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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Galley Solutions

Bite Ninja’s New Funding Shows Operational Efficiency Is What’s in for Restaurant Tech in 2022

Despite the constant flood of doomsday headlines as the dark clouds of recession gather overhead and consumer behavior regresses to the mean post-pandemic, not all news is bad news these days when it comes to restaurant tech. In fact, some startups seem to be doing just fine, particularly those whose mission it is to help restaurants save money.

Take Bite Ninja, who this week announced an $11.3 million funding round. The company allows fast food restaurants to outsource their drive-thru through Bite Ninja’s cloud-labor platform. Bite Ninja employees can remotely staff a drive-thru from their home anywhere in the country and can also work multiple drive-thrus during the course of their shift.

The ability to spread a single worker across multiple restaurants and treat drive-thru labor as an “elastic” resource that can be spun or down dynamically during the course of a day is a radical rethink of a core part of a fast food restaurant, coming at a time when most fast food restaurants are struggling to hire employees. According to the announcement, Bite Ninja is currently running trials at five of the top twenty quick-service chains in the US.

Other companies that help restaurants and retail become more efficient and bring cost-savings to operations continue to thrive and get new funding despite what many see as a large-scale downturn in food tech funding. For example, Galley Solutions, a company that helps restaurants more accurately predict and optimize their food inventory, raised $14.2 million this spring. Hyphen, a startup that is building plug & play automated makeline solutions, raised a $24 million Series A in February and saw additional follow-on investment by Chipotle in June. That same month, food waste reduction startup Goodr raised a $8 million funding round in early summer. Last month, Afresh, a company that enables food retailers to optimize their fresh food inventory and reduce waste, raised a $115 million series B.

If 2021’s restaurant tech funding was all about ghost kitchens and digital transformation, the big buzzwords for 2022 are operational efficiency and cost savings. Startups that can help streamline operations using automation, cloud computing, AI, and other transformational technologies will continue to do okay, particularly those that help restaurant operators deal with acute labor shortages and rising costs of doing business during rising inflation and persistent supply chain disruptions.

Galley Solutions’ Founders Talk Recipes, Data, and What It Will Take to Build a Better Food System

In the food world, San Diego-based tech startup Galley Solutions is perhaps best known for its software system that uses recipe-level data to automate the restaurant back of house. But founders Benji Koltai and Ian Christopher have much bigger plans for the role they want their company to play in creating a more efficient, accurate, and safer food system overall.

I recently hopped on a Zoom chat with Koltai and Christopher — who also happen to be brothers-in-law — to talk about their vision for the future food system, how a system like Galley’s can contribute, and what foodservice businesses can do right now to make their operations more efficient.

You can watch the full video below. Some highlights include:

  • The definition of “food business” is changing as we speak, from college dining halls now offering grab ’n’ go meals to ghost kitchens operating out of grocery stores.
  • Moving forward, restaurants must learn to leverage their recipe-level data to make operations more efficient, cut overall costs, and save on labor and time to accommodate these new formats.
  • Technology is everywhere in the foodservice world, yet for all the different devices and solutions, there is no common dataset to bring those disparate pieces together.
  • A truly efficient back-of-house system will use one source for all the business’s data. For example, a centralized data source could populate the digital order forms sent to vendors and at the same time tell the kitchen robot how long to leave a burger on the grill.

Restaurant Tech Roundtable: Reinventing The Back of House With Digital Technology

In this panel session, you’ll hear insights how how everyone from small operators to the country’s biggest QSR chains are using technology to improve operations, make their kitchens safer and to help roll out new menus in real-time.

Here are Jenn Marston’s take-aways from session:

More automation. Back of house automation isn’t just about robots making burgers. It has much more to do with digitizing operational processes to make them more efficient. That could mean a robotic arm doing manual tasks. But it could also mean using tech to replace paper-and-pen accounting books or taking a better, more granular analysis of food inventory to cut down costs.

More operational efficiency. Related to automation, the back of house will become more about making operational processes faster and more efficient. One of the panelists went as far as to say efficiency is the biggest thing for restaurants to get right. That’s especially true with fewer people eating in dining rooms and instead ordering takeout or delivery meals that are constantly evaluated for convenience and speed in addition to quality.

More transparency. The pandemic has arguably brought a greater desire for transparency when it comes to our restaurant food, and tech-savvy companies will respond with a variety of solutions. That could include installing software in a restaurant that can tell a customer exactly where their order is at any given moment (e.g., “on the grill,” “out for delivery”) or a tool that better informs them of a restaurant system’s security measures.

Spoon Plus Subscribers can watch the full session below. If you’d like to subscribe to Spoon Plus, you can learn more here.