Managing food costs at independent restaurants has always been a challenge for owners, and there’s a long list of startups like MarginEdge, OneOrder, TouchBistro, PreciTaste, ConverseNow, Fudo, Owner.com and others stepping into their solutions. increase.
Zitti’s app provides insight into food prices. Image credit: Noisy
Zitti co-founder Dante DiCicco tackles this problem, but from a unique perspective as a restaurateur. He has seen his parents’ Italian restaurant locations shrink during the economic downturn of 2007 and his 2008, but now the global pandemic has hit restaurants similarly. I’m watching you give
While opening a new location for his family’s restaurant and deploying all the food suppliers, DiCicco realized that the process required technology.
Luckily he knew a little bit about it. Leveraging that knowledge as an executive at Snap to lead the company’s international revenue growth and co-founder of real estate marketplace CREXi, he teamed with Erek Benz to develop Zitti and launch an independent restaurant. Large companies and chains on an equal footing in terms of technology.
The result is a payment software platform that streamlines transactions between restaurants and food suppliers through payment, price comparison, and vendor discovery tools.
“Food price optimization is the future of the restaurant business,” he told TechCrunch. “Much of the new technology is focused on ordering and inventory management, but the real business intelligence that helps restaurants make smarter purchasing decisions is sorely lacking. That’s our mission. It’s a big part of.”
Zitti will launch in March 2022 after raising $4 million in pre-seed funding in late 2021. The first beta customers were DiCicco’s restaurant and his family’s restaurant.
In the past two months, the company has started charging for products. $150 per month per restaurant location.
“Our goal to save on their food costs is a lot more than that, ideally many times that, so it’s been incredibly well received,” he added. We’ve already had quite a few conversions from customers to customers.”
The company is now back with a $3.5 million seed round, co-led by Oceans Ventures and Serena Ventures, with participation from pre-seed investor Crossbeam. In total, the company has raised his $7.5 million since DiCicco and Benz started working on it in 2019.
The funds will be deployed in technology development where artificial intelligence and additional automation will be added to the platform soon. One of DiCicco’s goals is to be able to see price changes in real time and use AI to predict next year’s price for a given product.
Zitti, meanwhile, is currently focused on the Southern California and Chicago markets, and also sees Austin as an emerging market, DiCicco said.
“The next step for the company is to expand into new markets, but we are taking a city-by-city approach,” he added. “This is important for increasing density on both the restaurant side and the supplier side so that we can get more market information and thus pricing information.”
