The Power of Tech in Foodservice
Chef Nate Keller, Head of Culinary Services at Galley, on the road from Google's kitchens to purpose-built culinary software - why spreadsheets break down at scale, and why the back of house got left behind while the front got all the investment.
About this session
Front-of-house technology got decades of investment because it sat closest to the money. Meanwhile the back of house - where food cost, labor, and waste are actually decided - ran on spreadsheets and instinct.
Nate Keller, now Head of Culinary Services at Galley, traces that gap from his own kitchens: the corporate-dining stigma he watched change, the point where menu planning in spreadsheets stops scaling, the admin creep that pulled him away from the food, and what he found when he went looking for something purpose-built for culinary and discovered it did not exist.
Key takeaways
- How corporate dining shed the cafeteria stigma - and what that raised the bar to.
- Where spreadsheet menu planning quietly breaks: moving things around, and knowing when to actually order.
- The admin creep that pulls chefs away from the food they got into the business to cook.
- Forecasting against real demand swings, right down to whether there is a game on that night.
- Why front-of-house systems got the investment while back-of-house inventory did not.
- What tends to go wrong when an operator builds their own internal solution.
- The onboarding journey, and why a customer success team is part of the product.
- Where AI genuinely helps in the food system - and why open APIs and integrability matter more than any single feature.
Transcript
Full transcript
auto-generated from the recording · click to expand0:02Alright, everyone. Well thanks for hopping in here. It is 1203 here on the West Coast, 3 0 3 on the East Coast. We'll go ahead and get this thing started. I am Jason Gunn, for those of you that I don't know, heading up marketing here at Galley. And I am joined by my good friend Mr. Nate, chef Nate Keller of Chef Nate Keller fame. I will let him introduce himself in just a second.
0:27But again, for those of you that joined a little bit late we've got your lines muted and we will make time at the end for some questions and answers. So feel free to engage with us throughout the conversation using the chat box or the q and a feature. We'll keep an eye on that and we will make sure that we get your questions answered. So, without further ado oh what you can expect for us to talk about today, about 25, maybe 30 minutes of us talking about all of these cool happenings in Nate's career while he took this journey from Google to Gey.
1:01Nate and I share a background as alum of the Culinary Institute of America. although I don't think we were there at the same time. And we wanted to kind of take his learnings if you got an opportunity to read the article we posted, I think it was a few weeks ago some really fun details about the journey that he's taken in the corporate dining space and what ultimately led him to Galley.
1:25So once we talk about that a little bit, which is one of my favorite stories here, which is why I love being at Galley, 'cause everybody's a lin. In fact, sometimes we even wear the same shirts, sporting meta Nate's heading up a lot of our customer success activities and we'll talk about that too. So we want to talk a bit about the complexity in the kitchen, specifically around corporate dining.
1:47And then the conversation that Nate and I have had recently is, where is the real power in digitizing your recipes? What is food data? And what does it mean if we don't have it organized in a, in a great way? And how do we have good technology behind it to support it, which ultimately led to what we built at Galley. But depending on your circumstance, there could be some opportunities to build technology internally, right?
2:15A lot of people kind of have this buy versus build conversation and we have a point of view there too. So we'll wrap it up talking about those things. But I want to give Chef Nate just a hot minute to get everybody comfortable with who he is, where he comes from. Are you native to the West? Like, where's, where's the journey start? Yeah. So thank you very much, gunner.
2:38So again, my name's Nate Keller. I am a native of California. I grew up in Sacramento. It's kind of the middle of the, central Valley growing region and just access to amazing food my whole life. grew up with a garden, was very interested in cooking at a very young age. I was the kid who got like egg slicers for his ninth birthday.
3:04I got a deep fryer when I was 10. I was like making homemade donuts with that thing. And, at 10 years messing around with dough it's always been just a really big love of mine. And through my journeys as a, as a young person, I kept doing it as a hobby. I graduated high school and didn't really wanna follow a traditional education track, so, I kind of took off in the world and went and explored the United States.
3:32Ended up in New Orleans at a really interesting place in the French corridor Frank's Italian deli, and got my first real job there. started at the very bottom as a dishwasher. and, decided that's what I wanted to be in the restaurant business at that point. So, I started my journey there and worked my way around the United States in, West Virginia, New York.
4:00I did a little small stint in Hawaii while I was building up my resume to be able to get into the CIA had a, just an amazing time at the ccia. It's much smaller than it was, than it is now. so, it's going back and seeing it now. It's it's very interesting and fun to see how much it's grown. But yeah, I went to the Culinary Institute of America graduated in 1999.
4:27Started in my track doing, really small boutiquey restaurants. I always wanted to search out, the best restaurant wherever I was. I was at the time living in Sacramento still and got to travel around to do some cooking in Europe for a very short time. And then ended up in the Bay Area where I got this opportunity to go work for Google.
