Meredith is the CEO of Empower Delivery. The company’s software combines the consumer journey, the product journey, and the logistics journey into one integrated piece of software. The software enables all restaurants to profitably and sustainably serve the growing consumer demand for delivered meals. Meredith is also the co-author of “Delivering the Digital Restaurant,” a book that explores the world of off-premise food and the massive disruption facing American restaurants through...

Seasoned is the only social community exclusively for service industry workers. The app allows hospitality workers to connect and share insights and experiences. It’s also a job listing resource that connects restaurants looking for staff members with potential employees looking for work. Traditional hiring websites aren’t well suited for hourly jobs and careers in the hospitality industry. Seasoned solves that. When it comes to hiring, the hospitality industry faces challenges from other...

Thanx is a leading loyalty and guest engagement platform for restaurants. The company, founded by Zach Goldstein in 2011, helps businesses embrace digital purchasing, capture greater customer data, and take action on that information to personalize guest engagement. Restaurants can take a page from the Delta playbook – which includes the potential for free first class upgrades (a perk that costs nothing to Delta) – including the use of secret menu items. Loyalty programs should not be...

Native Foods is a fast-casual vegan restaurant chain that operates in California, Oregon, Colorado, and Illinois. Carin has held leadership positions at Red Robin, Applebee’s and Wendy’s. Dealing with an unpredictable supply chain is the biggest challenge for Native Foods Native Foods is careful to only use healthy ingredients and avoid ingredients found on many “do not eat” lists. Native Foods locations gravitate toward the coasts where vegan and plant-based trends are more popular. The...

Adenah Note about escaping war torn country. Today, she’s the owner of four IHOP franchises and founder of four restaurants of her own, including three locations of fast casual, farm-to-table, soul food restaurant Cornbread and her newest dining venture, Urban Vegan. Adenah opened her first IHOP in Irvington Township, New Jersey at the age of 27, making her one of the youngest IHOP franchisees in the country. Today, Adenah is the second largest employer in Irvington Township. Adenah’s...

Olga is the founder of OLLO Restaurant Loyalty which offers expertise in loyalty and CRM for restaurant chains. The company’s key principle is simple: find out what your guests already like, then give them more of that – at scale – to drive sales. Email segmentation works best for brands with larger email databases in excess of 25,000 contacts. When segmenting for clients, Olga prefers to focus on product preference, dayparting, and spend preference. Loyalty programs can be an effective way...

Liquid Death is a canned water company founded in 2017 with the tagline “Murder your thirst”. The company calls itself “a funny water company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do” with a mission to “make people laugh and get more of them to drink more water more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution.” Much of the water industry is founded on concepts of purity and seeing that purity in the water, which is why nearly all bottled water is packaged in single-use plastic...

Wellspring is a health & wellness gift box and care package company providing turnkey solutions for human resources professionals across the globe. The employee-focused kits provide everything from better-for-you snacks to locally curated, specialty brands. Wellspring’s process starts with a frank discussion with employers to identify areas of improvement to develop a wellness plan that works for the employer and its employees. To create its wellness kits, Wellspring also partners with...

Adentro is a marketing solution designed to increase guest foot traffic in restaurants. The platform pairs with a restaurant’s in-store WiFi network to help businesses better understand and market to their customers based on customer visit behavior. Adentro works similar to how a tracking pixel on a company’s website might identify information about a site visitor and their interests. Using WiFi, restaurants are able to do the same thing because the WiFi is passively detecting devices every...

Full Course is a restaurant development and investment firm that incubates and accelerates emerging fast casual restaurant brands, focusing on restaurants less than five years old with 1-10 locations. Full Course has a special focus on businesses run by women, minorities and immigrants. Cleanliness and creating an appealing dining environment is important. Restaurant owners need to make scheduled cleanings – including annual deep cleanings – a priority. Full Course works with designers to...

Shuckin’ Shack Oyster Bar was founded in 2007 in Carolina Beach, North Carolina, and found success with its laid-back attitude and a menu of oysters, lobster rolls, and low country boils. Today, the restaurant has expanded to 16 locations across North Carolina,  South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, and Florida, Jonathan joined Shuckin’ Shack in 2014 and quickly rose to the rank of CEO. In that role, Jonathan got the bar and grill off the ground as a franchise ownership opportunity. Jonathan...

Papa Gino's is a restaurant chain based in Massachusetts that specializes in traditional thin crust pizza along with pasta, subs, salads, and a variety of appetizers. As of 2022, there are 81 Papa Gino's locations in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Kevin attributes his 10-year NFL career to helping him develop leadership and management skills that he uses today. Papa Gino’s has an immense amount of love and respect from its New England fan base. That passion is...

Simply Salad includes five locations in Los Angeles and was founded on the idea that everyone should have access to healthy, fresh, flavorful, affordable food in a way that is fast and convenient. Daniel was formerly the head of finance and development at Popeyes, where he was part of the team that led Popeyes’ entry into the famous chicken sandwich wars. Simply Salad has grown by making salads convenient and accessible and by adding locations to communities not typically associated with...

