Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

remotekitchen

Run a Restaurant From Your Phone, Thanks to This Latin American Tech Startup

Click through any restaurant industry publication in these pandemic-stricken days and you’ll likely assume that to run an off-premises restaurant, you need to load up on as much tech as you can. But as we’re fond of saying here at The Spoon, when it comes to restaurant tech, quality matters way more than bells and whistles. For all the contactless dining kits, delivery integrators, and AI-enabled tools out there, it’s the simpler solutions often create more value for the restaurant.

A Mexico City-based startup called remotekitchen appears to be betting on that idea with its new restaurant tech platform that essentially lets restaurant operators run a business directly from their mobile phones. That includes everything from promoting their restaurant to taking orders and processing payments. And for independent restaurants in Latin America — many of whom are not even online — that’s all they need.

“We are mobile and this [solution] is working for a smartphone-first operation,” David Peña, remotekitchen’s founder and CEO told me over the phone last week. With fellow cofounder and company COO Diego Vielma, he walked me through the technology and how it can get restaurants up and running with their off-premises strategies.

The company started as a delivery-only kitchen in 2019 and quickly pivoted to software in response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. As has been well-documented, worldwide shutdowns have decimated restaurants as we know them, and there’s been much ado over the prohibitive cost of doing delivery via third parties like Grubhub and Uber Eats. So it’s perhaps not surprising that when remotekitchen started tinkering with its own software, others took note.

As restaurant tech goes, the remotekitchen platform is an extremely simple setup. A Basic plan gets you a website (those already online can simply add an “order” button), an app for receiving orders, coupon/promotion management. Those who opt for the Plus plan also get their own branded iOS and Android apps and the ability to process payments online. Either takes about a day to set up, and restaurants can also sell meals via a Facebook integration.

There’s a good reason for the simplicity here. Peña says that unlike the U.S., Latin America’s restaurant tech is “far from being developed.” Tech solutions are hard to come by, and even when they’re available, they’re overly complex.

“This is an industry that is working with almost no resources, almost no labor, so the whole industry is running on the smartphone of the owner,” he explained, adding that he’s seen many restaurants simply taking orders through WhatsApp. 

On top of that, roughly 96 percent of independent restaurants in Latin America are not online at all. There are no menus to peruse via the web, and third-party services like Uber Eats are out of the question, given the high commission fees associated with those companies.

The crew at remotekitchen bundled all of these factors together and have built a solution to address them that works on any device and is most appropriately suited to mobile devices. “We believe we can unlock a new market by giving access to a technology,” said Peña.

It’s very early days for the company, which is still in testing phase. They are currently working with just 10 restaurants, though Vielma said that over 50 are on a waiting list and will be able to use the software once remotekitchen “really understands how we are adding value to this small group of restaurants.”

One thing that may help that progress along is the company’s recent participation in food business accelerator Food-X. When remotekitchen joined the cohort back in March, they had no product on the market. Without any technology to back it up, they quickly launched a landing page and started signing up restaurants and figuring out how their product could add actual value to the Latin American restaurant industry.

“They actively seek out feedback and iterate as quickly as any team we’ve worked with so the product gets better and better, not because of guessing, but because they are engaged with their customers, their advisors, and their investors to understand what works and what doesn’t,” Peter Bodenheimer, Partner and Director at Food-X, added over email.

That this past Food-X cohort was entirely remote actually helped. Vielma noted that staying in Mexico City and doing a virtual cohort let the company stay focused on their core market and in communication with the restaurants surrounding them.

At the moment, remotekitchen is developing the final part of its product before they officially go to market. From there, the company plans to start raising its seed round.

The overarching goal is to empower any restaurant to get online — no small feat when the majority of your target region is currently offline and a pandemic is currently wrecking havoc on the entire industry. A huge part of the restaurant industry’s evolution will be the shift towards more and more off-premises orders, for which an online component is pretty much mandatory these days.

Peña says that remotekitchen’s long-term goal “is to enable universal access to healthy delicious and affordable food by democratizing the marketplace.” In other words, anyone can be a restaurant, thanks to mobile-first restaurant technology. 

