Jeremy’s early school vacations were spent soldering components for restaurant customers. Twenty-plus years later and Jeremy is COO for CBS, in charge of the implementation of technology systems for CBS customers. It’s fair to say that Jeremy is very much in touch with the challenges and issues facing restaurant operators in the area of technology systems. Outside of CBS, Jeremy and his wife Michelle are the busy parents of two boys and two girls. The family’s youngest son was adopted from Uganda. Four kids, youth sports, church and many other activities mean non-stop action at the Julian household. Jeremy is a big fan of baseball and soccer. When not cheering on the kids in sports Jeremy enjoys cooking and watching Food Network.
The Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast brought to you by Custom Business Solutions
Top 10 Restaurant Technology Episodes of 2025: Insights and Innovations
In this episode, we highlight the top 10 most loved and impactful episodes of 2025, based on both personal enjoyment and audience engagement on YouTube and audio podcasts. Featuring industry experts and groundbreaking companies, we discuss technological advancements and strategic insights in the restaurant industry. Highlights include Bill Lindsay from Cogswell on AI-driven inventory management, EveryBite's smart menu technology for dietary preferences, House of Giants' digital ordering innovations, and more. The episode celebrates the successes of 2025 and looks forward to more exciting content and innovations in 2026, encouraging listeners to subscribe and suggest future guests.
00:00 Introduction and Overview
00:52 Episode 1: Bill Lindsay from Cogswell
04:42 Episode 2: EveryBite's Innovative Solution
07:52 Episode 3: House of Giants' Digital Transformation
10:45 Episode 4: Matt's Human-Centric Leadership
13:44 Episode 5: Mellow Mushroom's Guest Experience
16:49 Episode 6: Poke Works' Hawaiian Cuisine
19:16 Launching Hawaiian Hot Plates
19:29 Explosive Growth of Rewards Program
20:21 Pollo Campero's US Expansion
23:21 RTI's Energy Management Innovations
26:30 TechRyde's Seamless Integration
29:57 Wisetail's Learning Management
33:48 Wisk's Inventory Management Solutions
36:23 Conclusion and Future Episodes
This is the Restaurant Technology Guides podcast, helping you run your restaurant better.
Speaker 28:In today's episode, we're breaking down the top 10 episodes of 2025. We took the episodes that I enjoyed recording the most, as well as those that you indicated that you love the most based on the download views, uh, between YouTube and the audio podcast. We love coming to you and look forward to a very successful 2026 as well. While we talk about the show and the guests that we had on, if you know of any guests and haven't already subscribed, please subscribe as well as send us new guests that you think would be great to be on the show. The first episode that made the top 10 was a second time guest. Bill Lindsay from Cogswell. Bill has been in the restaurant tech space doing inventory management for quite some time. He was one of the original founders, I believe of re max and then came to us through, um, I dunno, compete. I think he was at compete before that. Now he. Founded Cogswell, which is a next generation AI driven cost of goods sold. Inventory management system, talks a lot about how he came up in the industry. He came up through the operational wings and really looked at making sure that, uh, the team continues to work on making sure that you're managing the high food cost items to ensure that you're profitable because. One of your two prime costs is your food costs to make sure that you are keeping that in line, and Cogswell does a fantastic job of that and they're a great partner of CBS North Star as well.