4:55Google never thought that I wanted, I've heard of Google before. Yeah, right. Small company. and back then it actually was kind of a small company. This was in like 2001. and yeah, I've never thought I wanted to be in corporate food service. it was obviously a crazy opportunity to go from, making $12 an hour if I was lucky, at a small restaurant, working 60 plus hours a week, nights and weekends, holidays, that whole thing to, this corporate lifestyle of having weekends off and normal-ish hours.
5:32And the ability to really, explore and do what I wanted to do with the food that I wanted to cook. just a fantastic opportunity. And what I learned very quickly was, when you're cooking at small restaurants, you can have an influence on the amount of people that you can serve in any given day. But in these larger corporate environments, you actually have an, you have a chance to influence a lot of people at once and make a big difference if you have the platform to do it.
6:05At Google, we were obviously lucky enough to just be Google. And so, we were not only able to influence the employees at Google and what they ate, how they ate, how they thought about food, but also our purveyors and what they purchased, so to sell to us. We had high enough standards there to be able to say, no, I'm gonna go with all organic chicken.
6:27I want, this type of pork. And we were, we had the buying power to really push the industry in that direction which was, in my mind one of the coolest things of, being able to influence the people that you serve, but also the people that you are working with on the supplier side. Well, Google, sorry to interrupt, but Google probably was one of the first ones to set the tone around what that kind of alternative dining experience would be going into a lot of other Silicon Valley based businesses, which, I think has widely been adopted in colleges and universities and higher education as well. more choices.
7:06Yeah, absolutely. Choices. Choices. We want to help enable a healthy lifestyle. We want you to be able to eat culturally the way that you are comfortable with. it was a pretty big shift in mentality to do that because you're talking about a pure overhead to your overall cost of goods, right? Yeah. Putting this type of culinary experience together, like you were at the, at the ground floor for that whole cultural movement, which is pretty Cool. Yeah, no, and it was, it was really cool because, at the time, when I, when I started, it was like, I don't wanna work in cafeteria.
7:42Who would wanna do that? Like, I went to culinary school, like, I wanna be a chef. Like I wanna, make amazing food every day. And and it really did change the tone of the industry in corporate dining to a large extent. that's, that's what I found really amazing about that experience overall. And just, the experience of what corporate food can be.
8:06Yeah, it was just really amazing. And, so, from there, really it was what can we do to make it even better? How can we, how can we make this a cooler experience for the people that are at Google? And how can we push the limit to, continue to innovate in an, in an area that hadn't really had a lot of innovation in a very long time.
8:30And even to this day, the stigma holds over of, corporate cafeteria food that you're gonna go in and stand in line burger or whatever it is. And, the shift that we've seen is one that people are taking a lot of, a lot of responsibility and curiosity over innovation in what they're doing. how can we make this cooler?
8:52How can we work with more local farms? How can we, expand what we're serving to please a larger variety of people? What is the vegetarian option and vegan options look like? How are we going to communicate to our customers what allergens and what the ingredients are, and make it interesting for them, you know? there's a ton of different diets these days, and you really have to understand your clientele to be able to serve them in an, in an appropriate way.
9:21Well, you're segueing me into like that first bullet of conversation that I want to have because you're describing a number of areas of complexity in the kitchen that maybe at a smaller scale, you're at a fine dining establishment, you are at maybe something that's focused on one type of cuisine, you might be able to get into some of those very specific, local organic, let's cater to this, but doing it on mass is a completely different animal.
9:53So what was that like? What does complexity look like in a small kitchen, and how did that register? How did that manifest when you started exploring this new dining experience when you're trying to, what was it at the beginning? A few hundred, a few thousand people? where did they decide? Yeah, I think it was a, it was a, it was like just under a thousand a day you know that we were doing at that time and daily changing menu.
10:17So everything changed every day with the exception of like, a salad bar or a sandwich bar. And those would just sort of rotate through seasonally. but in a smaller restaurant, you have all your ingredients if you have, either a stable menu or even a seasonal menu, you're, you're looking at the products that you're getting and what are, what are the best products I can get that I can mold into the dish that I, that I wanna serve?
10:41And a lot of times you there that verbal communication, that's okay, we've got, snap piece today, we've got fava beans, we've got this, and we're building the menu around the products. But you get on that multi-unit level, or even like multi menu per day level. And there's a lot of stuff happening, with the onset of, people having, or being more vocal about allergies and the products that they want to eat and the products that they can eat.
11:16There's, there's a whole instance of we have to think about labeling and how do we identify those allergens, and what are we putting on the menu? And, the culinary world is not a stable place all the time. You could order, one kind of tomato and get a different kind of tomato instead as a, as a sub. That one wasn't available. You make a last minute change.
11:38How do you capture that change? You get a sub for your worst sauce, and this one doesn't have anchovies, but it has gluten in it. So how do you handle that change of that one that could cause a problem down the road when you're serving it to a customer that has a gluten allergy or, in the opposite way that they don't, they can't eat fish and it has anchovies in it.
12:04The level of complexity just, goes up exponentially over each menu item that you, that you are going to serve on a, on a given day. So, in a normal corporate dining facility, you could be serving 300 different recipes in a day, and the ability to communicate that to all of your customers accurately becomes incredibly difficult. planning for that kind of a menu that could change on a daily basis gets very cumbersome.