El Arroyo is a Tex-Mex restaurant in Austin, Texas. Established in 1975, the restaurant is known for its assortment of Mexican cuisine including tacos, fajitas, guacamole and tortilla chips in generous portions. Ellis and his wife, Paige, have been the owners of El Arroyo since 2012. El Arroyo’s most famous marketing tactic is its marquees, which house witty messages updated on a daily basis. The marquees have driven social media success for El Arroyo, with a few thousand followers when the...

VROMO is the only delivery management software solution tailored to the restaurant and food industry. VROMO’s foundation is its customizable and intuitive dispatch technology which allows customers to manage their deliveries and drivers seamlessly from a cloud-based system. When it comes to new clients, VROMO is honest about the cost of the product and whether the restaurant is big enough to realize a profit while using the service. If the ROI isn’t there, the VROMO team will let the...

Kickfin was founded in 2017 and allows restaurants to send tips directly to employee bank accounts without the use of cash or pay cards. Kickfin's instant tip payments eliminate bank runs, cuts labor costs, and reduces the risk of theft.The idea for Kickfin came to Brian and his co-founder partner Justin when they observed an armored car dropping off cash at a restaurant in San Francisco. The cash was being used to pay employee tips at the end of every shift with money that traditionally...

David has been in the hospitality industry for 32 years. He started in the industry as a dishwasher and is now the owner of DASH Hospitality Group, a management and consulting company for start-up and existing restaurants, hotels, and other food and beverage services. Before starting DASH Hospitality Group, David held the role of COO for the Buckhead Life Restaurant Group overseeing 9 restaurants in Georgia and 4 in South Florida. Technology plays an important role in restaurants, but human...

Founded in 2019, Koala is an industry-leading platform that creates premium, customizable apps for restaurants to offer digital ordering. Koala provides a premium experience for more than 4,000 restaurant locations nationwide. Digital orders with Koala lead to higher conversion rates than a white-label solution and an increase of up to 20% in average order value. Creating a seamless, streamlined online ordering experience that’s free of confusion and obstacles is critical for the customer...

As senior director of marketing, Richard led a very successful evolution of the Austin-based Tacodeli brand. He followed that success story with a stint as VP of marketing for Freebirds World Burrito and now works as a fractional CMO and consultant. Richard has spent time in agencies and client-side. He said people at agencies tend to have a more specialized expertise (in his case, brand strategy) and are spread across multiple clients in multiple industries. On the client side, he’s focused...

Flatbread Grill is a fresh casual Turkish Mediterranean concept conceived and developed by the Esendemir sisters in 2007. The menu features a diverse mix of soups, gourmet salads, sandwiches, platters, and kids items all paired with specialty flatbreads baked daily on-premises. The Esendemir sisters also developed a spinoff brand, Thumb Bread – a versatile, Turkish bread available in stores. Gonca and her sisters knew that introducing Turkish food into the community would not be easy....

Tom is a restauranteur at heart who co-founded Opsanalitica, an operations data platform that helps restaurants manage and measure human activity and avoid missing the “little things” that can impact profitability. Armed with that data, restaurant owners and managers can identify and remediate issues, in real-time, before they affect the business negatively. The data and KPI’s that are important to track differs for each restaurant. Data available to restaurant owners has included sales data,...

Christopher is the founder and executive director of Bottleshare, a fundraising and fund distribution nonprofit organization for the craft beverage industry that provides emergency funds to members of the craft beverage industry when they experience extreme hardships that prevent them from working or producing an income. Christopher was inspired to create Bottleshare when he received support from friends and family members after he was badly injured in a car accident. From that moment, he’s...

Myles is the Vice President of Operations at Wing Zone, a restaurant with nearly 80 locations in 25 states that offers “bigger, better, flavor-fuzed wings, plus burgers, tenders & more.” The COVID pandemic has increased the pressure on restaurant owners and managers to implement programs that reward employees and boost employee morale. It’s important for restaurant leadership to sometimes roll up their sleeves and work alongside employees and engage with employees at the ground...

Alistair is a partner at KitchenSync, finance, HR, marketing, and the advisory team behind some of the fastest-growing independent restaurant groups. He also owns seven restaurants in the San Francisco bay area. Most restaurant owners have a culinary background or are the first or second-generation owners and they might not have a formal business education or business experience. KitchenSync provides services that many restaurant management teams might be missing. A lot of people in the...

Chad is an absolute pioneer when it comes to cryptocurrency and NFTs in the restaurant space. In this episode, he takes the time to break down the basics of the blockchain, crypto and NFTs, how restaurants can capitalize, and what the future looks like in this space. It's a brave new world and Chad's company Devour is one you'll hear about more and more. Chad has spent his entire career in the restaurant technology sector. He and his fellow co-founders at Devour began paying attention to...