Speaker 17:I was a restaurant manager in 1974. I was also a food and beverage director in Las Vegas for many years where we developed our own inventory, software and recipe software. So there are truly only two controllable costs in the restaurant. Food and bar cost or cost of goods sold, COGS and labor. You know, we saw what happened with, uh, the All You Can Eat Shrimp at Red Lobster didn't work out so well for them. Crush the national brand. You know, I always say this is a penny business. If you're not watching your nickels, you'll never see the pennies. I'll tell you a short story. When I was in Las Vegas, we did a lot of eggs. I mean, we did a ton. We had a buffet, we had a great breakfast restaurant. And uh, um, I signed a deal with a chicken farm in California, and the deal I signed with them is, uh, you're gonna drive a truck in the middle of the night and you're gonna deliver X amount of eggs to me six days a week. And we never refrigerated an egg. They would lay the eggs, they would box them up, they would put them on the truck. We would start cracking them for omelets. The next morning. A hundred percent of my eggs were in the chicken yesterday. They were delivered about two 30 this morning, and we're serving them for breakfast Now, if you're half as good as you think you are, and I believe you are, you're gonna make this something that people will enjoy. Even though it's not the best ingredient, but anybody can make the best ingredient work. I need you to make this work. Mm-hmm. And you owe it to your staff. I always prided myself that I ran, uh, operations with 800 people at a time. I've never done a layoff in my career. I would find a way to increase profit so that I didn't have to send people home and just sit down with the staff and say, let me show you the numbers. And you get enough of that, and all of a sudden you see the numbers start to creep up. And now we're all in the game together and the staff understands that I don't wanna cut your hours, but the only way we can avoid doing that is we need to. Lower our food costs so that I can spend it on pack size. So I like to say without an audit, automation is a fast track to a bad, nobody calculates flow through anymore. And I'll explain it in simple terms. Let's say you've got a table for four in your restaurant and you put two people on that table, theoretically, if you were to seat a third person on that table, what's your profit on that one seat? The answer is about 70% because Yeah, because you had already, a challenge is a high margin item that you don't sell enough of. Mm-hmm. You train your staff, you put contest out like we were talking about. Yeah. What do you recommend? Oh, you know, the Denver omelet is a favorite around here, and it's also your highest.
Speaker 29:The next guest that made the top 10 list is the team over at EveryBite. EveryBite is an interesting product and quite honestly, I didn't even know that the challenge existed when they came on, but they are building a technology solution that helps restaurants define allergies or food preferences and allows the guests to be able to look those things up and provides a smart menu technology to help. Those that have dietary preferences, as well as dietary restrictions to be able to know that they can go eat safely. They shared some crazy statistics and the episode was really, really cool and a great solution that they're building and taking out to market.
Speaker 23:Food allergic dining community. So one in 10 Americans have a food allergy and that's growing. So we're little under 34 million people have a food allergen and unlock. And a marketing opportunity is definitely something that we feel is the biggest opportunity and it's for 85 million people. The
Speaker 24:driving force of all the business I've been in are about personalization and what we see is the McKinsey study that's. Goes around that basically says if you basically do personalizations, you can raise the top line revenue by 40% and it makes sense. Mm-hmm. And just to give you an idea of the magnitude of unlock classically in the restaurant, this is, there's two to 6% conversion, kind of QSR and fast casual. What we, what we're seeing is basically a four to five. Multiplier on that conversion,
Speaker 25:but it was amazing. Once you put the power in the hands of the consumer and allow them to do that, the friction goes down and they jump on it. How do you stand out? It's all about personalization.
Speaker 23:We are now at a quarter of a million people every month coming to our smart menu, we ran a report or a survey, I should say, and it took on average 11 minutes for a guest who has a dietary preference to find a menu item versus on smart menu. I think we're a minute and five seconds. It gives them those additional 10 minutes to upsell menu items to push for cocktails, drinks. It enables the front of house staff to get back to what they do best, which is building experiences for mm-hmm. The table.
Speaker 25:I love that. One last set of questions. Have you guys found that brands are using this as an advantage to market to their consumers at all yet? Yes. We and talk. Let's talk a little bit about that because I think it's Syd, you mentioned I can go anywhere. There's within a nine iron of me, I've got three Thai places that I can go to. So the Thai place that's gonna serve my needs the way I want them is gonna end up getting my business more than the other two that are not there. Yeah, yeah. We've
Speaker 24:seen one of our customers, they took off a Una fish sandwich, which is the only pescatarian dip they had on their committee. So immediate rebate, just, and then you looked at yourself of their user coming were marked as pescatarian. So you just created a hole for yourself. And remember when you go to the menu,
Speaker 25:you don't see what you're
Speaker 24:looking for. Hey, I'm out.