12:41Running through menu planners on excels or, in spreadsheets gets very difficult. You're moving things around. It is hard to see things. It's hard to know when you exactly wanna order things. it's very manual and in a small restaurant, very doable. And the, one of the things that I've, that I've found is people in the restaurant industry have the ability to hold an amazing amount of information in their head at any given time, right?
13:08Chefs at small restaurants will know exactly what's in their walk-in exactly where it is, how long it's been there, you can go through and talk through what a menu looks like to a staff at a 50 person seat restaurant. And you can, you can accurately know what's in everything. You've touched everything. But once you get above that, and you are an executive chef at a corporate level, and you are checking on all your sous chefs and you're checking on all your managers, you're not accurately seeing the food anymore.
13:40And so you need to be able to ensure that what you're serving is a safe, you know that you have enough of it, and that there, you're able to tell people what's in it accurately. So that amount of information, becomes impossible to hold in your head anymore. And so you end up, because it's kitchen. And, up until recently, traditionally not like a really tech heavy industry.
14:07You have scratches of paper that you're handing to your purchaser, notes get lost, the recipe book could be covered in, split piece soup or whatever was being cooked next to it. it's, it's a greasy big old mess. We've all had 'em in the kitchen, and there's nothing wrong with that. But think about all the effort that you're taking to manage all of that information.
14:31And even though you may not even realize that you're doing it just because that's the way that you were taught, and that's the operation that you walked in, you're handling data all the time, and you just don't realize it. and that we found that there were just so many different ways you can utilize that information once you digitize it, once you're able to find a, put it into a database and actively use the data that you're putting in on a daily basis.
15:01In the environment that we were in at Google, we didn't really use what we would consider a traditional recipe. we cooked on the fly every day. It's like, all right, today we're doing southern food, we've got fried chicken and biscuits and greens. The next day we're doing a menu that's centered around, bask country in Spain. And so you have to do this context switch every day of like, okay, what am I doing?
15:30How am I, what's my prep list look like, you're making these orders. We started to look at it as like, your order that you're going to place to make that food is essentially a shell of a recipe. What's missing is a procedure and a yield. So if you're able to accurately capture that and then add that information in, you have, you have a scaled recipe at that point.
15:56If you can capture that at that moment, and make sure that you put it somewhere that you can use it, scale it, manipulate it, then you have save yourself work to be done in the future. And think about all the times that we spent, pouring over order guides and pouring over prep list. One of the things I realized after, while being at Google, and then I kind of started this journey of trying to find how to do this in a more sustainable way.
16:29I realize that it really all stems from that recipe in the end, the entire workflow of an entire restaurant. You can cook back to a single recipe. You have a recipe, it goes on the menu, you make your order, your order comes in, you receive it. You use that order guide basically as a template for your prep list, and then you just spread out that information.
16:53But what I found was that the more I was doing that, the less time I was spending with the food itself, which is what I got into the business to do, was to, hang out in the kitchen and make delicious food. And the more I had to do all that manual paperwork or computer work, excel work, the more I was being taken away from what I wanted to do.
17:16Right. So you found yourself doing much more paper chasing, manual scaling of recipes. Now you're the only one that knows what's inventoried, right? 'cause it's all in your brain. Yep. And now you can't synthesize any of that activity or work around because it's not written down. And I think one of the things that we've been trying to do recently at Galley is just let people know that they have a ton of food data laying around, and maybe they don't even realize what makes it up.
17:45You've been touching on it, and I don't know that we've even gotten to food costing yet. Have we even approached profitability or, yeah, no. I mean's, like sustainability. Yeah. There's, there's all this information that you have to, that you have to be very connected to have a successful operation. at Google, we were looking up to where we didn't really have a food cost.
18:08It was just like, make people happy and here's all the money you need to do it, which was awesome, but we also knew that was gonna go away eventually. but yeah, you food costing data, like, we touched on the allergens, but, ingredients, sub ingredients for things that you're gonna purchase. Does this tomato sauce have, X in it?
18:30Does this soy sauce have wheat? Or is it tamari and wheat free? there's, there's just a ton of information that you can potentially use or you can potentially not use, and that you're putting yourself at risk for something, you know costing is a perfect example. prices change daily in some things. How do you keep your costs up to date? How do you make sure that you really know what your menu is costing you up to date on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?
19:03You can enter every invoice as it comes in and change the prices in your database. That's very manual, and it's very difficult. And again, taking you either away from your core responsibility, which really should be to make delicious food, you have to run your business, sustainably, profitably, and responsibly. So what's really the best way to do that, right? How do you, how do you use that data to your advantage?
19:29And to your point, and are like there, in a lot of operations, it's lying around. It's on the chef's desk, it's on the purchaser's desk. What happens when there's a change? How many people are gonna touch that down the road, potentially lose it, not pay attention to that information, or, all the work that goes into just passing down one change on one item in a menu.
