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.