Speaker 25:Yeah, I'm out. I'm abandoning the cart, and I'm moving somewhere else. Yeah.
Speaker 30:The next guest was one of my favorites, and albeit yours as well since the download numbers showed it is the team over at House of Giants, the House of Giants team. They built quite a bit of technology, helping to streamline the ordering process, and really quite honestly, everything digital to ensure that you are making sure. You're getting every sale in a digital means. They do a lot of data analysis as well as some UI and UX work to make sure that everything gets done properly at the, um, digital level on your mobile app, as well as on your website.
Speaker 18:for sure it. When we entered the space, we really recognized this like. The disparate amounts of data, right? You've got your point of sale systems, you've got your loyalty programs, you've got data in many different places, and there are very few all in one solutions that are really pulling in all of that data in a unified kind of way for a single experience, right? The opportunity for the use of ai, LLMs, all of that type of stuff, to parse that data and make recommendations and suggestions is invaluable, especially in this day and age.
Speaker 19:We need to look like Starbucks. And so they, they want to just chase Starbucks and their CEO comes into this IT guy's desk and throws something down and says. Starbucks is doing this. I wanna figure out how to do it. And ultimately they're stuck holding the bag because they don't have, they don't have the pieces that go through that. Most decisions are made with emotions, and then the data backs it up. I said, go look at the data. How many times do people have that item in their cart and they go to order and it doesn't go through? What are you doing about it? And I have a good friend who used to do this in the consumer space, consumer good space. He's like, you have no idea how many sales you're losing because you don't convert. If you're prioritizing everything, you're prioritizing nothing. I'm a father of four. Sometimes me getting on, I want to order fast, have it in the app, have it paid and move on. Whereas other times I want discovery and I wanna work through those things. And it's funny'cause I had a customer call me a while back'cause they were finding a lot of abandoned carts on catering. And I said to him, have you considered the fact that they're a pharmaceutical rep and they're considering catering, but they realize that your product is too expensive? And they were really trying to redirect them to a customer service person while they were in the middle of that cart experience to say, Hey, we have other options that might not be on this website. If you tell me your budget's.$500 for this meal. I can get you something. I got an email. I now got craveable product and now I can't get it. So now it turned into a, I'm gonna start to ignore their emails because they're not relevant to Bed. Bath Beyond went outta business because they hit the 20% coupons. They're like, no, I'm not going. When this 10% coupon, I'm not going with 15%. I need that 20% to get my new pillows for my wife for the couch.
Speaker 31:The next episode is somebody that I just met this year at a trade show earlier in the year, and I knew after I had met with Matt, I had to have him on the show. So Matt is a fantastic human. Has a great story and really is a human-centric leader who helps the restaurant groups to manage and ensure that they are putting their people at the center of the guest experience to make sure that they are also delivering on what the promise is. He talks a lot about the people. And ensuring that they are trained and know what to do and know how to do it so that, uh, you can continue to thrive as a restaurant brand. So, love Matt. Love all of the things that he's continued to do.
Speaker 15:So I really wanted to stay on the team, but I, he said to me when, as of Matt, you're not gonna graduate high school. I really recommend that you go look for alternative employment. And I found the restaurant industry. I was washing dishes for somebody at some point, and it was the first point when I found the industry is I was challenging myself as, what was I gonna do? And I was a pretty angry young man at that point, and I was able to find somebody who said, we believe in you. But when I found hospitality, it didn't come with any of the badges or labels, and very quickly started to fall in love with the industry. It's not about the process, it's about the people. And I think in my experience, what I've learned the hard way is sometimes what I was designed to do is step over and solves the problem. Leading a restaurant, whichever it is, the I, the question I ask is, how do we win? Like what's the definition of winning? Yep. And often it's a behavior, it's our job as leaders to create clarity. Yeah. And we can't judge them for wherever they're at, but it's a really great exercise to get to understand where are they at. The biggest difference that I see between top or performers and average is they're not in agreement as to what their responsibilities are to execute that goal. I understand what they want to do, but how could I possibly fit that in my day and my week? I'm already over capacity.