19:54And you take all the changes that have to happen on a, on a daily basis, and that workload becomes, gigantic immediately. so, all of that sort of led me to think, how do we do this better? what's, what's the best way to do this? and, kind of a segue, but a backwards one, you know we had a food startup in San Francisco called SPR that was a food delivery company.
20:28And, it was three clicks on your phone and you got a hot meal delivered to your, to your door. We had three to five menu items per day. menu changed every day. Numbers would change all the time. It was a very data heavy driven company in terms of what did our sales look like the last time we ran this? What's happening today in San Francisco? Is it raining?
20:52Is there a basketball or football game on what's happening? What's, all these different things. So the numbers would change all the time. We would set ourselves up to say, okay, we're gonna make 500 of this dish. We would get some new piece of information, and the rubric would change. We'd be like, switching everything. So we'd be like, okay, we need 700 of this and 600 of that, and 300 of this.
21:14This would change, on a daily basis sometimes. So when you go back, okay, I have to change my orders, I have to change the prep list, I have to change, all the items of along that workflow. And, it became apparent to me quickly that I was doing them all in spreadsheets. And I was, building these spreadsheets and Google Docs and, they were all interconnected and very not stable.
21:44They're very easy to break. and I was having a conversation one day with one of our, with one of the engineers at Sprig, Benji. and, I was like, as I have, I'm like, I spend all my time in the office and I can't do these things. And Benji has a, has a gluten sensitivity, and he was a super user of Sprig early on.
22:07And he came, was like, how are you guys getting this labeling wrong all the time? Because we would set allergens on the app and you could see what, and he was still having issues with it, and like, how it changed and we didn't catch it. we didn't, it didn't make it onto the app in time and we just, we f flooded it because it's all this information that got passed down.
22:30And he was like, well, that should be able to be automated, right? I was like, yeah, I don't know how to do that. And, one of the coolest moments that I've ever had was, I was having this conversation with, a data scientist and Benji's an incredibly smart person. And we had this conversation about how much of an issue that is in the food industry.
22:52Like there aren't really good tools that were built at that time that were built for people in my position that were chefs that wanted to spend their time in the kitchen and not on a computer. How do you optimize for that? You know? And he really took that to heart and he embedded himself in the kitchen at Sprig and built version one of that at Sprig, which was, a really cool thing for me that I had been at Google, I had my own business.
23:21I had, had worked at multiple different kind of corporate structures. And no one wanted to give any resources to that we were just on our own. We were making it up as we went along in a lot of ways. and so to see someone really understand that this is the problem in the industry, people work these long hours and they have to work those long hours 'cause they have to work with the food and they have to get their office work done too.
23:48So how do you minimize that so that they can have a better working environment, they can be, more efficient and you can have a better, ideally life overall if you're, crushing it at work, you're not having to work 14 hours a day because, you're, you're able to get that work done efficiently and you can actually spend some time with your family.
24:12Yeah. Still in this, sorry. Yeah. Fading out a little bit on me there. sorry. So you touched on so many things. I want to unpack just a little bit. a, you've discovered that the amount of information you have to manage is somewhat untenable. So with Benji inserting himself into the kitchen, which for the uninitiated, Benji Co-founder and CEO of our beloved galley basically put together all of the elements that you needed in order to have a centralized database of recipes which serve as the core of what we call a culinary operating system.
24:52Which by the way, didn't really exist. There was nothing out there purpose built for culinary, as far as I know. And I've been, Yeah, I searched long and hard while we were at Google, can we buy a product off the shelf? And there were products that did it. there's Seaboard and Chef Tech now and these other ones, but they were all funky.
25:14They didn't seem elegant. They were difficult to learn. They were hard to use. It organized your data. Sure. But was it easy to use? Was it friendly? chefs like things that are aesthetically pleasing. Mm-Hmm. These look like, like accounting software from the eighties. I, if you wanna play Minesweeper, great, you can go do that. But like, wouldn't it be cool if you had something that was built specifically with chefs in mind that could actually help them instead of hinder them?
25:49Right. You can, you can do both things at once. You can be efficient, you can be pretty, and you can get it done with a, with a smooth user interface. And, I, the perspective that Benji and team took to do that was that exactly, make it for the people that are going to actually use it. Yeah. I think that's fair. So we're digitizing all of this information and trying to take the paperwork off of your desk.
26:19What are you seeing as the immediate benefits besides just your time back? Are you getting better at food costs? Are we getting better at inventory? there has to be some implications there that were instantly noticeable. food cost is the immediate thing that I, that I've seen moreover as a great example of like return on investment for what you're doing by digitizing your information.
26:44We have the ability to have UpToDate food costs all the time that are automated, that every time you open that recipe, you can see the UpToDate costs. Every time you put that recipe on a menu in the system, you can see what that overall menu is going to cost. That the volumes in which you're gonna produce it. You see your margins immediately. I've talked to countless companies that once they get onto Gey, they're like, oh yeah, we pulled like these three dishes off the menu.