Food-X Announces Cohort 11, Its First-Ever Virtual Accelerator Program

Food-X, a hugely popular startup accelerator for food businesses, today announced the eight chosen companies for Cohort 11 of its program. While they vary in focus — food traceability, restaurant tech, pet food, and upcycling — the selected companies all share Food-X’s mission of solving some of the biggest challenges the global food system faces. And for Cohort 11, the companies share something else in common: They are part of Food-X’s first-ever virtual cohort.

While many food accelerator programs operate remotely or through a combination of remote and onsite work, Food-X’s NYC-based program has historically always been done onsite and in-person for its three-and-a-half-month duration. That was in a pre-pandemic world, though. With most states still locked down to stem the spread of COVID-19, and with NYC getting hit especially hard with cases, holding a program onsite is more or less impossible at the moment.

As far back as the beginning of March, the Food-X staff was preparing for this possibility. Program Director Peter Bodenheimer told me over the phone last week that they had initially considered pushing program’s start date back a couple weeks. When it became obvious that two weeks would be something of a drop in the bucket in terms of statewide shelter-in-place mandates, the program decided to pivot to an entirely virtual model for the first time ever.

That’s included using video chat in place of the standard office drop-ins, doing virtual “coffee breaks” with the participants, and finding alternative ways for companies to meet with potential investors in place of the usual “demo day” event.

The results, it turns out, have been a pleasant surprise. “It’s been even better than I hoped it would be in terms of engagement,” Bodenheimer said. “It feels like it’s been one of the most engaged cohorts we’ve had ever.”

That’s significant, considering this particular cohort is also Food-X’s most diverse ever in terms of where companies are located. Milk Moovement, which makes supply chain software for the dairy industry, is headquartered in Canada. Health supplement maker Rambuhealth hails from Costa Rica. Latin American restaurant tech company remotekitchen works out of Mexico City, while ingredients marketplace Fieldcraft is from Austin, TX. 

Normally these companies would all converge at the Food-X offices in Manhattan. Now, like the rest of us, they are being forced to carry out normal business in abnormal circumstances. And, as Bodenheimer sees it, they’ve more than stepped up to the task: “The companies have been incredibly active and incredibly engaged. They’ve rolled with the punches, and that’s a great signal from an investment standpoint. We’ve made a good investment because on some level these companies have barely skipped a beat.”

Food-X hasn’t yet decided if the success so far of this virtual accelerator will permanently change the program’s format moving forward. “I could see something where we do a hybrid where there’s a portion that’ sin person, a portion that’s remote,” says Bodenheimer.

In the meantime, here’s the full Cohort 11 roster, as outlined in a press release from Food-X:

  • Bramble: A fresh, 100% plant-based pet food company that aims to consciously boost your pet’s diet.
  • Ester: A startup harnessing science and AI to develop hyper-personalized customer flavor profiles for retailers of beer and wine.
  • Fieldcraft: The first B2B marketplace for commodities and ingredients built to simplify sourcing from growers to manufacturers.
  • Living Food Company: A managed consumer marketplace offering access to fresh, clean and delicious food made by world-class farmers, bakers, brewers and other food artisans.
  • Milk Moovement: A startup that is providing actionable intelligence across the dairy supply chain through its cloud-based software.
  • Nature Preserve: A sustainable food tech brand that is upcycling produce to minimize waste and maximize health via a proprietary food preservation process. First up: Lovi Smoothies, a natural plantbased mix packed with nutrients for use in smoothies, shakes, baking, and beyond.
  • Rambuhealth: A venture leveraging the antioxidant-dense shell of Rambutan for heightened health benefits, which can be found in their food bars, supplements and ingredient offerings.
  • remotekitchen: A single unified platform to empower restaurants to run, manage and grow their business effectively.

Bodenheimer suggests a point I’ve heard mentioned frequently over the last few weeks — that the pandemic’s complete disruption of day-to-day business is forcing most to rethink norms and experiment more. Startups, too, are inherently more open to taking risks typically, and those that do may actually find some upsides to this situation. “Downturns tend to be a great time for companies to start because there’s less noise, less frothy money being flopped around to companies that may not be as great,” he says.

Food-X is currently four weeks into Cohort 11, and already taking applications for Cohort 12, which will kick off in the fall of 2020. Whether that will be an in-person or virtual affair is anyone’s guess right now.