Speaker 16:I actually encourage our team members if they see anybody in leadership, myself included, not acting in accordance with our core values to call me out on it.
Speaker 15:Yeah,
Speaker 16:I give them permission to do it introspectively. I looked at it and said, they're right. I was wrong. I wasn't acting in accordance with our core values, and thank you for pointing out my blind spot. This person in their frustration got on
Speaker 15:the desk and scratched out the core value on the wall. It's a dramatic, very vulnerable, this is my lead. The businesses went a lot better when I got outta the way. I didn't read a book until I was 25. The first book I read was Thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. He said, if you can't give now where you're at, you're not gonna give when you're gonna be successful and you're gonna be successful If I need you to give now,
Speaker 16:put it in the hands of, they're gonna fail from time to time. But if it's not fatal, it's not doing anything illegal. Let them fail. Let them learn.'cause you know what we all learned through trial and error and we, we broke stuff while we were coming up. One thing
Speaker 15:that you
Speaker 16:never let us do is you never
Speaker 15:let us fail. I've had some really great groups say, Matt, all you've done is take us back to, you know, what we were doing 10 years ago. A really big, like really, really big restaurant or billion dollar brand. And the president calls, he's like, we're just going back to role values.
Speaker 32:The next episode was a really fun one because this was a, it's a brand and it's the first one that's a brand that's on the list as the team over at Mellow Mushroom, and they have been doing quite a bit in the way of guest experience and ensuring that they are building technology. For the guests as well as for the staff member. They did a reboot this year and their chief Digital Strategy Officer, I believe is, is his title. Assan was great with just talking about all the ways that he focused on ensuring that. The guest and the staff was taken care of as he really has grown within that organization, has continued to make his mark. He and I have had a chance to spend some time throughout the year and he has some fantastic insights as to where he came from, how he came up in the organization, really how he found Mellow Mushroom. If you haven't been to a Mellow Mushroom as a being the first brand on the top 10 episodes, I would check them out if there is a store near you.
Speaker 13:I see way too many people that come on or way too many technological innovations that happen, but they don't put the guest or the staff member at the center of it. Technology for technology's sake does nothing. Technology that enhances the guest experience and or the staff experience and ideally both and drives profits to the bottom line. Are the ways and the times that you should be investing, if they're
Speaker 14:not ready for what you are trying to implement from a technology standpoint or the experience standpoint, it's gonna fall flat and it's just an a investment that you're making that's not gonna go anywhere. Mm. But if you don't have a strong foundation to build from and you're just chasing after that shiny object or that shiny piece of technology, you're not gonna be able to really solve the root problem that you were supposed to be solving for. Mm-hmm. Yes. I like to say we're probably the best kept secret in pizza, even though we're not. All that secretive anymore. We don't have customers. We have guests. Mm-hmm. Right. And we treat people as if they're coming into your house because the restaurant is our house, we don't want to create transactional relationships. We want to create a real relationship with our guests.
Speaker 13:Finishing, but I'll just say it. You don't have to be the bad guy. Restaurants are laggards as far as tech adoption, and definitely as far as data and using data to make data-driven decisions. Awful at it. As restaurateurs, we've
Speaker 14:all been trained now by the Amazons of the world to expect every single update of every single thing that we're doing with our products that we're purchasing, when we expect it, how we expect it, and then if it's not exactly that, we're annoyed because eating a pizza hot out the oven is not the same thing as eating a pizza that's been sitting in a box for 30 minutes. Yeah. So we got a hot honey pizza, but we do it a little differently. We take our pepperoni pizza, we put whipped ricotta after we bake it, and then we put the hot honey swirl on top. So you get that nice bite. The spiciness, but then that cool off with the ricotta. Actually, I will say one of our hidden secrets on our menu is our burger. It's one of the best burgers you'll have. That's tough. When I go to
Speaker 13:a pizza place, I struggle to order a burger.