27:10'cause we didn't realize how expensive they actually are. So it's just that, besides the time back, which, we've, we've heard things ranging from like, this saves me eight hours a week to, galley acts as a secondary sous chef for me. that's how much time, you can save. Then there's the, I have a big caterer that we brought on board recently estimate that we're saving 50 hours a week, I'm sure. like it's, it's exponential.
27:39The more menus you have, the more items you have to touch, the more you have to change these things. How many ingredients do you have? Are you, are you updating your information on an ingredient level, on a recipe level? Are you costing out every recipe? a lot of people don't, and they kind of just wing it. We're like, that's probably, I spent this much on it.
27:59So we'll say it's $5 to produce a plate. the reality of that, things add up really quickly, you know? And is, it's just so much easier and you feel so much more at peace when you know that your information is real, and it's accurate. And you can make those real business decisions at that point based off of that information. And I think that's like the real power, right?
28:28Is giving you the information so that you can make the best decisions for your business. So you're around a lot of our current clients who've been around a lot of our prospects. You've been shepherding this notion of a culinary operating system for a while. And I've been in the software space and food service for a while. I think one of the things that we all run into is companies, especially larger companies that have some some sophistication might be juggling the idea of buying versus building.
28:59This was a key component to some of the conversation that you and I had going into this. Mm-Hmm. What do you see work there when companies decide to kind of manufacture their own solution? Or is there not really a good reason to do that? I have seen it in a couple different scenarios. very large food service. not company, but a very large company in Silicon Valley that has its own food service in-house.
29:29I've seen people build. So, you can talk to the, you can talk to the tech folks and say, Hey, I ran this problem. Can we get some help? Can we get some resources to help build this technology for us? And, you may get some volunteers, you may get some people and say, oh, actually we're gonna put some resources to that. But then they build that product and then what happened to it?
29:50Then? Like, you have to shepherd that product along over time. It's gotta grow, you have to keep it working, is all the code that you're gonna put into that gonna be viable in five years? Then what happens? Like, you have this system that would potentially will be holding you back at that point because your program is growing, but that you're not getting the resources to continually update and innovate and push that forward so that you can continue to push yourself forward.
30:25Right? and I've done both, right? Like, I built my own stuff. And it's kind of funny because Galley was something that we was built in-house at another company, and then we, it was realized that this is a, this is an actual problem and it's its own thing that it, once it, we put it to work, it became very apparent that like this, a lot of people could use this and it could be very helpful to everyone else.
30:53And so, you have, when you build it yourself, you are responsible for it in the end. That's, that's the bottom line. So do you want to go back and continually push that product forward? Or do you want something that you can just use that works that you have a team of people, a full company of people that will be there for support, that will be there for how do I best do this?
31:17To be there to bring new features to, really continue to innovate and push? Yeah, and I think the way that I've thought about it, 'cause I did a lot of these types of engagements with like distributors and manufacturers, so somebody wants to build a thing, and I always remind them, Hey, your business model in distribution is to help deliver products to clients.
31:40Your business model in a kitchen is to create food and deliver those meals to your customers, right? At no point does building software go into the business model that you took to your key stakeholders or that you want to, continue to push on. So to your point, if things need to get changed or updated, now you've got this capital expenditure that you have to try and push through and Yep.
32:02The question's gonna be what's the ROI Oh, your time saved, whatever, spend more time, building totally, workarounds or I always said wiring things up with Popsicle sticks and, chicken wire and duct tape, is good enough as long as a stiff breeze doesn't come by and blow it over, and then you end up back in your spreadsheets and your word documents and you know it doesn't work.
32:22So then there's no, And maybe you lost all that data, right? Add all that data and now it's gone. Yeah. you put all that work into it and you cannot cash it again. I think one of the big reasons why that happens a lot and specifically in the food service industry is that there weren't good tools built for this industry. There weren't good technology tools built for it.
32:44POS systems. Yes. the customer facing things, yes, they're customer facing, they're a money maker, they're a conduit of money. But people didn't think that, those inventory systems that are easy to use or the recipe databases that can be easy to use, that can connect to your inventory system or your ERP system or maybe even directly with your purveyors. There weren't good tools for that.
33:11And, therefore people just got used to building their own things. I, when I started at Google, I had messed with spreadsheets a little bit, but not to the point that I got to at the end because I was like, I need to capture this information. I've got, 20 different outlets that have 50 different menu items each on a daily basis. How do you even purchase for that centrally, you have to use spreadsheets, you have to use some kind of a system.
33:42And so when we went out to look for them, they just were not very good. We weren't impressed. And so that's why I think people go back and they wanna build it themselves. What we're seeing now though, is that we're seeing this new wave of food tech come through that was, ushered in a lot by the food delivery area that people are starting to look at these as real problems.
34:09We have, we have ways now that are much better than they ever have been in the past that, I see as a really positive thing for the industry. It's that people are understanding that there are problems in this industry and we need to address them and tech. And there are, there's been a lot of talk about automation and taking jobs away from people.
34:36But that's, I think that's at a point where do you want the industry to survive? Do you want to have a profitable business? You have to automate some things. It's just that's the world that we live in. And, doing that responsibly and doing that so that your business can thrive that way you can keep hiring the people that you want to keep. You can give them a good life.
34:58You can, maximize your profitability. Those are the things that you need to do to be a responsible business owner these days. Absolutely. And that hits on the kind of third or fourth dimension of all this is, savings, profitability, organizing the data, but the impact to your employees and the people that are working in the kitchen is something that's a significant focus for Galley as a company, because part of the whole mission statement is improving the lives of the culinarians, right?
35:26That serve the food that we enjoy as food away from home across the entire world. So I want to double click into a little bit of that. So is there a significant feedback loop that you hear from our clients or things that you have seen in your experience where it's like, oh, it's not so bad having to be in the kitchen anymore because I don't have to do all of these things and I get to innovate and be the chef that I went to school for.
35:53I've heard some of this, but again, you've been around it much longer. the implications to the lifestyle of the individuals that have to bring this food to life mm-Hmm. Is ultimately significantly increased when you take the burden of all of this food data and technology away from them having to do it all manually. Yeah, I think one of the most common themes is, I get to now do what I want to do in the kitchen as opposed to, delegating that to someone else and then coming back to check to make sure that they did it okay.
36:30Right? There's a certain amount of delegation that has to go into everything, but if you delegate it and then walk into the office and have to spend three hours, while everyone's prepping, you're not paying attention to what you're gonna be serving. And that affects the overall food quality. One of the, one of the things we've heard from multiple different larger larger companies is that they've seen their actual food quality go up because they have more time to pay attention to it.
36:56That's, I think the biggest lesson there is you're running a more responsible business. You're actually doing the things that you want to do. You're gonna do a better job at those things just naturally. Mm-hmm. no chef got into the business to be an accountant. No one got into the business to work on spreadsheets. you can hire people that are accountants and that love to work with spreadsheets, but they're not the culinarians generally, you know?
37:24I have learned all those skills. I don't enjoy them at all. And I find that if I have to do those things, I take that less enjoyment into whatever else I'm doing. and from a food perspective, you're at your best when you are creative and happy, and you are, doing things you wanna do. You're in the zone with your, with your team, and you are directing things and you're, you're there with them, right?
37:56It's a, it's a team sport. And if you're pulled away to do the books, which is a necessary piece of the business, you don't get to do that. And so, one of overall, we've just heard like, the food's better, the food's better. People are happier, the customers are happier, we're getting more business. it's a compounding effect down the line. So, when you're able to put all of your effort and love into what you actually wanna do, you're gonna do a better job and you're gonna have better food, and it's gonna be a better outcome for everyone.
38:33Yeah. it's over that kind of comical caricature of the chef who's yelling and, screaming over zealous sometimes, that we kind of laugh at, in some of the television we might watch or movies or TV shows that we might watch, but that comes from a real place of frustration because they're not focusing on things that they love and they're having to deal with, some other challenges.
38:58So I love that you kind of highlighted some of that. we've got about 20 minutes left in the hour, and I see some cool questions coming in. So I wanted to kind of hone in on that. Obviously, the conversation today, everybody out in Zoom, land listening, is to point you towards our culinary operating system to help you understand that it's built by people who love the industry and the, and the things that all brought us together as Culinarians.
39:20How do we build technology and help influence and elevate the lives of those around us. So hopefully you got that as a, as a bit of the narrative here. Yeah. Not only what, built for, built with the culinary as an idea, but built by people who have grown up in the industry. Right. I've been at Chef for 25 years. we have multiple culinary on the team.
39:48We make it a very big effort to make sure that we are channeling the voice of the people who are actually going to use it. Yes, it was built, by a gentleman who's an engineer, but there is a feedback loop and a lot of the systems that I've seen in the past, and a lot of the new food tech that comes out is built by people that don't really understand the industry.
40:12They think they can build it better because, they're smart people and they can learn the industry, but there's something about the food industry that lives here, and not so much up here. and if you don't have that as a constant reminder and as a, as a north star, you can, you can make bad decisions for the end product. And the thing to really point out is like, well, this has helped build by people who were in the, who are in the industry, and we consider ourselves, part of the food industry as well as a tech company.
40:48Absolutely. So one of the questions that I think will be kind of interesting to tackle is how long did it take for you to get the system fully implemented, which I'm guessing isn't built, but maybe speak from the customer perspective. What's the onboarding process look like? Somebody adopts the full suite of offerings within the culinary operating system as we've built it today. what does that look like to get the recipes either migrated from other systems or manipulated and input into our systems?
41:18I think, the fact that we have a customer success team is one of our biggest qualities against our competitors. But what does that timeline look like? What's the journey for onboarding from the time? our friend Tim here out in Zoom land says, I want gallery. Nice. so basically you'll work directly with me and the rest of the CS team, and we learn as much as we can about your business, and, we'll take your recipes and we'll input them into the system.
41:46It's really dependent on the complexity of your operation, of how long it can take. But, we've seen implementations that can take 60, 75, 90 days. We've also seen implementations that take six months. It's really dependent on how complex, how large is your system or your operation, and then how accessible is the in, is your data. Now we've got a team of people that just work with food data, pulling data out of other systems and then putting it into galley.