Speaker 14:Made it. I bought. So with that said, our holy shiitake pizza, right? And it's holy shiitake mushrooms. Three different kinds of mushrooms on there. So this is coming from a guy that didn't like mushrooms on his pizza. And now my favorite go-to item is our holy shiitake pizza. So we actually, our franchisee up there wanted to offer a skyline chili pizza Look. Not, it's not for me, but I know how big Skyline Chili is in that market.
Speaker 33:The next is another brand and it's the team over at Poke Works. And Poke Works is. Hawaiian cuisine really kind of sushi, but they have a build your own poke bowl where it's sushi, but it sits on top of a better rice. It sits on top of the salad and they do a great job. Really, really fun episode. Kind of talking about how they went to market, what they did, how they think of loyalty, how they think of their new. Hawaiian hot plates. So they came out with Hawaiian hot, hot plates earlier this year. So it's really try and make sure that they hit all the demographics if you're not looking for poke. Okay, what are some of the things that are gonna bring people in? My favorite item, and there's a, a poke works here in town that I'd love to go swimming by for is their spam masui. So if you haven't checked out this episode that happened earlier this year, I would strongly encourage that it's a fun episode to listen to what they did, both in the brand as well as on the technology side.
Speaker 11:Poke really is, is one of the core, I would say, and quite legendary Hawaiian cuisines out there. And it is basically raw fish that is cured in various sauces. I just think of it as sushi, but with a lot more flavor. The key difference there is in the flavor and the sauces is the sauce that you use that's gonna be marinating, giving a lot of uniqueness and umami to that, to that fresh fish or fresh protein. Poke in general is coast to coast. It's well known 10 years ago when Poke works. Kickstarted the Build Your Own Poke experience. It was a little bit less well known. But the expansion has been extremely rapid. One of the big areas, of course, is making sure that you show up on Google Maps or Yelp really nicely because mm-hmm. When someone's hungry and they're not entirely sure, they haven't made up their mind where they're going, they're pulling out their phone, right?
Speaker 12:I want people to think, Hey, if I haven't at least started capturing an email address or something, you've gotta be there because if you're not, other people are, and you're losing out to them. Before you go on to 0.3 real quick, one thing that somebody said to me is that a lot of times, 70% of first time guests don't come back. Mm-hmm. And that baffled me need to figure out how to get that first time guest to come in a second time and that second time guest to come back a third time.
Speaker 11:Like how do we. Optimize and maximize that second visit. Literally. That's our goal. We recently launched Hawaiian Hot plates. It's, it's, they play on the, the classic Hawaiian plate lunches. And the reason for doing that is that frankly, guests can only eat so much raw fish in a week. Our rewards program is actually growing four times faster than it was last year. Yeah. It's, as I mentioned, pre-show, the, the traction blew our minds. We weren't even sure that it could grow that fast, but our goal is to keep it going.
Speaker 12:If you're a Poke K Works fan, you are like rabid, like you're one of those people that, that wants to go and wants to support the brand. I think people step over dollars to pick up dimes from time to time thinking about cost savings instead of driving top line sales. Because it's that idea of abundance and really being there to, to see the value.'cause I think even as people are struggling with just the state of the economy and all of these things, if I can get more and potentially have these things more frequently, it creates that reward cycle that ends up bringing me back. I personally love the spam Musubi. I, I, my wife's like, how do you eat that stuff? But I don't know, ever since I was little, the first time I went to Hawaii, when I was little, I started eating spam musubi. And ever since now I'm like, it's one of my go-tos.
Speaker 34:The next episode that we have on the top 10 is the team at Pollo Campero, and ironically, Pollo Campero has been on the show twice. It is a really, really cool brand that has taken the US by storm. They headquarters are here in Dallas. They do a great job. They're actually out of Guatemala. Those that know me and know our team, we've got some people that work with us in El Salvador and they love the product. It really has taken off here in the US and their team. This is their second time, but on the show, they do a great job of sharing their vision for what they're trying to achieve here in the US and how they continue to grow the brand.
Speaker 9:At the end of the day, I love the brand and the restaurant industry most. So those were the initiatives that we did that allowed us to really grow to last year where we had 29 units. So that's something that really we, we hit out of the ballpark, for lack of better words. We had been five to 10 units during the prior 10 to 12 years, and I think since the last two or three years, we have seen a lot more brand recognition. Not only when I go out to shows and conferences, but also when we go out and look at development opportunities. Now brokers and landlords and real estate developers know who we are, and at the end of the day, it's the tender, crunchy, juicy fried chicken that everyone craves. Because to your point, once you taste it.
Speaker 10:You're, you become somewhat addicted to that. I've watched brands go into new markets and fail. I've watched brands go into new markets and take over.
Speaker 9:We don't necessarily want to go everywhere immediately. We would love to, but it's not feasible. It doesn't make sense. They drive hundreds of miles to come eat our chicken. Oh, wow. We have data that proves to it. Approves, uh, it to us. We also tend to want to go in areas where there's economic growth, population growth, that we know people are relocating maybe from California. So we want to be in that market because we believe there's enough room for all of, we don't wanna be opposition by competitors, so we wanna make sure that we're in the right spot. That's been successful for
Speaker 10:us
Speaker 9:in
Speaker 10:the last
Speaker 9:couple
Speaker 10:years. Help me understand, because you guys are really taking ultimately the flavors of Central America and bringing'em to the states and then trying to figure out how to distribute them across to all of the different regions. So that helped us expand
Speaker 9:and also helped us reduce our cost.
Speaker 10:Yeah.'cause
Speaker 9:now we're not having to ship a chicken from Arkansas to Minnesota. We know Generation Z by 2030 will be, have the biggest purchasing power if you're one of the first hundred that show up there. And we do that through social media to come to our new store. You get a free meal every week for a year. The famous being able to read your license plate and being able to identify it's Jeremy, you're here last time you ordered 20 piece chicken meal. Can we get you the same thing? You think it's big brother looking at you. And I've had people, Jeremy stop me and say, good chicken, and they walk away.
Speaker 10:That's amazing.
Speaker 35:The next episode was from one of our sponsors. The team at RTI. RTI has been a longtime sponsor and a longtime partner of the show. That's not the reason that they got on the top 10. They really got on the top 10 because one, you guys loved it, and two, I was blown away with all of the different things that they're doing as it relates to energy management and really the different types of oil that are out there, how they all work and how optimizing your oil management within the restaurant for fried foods. Can really, really help both save you a lot of money, save you a lot of time, create some great safety environments, safe, safer environments inside of your stores, as well as make you more money. And so Ron Cardwell knows more about the world of oil than I ever will, and he shares quite a bit of that on the show.
Speaker 7:So, my name's Ron Cardwell. I'm the director of commodity strategy for restaurant technologies. What does that mean? That, just from my background of working in the food side as well, but I'm the resident oil nerd, I guess you can say, and I'm, uh, one of those weird people who really love talking about it.
Speaker 8:I think I need to get you business cards that say oil nerd instead of director of commodity strategy for oil. You know? Yeah. Need to be
Speaker 7:better. Um, you know, I'm not the most popular guy at the cocktail party, so these podcasts are what I live for. We really close this circle of sustainability. We really do. Um, so a, as many know that we deliver that T oil to the restaurants and we take away UCO or used cooking oil from the restaurants. Last year, I don't know the exact number, just shy of 400 million pounds of used cooking oil we put into the renewable fuel sector. And we'll continue to grow every year with it. So a hundred percent of what we take in, we'll make it to that renewable fuels production. So it's sustainable and reliable for sure. I think we overlook how important that oil is to getting good quality food out. One thing that does not depend on anything is how you handle your oil. That is a constant. You always wanna make sure it is filtered and you always wanna make sure it's at the right temperature and you wanna make sure it's changed at the right time temperature. Mm-hmm. If your oil is at 425 degrees, which is way hot, that heat. Allows oxygen to get into the oil and oxygen is what breaks it down and gets bad.
Speaker 8:You know, like a lot of people at COVID, I, I found the recipe for the Disney, um, churros and decided to fry some churros at home.