42:23We've got teams of people that can manually type in the stuff as well, but we take on all that work because we feel that, again, as culinarians, you have things to do in your kitchen. Like you want to get organized, you want maybe you don't know, really know how to do that. That's what, that's what we're here to do, is to help you get to that point where you can actually utilize that data.
42:48And like I said, if you are coming on to Galley, if you're signing up with Galley right now, you are probably gonna talk to me. I'm gonna learn everything I can about your business, and as a chef we can have those kind of conversations of like, this is how my business runs, and we've seen so many other businesses at this point, and you get the experience of, myself and people like me on the team that have worked in various different operations too.
43:14And so, our goal is to make you the best you that you can be. and that's really one of the things that I enjoy most about my job. It's like, I've ran large operations, I've done, huge events. I've done all that. I know how they operate, and I get to help other people do their best at what they're doing. And I think that's the really exciting part.
43:38So you get a team of people that are like, honestly excited to work with you and learn about your business and see how we can help you improve so that you can get back to what you wanna do, which is making food. So, 90 days is a normal-ish onboarding. you'll work with our team, we make sure that you get all the information in that the information is clean, that the information is correct.
44:06And then we teach you how to use the system. from there, we really believe that you should be able to do most things yourself that, we want you to be self-sufficient as much as possible, but we are here for assistance when you need it. a little bit of speculation from our friend Sam out in Zoom land, how soon before chat, GPT takes over and starts writing our menus, recipe methods, et cetera.
44:33I only wanna touch on this because I don't think you and I have had a pointed conversation, but I've been talking with Benji and some others, but AI has a significant place in all of this, right? how many different ways can we bring some artificial intelligence into the food ecosystem from a tech perspective? to, I think the Experience, not replace it, right?
44:57Right. I think there's, to your point, there's some fear, like creativity will go away, but in my experience, chat, GBT isn't creative in a sense. It's smart, it can be, it can help eliminate some things, but the human creativity is always gonna be there. The question is, can chat GPT help distill your creativity to its most potent and take away things that keep you from being even more creative?
45:21That's the question that I'm thinking about. What do you, how do you think about AI in this space? I think about it. Everything that's can be an improvement to the overall food system as eliminating waste. I think the biggest thing that we can do with artificial intelligence is to put it on how do we reduce waste? How do we reduce the, i call 'em like the black holes in the food system where you grow something, there's a certain amount of waste on the farm that's a black hole.
45:56You get to a distribution center, there's some waste there. Black hole, if we were just to eliminate all of those black holes, or at least minimize them as much as possible with, I would say probably intuitive ordering Predictive analytics around predictive Analytics, Right? Ordering, yeah. Like how many, how, what kind, how much business you're going to get based off of these trends.
46:20Like that kind of analysis and analytics are the things that I think we should push to get AI to work on. The creative piece is if you have more to work with, yes. That, the chat GBT can put out a recipe, do will we know it's gonna be good? Is it going, what is, what is it taking into account for that?
46:49So I think AI is important. You have to direct it in the right way, you know? Yeah. Because direct it to the problem Food that aren't intuitive, right? the magic of the human brain is that you can just take two disparate ideas and bring them together and maybe even like force it to work. But when you think about I think one of my favorite things that surprised me was a peanut butter and jelly with sriracha cheeseburger.
47:19And I was like, there's no way this is gonna be good, but more of a curiosity, right? Right. And I was like, holy macro, this is actually pretty good. Because what you've done is you've taken a very simple concept, but it actually hits on some ethnic flavors, right? When you think about bringing in, spice and peanut butter and Mm-Hmm. Some berry notes and all that stuff, and you bring it in.
47:38There's, it's really not that wild, but it's not that direct line. I think there's still that human element that has to be there. Yeah. Yeah. and I think, everything that you can do to keep the creative people being creative and let automate as much as you can with everything else you're gonna have a better experience, in my opinion. Okay. Two more questions from the audience.
48:05One is, what is your favorite galley feature? I have a guess, but I want to hear what you say. for me, it's our just straight up production workflow. it was like the core of what I wanted to see done with it. And, I remember when I was an advisor for Galley for a long time before I joined full time and I was watching them from afar and I was, at the time I was working for Comcast and Philadelphia running that food program, and I saw like the final kind of product that was being put out, and I was like, oh my God, they did exactly what I had envisioned and I had this like thing in my mind for years, and they captured it perfectly, but just the ability to say, here's my menu.
48:59Here's how many people I'm think I'm going to serve. Hit a button and automatically scales all your recipes, all your orders, all your prep guides. That it, that's the first thing that I thought was the point where like, this is gonna work. This is gonna be life changing for so many people. That kind of work took me hours per week in the past changing all that if I needed to.
49:28And now it's literally click of a button done. Well, there's so much baked into the technology from understanding what the unit conversions are, understanding what a canonical unit is for your items, integrating those items with your vendors, assigning the pricing to it, having that pricing flow into your food costing. when you say scaling a recipe, it's not just, okay, how many onions do I need to put into it?