Speaker 7:It has to do with the stability of the oil. And when I say stability, I mean how does it hold up under those hot conditions of a fry? So
Speaker 8:I live in Texas. There's a local barbecue place. It's just moved away from all of the, all of the regular oils, you know, all of the seed oils to cook with. And they went with beef towel. Yeah. You know, but I got four tater tots, fried and duck fat, and I paid, you know,$32 for four tater tots. I
Speaker 7:think the one that's hard to put a cost on is those customers. Who get bad food from it, are they ever gonna come back? Mm-hmm. It's the most dangerous job in the restaurant. And I will say that what we provide is we provide assurance that nobody has to touch it. And we all, we've all heard the stories of the, the cooking oil pirates that come through and, and essentially suck out that, that used cooking oil so they can sell it somewhere.
Speaker 36:The next episode was from the team at TechRyde. TechRyde is a company that is trying to take on the third party delivery and digital ordering process to help integrate that to the restaurant space. So they will take from your online ordering, third party delivery and insert those orders, not needing to have a third party middleware or somebody sit there and manually enter orders. Accuracy is great. Timing of of cooking is great. Guest experience makes it so much better, and really they're trying to solve the whole idea of ensuring that the guest can get a fantastic guest experience through the use of technology by making it seamless for both the guest and the staff Member
Speaker 26:Why not create a simple, easy to use a middleware kind of setup, which can help any restaurant operator to connect to any app to the point of sale system. In 2016, we created a middleware to connect all the apps to the point of sale system. So we are backbone of the kitchen, so we see kitchen as a soul of the restaurant from where we, we do everything. Our system is built for saving the labor cost, saving the food. And
Speaker 27:making the customer happy. But nowadays the consumers expect to be able to order on a third party marketplace on your website directly. They wanna be able to call the store and get an order. They wanna be able to sit down in the dining room. So this is where
Speaker 26:technology is taking care of it so that the business can focus on their business side and where technology can help them assist. Smoothen the operation, help the customers, their consumers, and their staff, everybody. That's what we guarantee. 2500% ROI when somebody uses our system.
Speaker 27:Yeah. So tell me how is it that you guys are calculating a hundred percent ROI on these things or a hundred percent delivery time? That's unheard of. That's the beauty of
Speaker 26:technology. So that's why where we say kitchen is all of the restaurant delivery. Batching is one thing. Also route deciding best route based upon traffic so we know when the traffic is going to increase. What is the best route to deliver the food. Uh, most of the restaurants today are struggling. Especially struggling to keep up the operations to get the profits. And with the trade war happening with every country, the cost, price for the ingredients are going up and up. So this is why technology is really helpful. There is a order which has chicken wings and fries. Let's say chicken wing steaks, six minute to cook and fry steak, two minutes, just an assumption. So our system knows both. Item has to be prepared hot and fresh. Buy it a fourth minute. The fries will remain deactivated until fourth minute because it takes two minutes. Mm-hmm. By the fifth minute start, our chef will get alert now start cook fries, or maybe back the fries. So by the end of sixth minute, both item will be hot and, and this is where technology is helping.
Speaker 27:If I have 10 orders in the kitchen, it's a 60 minute wait time. If I have an 11th order, it's 65 minutes. If I have a 12th order, it's 70 minutes. It takes nothing into account. It is really helping
Speaker 26:mitigate those problems so not only 2025. If you go down the line, there's a lot of progress already happening. Recharge one$50 and ROI is huge for one$50 per month per location. And ROI is, I already told you, 2500% ROI, which is part of our agreement. As KPI in one day, their sales skyrocketed and they achieve 56 months of positive month on month growth after implementation of.
Speaker 37:Wisetail is the next episode that we had hit the top 10. They are a learning management platform, and I would encourage everybody on this that's, that's listening to this episode to consider having some form of learning management Wisetail is definitely top of the line as far as their features, functions and the fact that they focus on frontline workers to ensure that they understand what are the things that you need to do and how do you keep micro training in front of the employees because today's. Employee base and today's team members are constantly looking for something short and quick to be able to get to the bottom of it. And Wisetail has not only gamified that, but also has some fantastic best practices to help you and your restaurant to thrive. So check out their episode.
Speaker 3:I came to Wisetail by way of falling in love with the restaurant tech industry. I spent time at Toast back when they were pre IPO, left from Toast, went to Smartsheet on their restaurant team and division, and then found my way to Wisetail. Absolutely wisetail. We are an employee enablement platform, born in the heart of Bozeman, Montana in 2008, and we've really stuck to those Rocky Mountain small town roots with how we operate. We need to have quick, accessible micro training that they can do in the flow of work. Be able to open up the app on whether it's a personal device, a tablet, in the time of need, get accomplished, what they can complete within that limited time, and then get back on the floor. Absolutely. I think most folks currently right now, the workforce, we are supporting four different generations. So most of us who are. Maybe in the older generations dating myself here, Jeremy, but we came up at a time where training was truly sitting in a room watching hours and hours of video, and then you're given a multiple choice test on a piece of paper, you're expected to retain it. We wanna keep that engagement level high and we know that the quicker we can get them the information and make it impactful. The more likely they are to retain that. So essentially, if I take my micro training on how to operate the fryer and I've passed the quiz and I'm feeling great, it's a good day at work. I've done it. I'm ready to rock a ser. Mm-hmm. A server runs back. I am slammed. I'm trying to get dishes out as quickly as I can, and that server's, Hey, does X, y, and Z dish have peanuts in it? I've got an allergy. Ah, I don't know. But if I can click it really quickly, grab that recipe card and see the allergens in it.
Speaker 4:I'm old enough to remember my childhood phone number, but I can't remember my children's phone number because my children's phone number's in my phone. Excellent. There
Speaker 3:were some women playing a great game of Mahjong and I dumped the Chardonnay all over the table. I've yet to meet anyone in this industry who says, you know what, cat? I've got some extra time. I can hang out right now. Let's chit chat. Everyone is wearing so many hats. And so for that reason, we do have a team that one can create custom content. So off the top of my head, thinking really quickly in the hot lights of filming a podcast, I just came up with six different pieces of tech that coming to Wisetail become one. Okay, retention is based on day number one, that first interaction with the organization, that first day of how was I trained, how was I treated, how did I integrate into the culture, and how did I understand my role here?
Speaker 38:The last episode is somebody that I have been wanting to get on the the show for a while. It is Angelo from Wisk. He was amazing. And then I, I got the privilege to meet him in person later in the year because he and I, after we were on each other's show, I happened to be on his show as well. They started as a bar management system to be able to manage the costs related to your bar items, and then they. They took that and moved that into food, kind of really competing in the same space where Cogswell one of our earlier episodes was. But he's a fantastic human way, way, way fun to talk to, and also has his own podcast out in the space and delivers a ton of value. Has a great product. Check out what Angelo from Wisk is doing as well.
Speaker: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 your prime cost. 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. Yeah. I found
Speaker 2:even the coolest places in the coolest cities just had clipboard with a pen and paper and that's it. Throw it out at the end of the night. I'm like, that's crazy. They're not keeping any of that data. 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. I'll go back to pen and paper. And so that was a challenge. Can we make this as easy as pen and paper? Yeah, 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 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 like three to 5% improvements in in cost of
Speaker:goods. 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. It's like the diet. By February 15th, nobody's dieting from their New Year's resolution. True. Same idea.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker:true. With inventory,
Speaker 2: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. It's sad. 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, I don't wanna hear about an ai. Mm-hmm. 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, it's 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.
Speaker 39:Thank you again for joining us for the top 10 episodes of 2025. We look forward to delivering even more value in 2026. If you haven't already subscribed, please do so on your favorite podcast player or on YouTube. If you need to send us a suggestion for a guest or you know somebody that would be perfect for the show, please go to restaurant technology guys.com and click be our Guests and fill out the form, and we'd love to talk to them.
Speaker 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.