49:50It's all of these other downstream implications that a lot of folks, might not think about it first blush, and then you're having to go back, and uncover or re-engineer or, sometimes back into your food cost. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we Made your existence, here's How much it cost, and that's how much the food cost was, after the fact. And that's just that's the way that the industry is running in a lot of ways.
50:16Like, you can take a good guess, but it's not gonna be accurate all the time, you know? so yeah, I mean the, and until the other thing to mention there is like density, conversions, nutritionals, things like that, it's just like a drop of a hat easy. We, back for so long, people were like, can we get the nutritional on this? And we're like, No. Nope.
50:38Just not even, not even no thought about it. Just like, no, we can't, not really. we can't, but we can, we can capture all that information now, which is really cool. Well, it's nice too that the rest of the ecosystem has started to digitize itself as well, you know? Yeah. You can get a hundred million. They Had to, like, based off of like what was happening in, from our consumers, people started to care about it.
51:01More people, will care about what's in their food. They know that they, I don't, they're allergies, all of that to the, it's just, it's, it's, the industry is changing because people are making it change from the consumer side. And I think there's this, the opportunity to continue to push it forward from the producer side, from the chef side too. we're reacting, we're not being proactive.
51:27And I think one of the things about Galley, which I really appreciate both being here and as a super user of Galley on my own is that push for innovation and proactivity of this could be better. Absolutely. And, it enables the chefs to take a creative challenge rather than roll their eyes at something that, not that long ago, you or I might be working in a kitchen and it's like, Hey, we have to make a vegetarian option, and you go, Ugh. Right. Yeah, totally.
52:03Now it's, oh, I need a vegetarian, a gluten-free, and I need a couple of other, dietary restraints complimented. And I think with the availability, the information and the ability to manipulate what happens in the kitchen so quickly, now we can roll up our sleeves and be like, challenge accepted. Right? And you go off totally, and you, and you take it from a completely different angle rather than a burden.
52:26Yeah. Which is what it felt like traditionally when I was growing up in kitchens. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a exact right way to put it of, it's a burden to have to do these things when you want to make this type of food, but you've got these customers that need this variety of items and, just keeping all that, keeping track of all that is can be incredibly difficult.
52:52Again, if you have, you have a vegan section, you've got a vegetarian section, maybe you have a raw section, how do you, how do you keep all those recipes together? Or, you're doing an event, you're like, I need a gluten free one. And you're like, okay, cool. Do I think about it? Do I put something together on the fly or do I go reference the information that I've already captured?
53:15Absolutely. Well thanks Tim. I see ahead now. I appreciate the acknowledgement and the follow up there. Hopefully we answered your questions. I think we did. there was one last question I wanted to address about integrations, which I think we'll speak to a little bit more of the technical prowess that Benji brings into this whole ecosystem. It all started with that data model and making sure that we got the food data correct, using recipes as a base and then bolting on these integrations.
53:47We might talk about open APIs and some technical jargons, so I don't want to necessarily get too deep into the weeds with that, but all that to me says flexibility integratability, right? Being able to centralize and decouple some things so that you can bring in, whatever systems you need. how do you think about integrations here and the value add that brings?
54:09It, the more we can make the tools talk to each other, the more streamlined the operation is going to be. If you have your purveyors that they know what their prices are, they're getting you a certain price. Are they quoting you that price? Are you getting updates weekly from them? Are you taking that pricing off of invoices as you get it? Which is, after the fact you've already purchased it's here.
54:38I paid more than I thought I was gonna pay for it. Oops, I have to go back and redo all that work. Right? If we can just integrate directly with your purveyor, you're gonna see live price updates in the system real time. And I think those kinds of things are where we like to push to make sure that we can make that as streamlined as possible. I think it's a, it's incredibly important that the more we can get systems to talk to each other within the food world, the less of those waste black holes we'll get over time.
55:11We're gonna have to unpack more of those wasteful black holes in another episode of Nate and Jason talking galley. Right. Question popped up here. Pertinent to the integration conversation. What purveyors do you integrate with currently? a lot of the big ones Cisco, US Foods, PFG I don't have a complete list off the top of my head, but if if they have an electronic system, we can most likely set up an EDI connection with them.
55:43Going back to that flexibility and integratability of galley with all of your different solutions out there. Yeah, I mean flexibility is one that you have to be flexible in this business. Right. And a lot of the tools that we've had in the past just are not flexible. Well Nate, you have been incredibly gracious with your time. I know this is coming off of the tail end of a family trip that you made, so I appreciate you making time for us and the audience at large.
56:09It sounds like everybody out in Zoom land enjoyed it and this will be available recorded for your friends and family that didn't get to make it at home. So we'll let you know when the recording's available. Nate, any other closing thoughts before we send everybody back off into the wild? No, thanks everyone for showing up. Great questions and yeah, go out there and do great things in the food world.
56:33That's right. See you at the National Restaurant Show, my friend. Cheers. Good Bye.