Having raised $2 million in seed money, Foodetective plans to provide a tool that dives deeper into payments data and social media feedback, while also delivering order and bookings management, human resources tools and other key functions.
The dashboard allows management of all integrations and tools through a single channel. The integrations come from more than 300 vendor partners such as Square, Stripe, Uber Eats, Okestro and iZettle, as well as hundreds of wholesalers including Nestle and other food manufacturing companies.
"Foodetective is sort of an Amazon for the restaurant industry with this dashboard," said Richard Crone, industry analyst and chief executive of the payments consulting firm Crone Consulting LLC. "In the same way Amazon helps every little retailer that wants to sell on e-commerce, Foodective is the white-label Amazon to the restaurant industry because of the fulfillment of the entire restaurant infrastructure."
The dashboard allows a restaurant owner to choose which payment provider it wants to use, as well as other services such as online ordering and marketing tools. It all provides flexibility that Foodetective could not provide before the new dashboard design.
In addition to a business overview, the dashboard delivers advanced reports through artificial intelligence that pinpoint payment types, sales, budgets, employee schedules and costs, and food supplies and costs.
"The restaurant owner can see the customer behavior on the most important payment forms out there, such as cash, credit cards and other forms like payment vouchers, promotion sales, digital bank apps or maybe through PayPal ACH," said Andrea Tassistro, founder and CEO of Geneva, Swtizerland-based Foodetective.
"It can keep track of POS payments and mobile payments and it provides a lot of data in a way that a restaurant can understand what is paid for by which services at which times," Tassistro said.
Payments data can be analyzed to let restaurant owners know which payment methods are used the most, as well as details like how many customers paid with a Mastercard through a mobile phone, or how many paid in cash — all specific to the regions in which a restaurant might operate multiple locations, Tassistro added.
In today's restaurant management systems, understanding the payment methods and customer preferences is "sort of a gray zone," Tassistro explained. "It's not because the providers are not giving the information, it's more that restaurant owners don't have the time or knowledge to look at each solution independently and try to analyze what is happening with each," he said.
Competing providers would be reluctant to share information with each other, but do so with Foodetective, which works on behalf of the partners in getting restaurant owners who want sign up for Foodetective services to also sign up with one of the payment providers listed on the "integration hub" portion of the dashboard.
Foodetective manages data for clients, and provides key statistics within the dashboard, making it easier to analyze in real time.
"Data is the new secret sauce for success in the food service industry," Crone said. "The key ingredient is interpretative machine learning, because disjointed dashboards and lack of integration has been a recipe for poor service, lost orders and not being responsive to the
Understanding the payment data and the payment method mix allows a restaurant owner to establish pricing models not only for products, but for how to optimize their portfolio toward lower-cost remittances such as debit, Crone added.
"No other restaurant platform that I know of does that," Crone noted. "Certainly not with the old guard in POS systems, which remain stuck in old approaches."
In targeting medium-sized restaurants and smaller chains, Foodetective is currently serving more than 17,500 restaurants, bars and food-and-beverage companies across Europe, as well as 3,000 in the U.S.
The dashboard would also work for larger chains, so Foodetective is looking for that to be part of the equation as it advances the new unified API into more markets.
"The pandemic accelerated a cycle of accepting technology in the restaurant industry, where they were not really tech-savvy before," Tassistro said. "It's been an adoption of technical tools that was just immense."
At the beginning of the pandemic, Foodetective put together a sales campaign aimed at supporting restaurants with digital advancements.
"In two weeks, we registered more restaurant clients than we had done in the previous two years," Tassistro said.
The business model of working with the partners has helped drive the dashboard concept. For example, if a restaurant wants to set up a Foodetective account, they also have to set up a Stripe account.
"In that manner, we operate on behalf of Stripe as an acquisition tool," Tassistro said. "PayPal or Adyen or other providers can come to us and say to offer their services as well, and it enables the restaurant owner to choose the service they want or would like to use."
Similarly, food or beverage distributors such as Nestle or Coca-Cola can distribute the Foodetective product through a partnership. "It allows restaurant owners to order our product through these wholesalers," Tassistro said. "They indirectly sell our product and they benefit from that."
Those wholesale partners get a percentage of the sale, in the same manner Foodetective gets a percentage if a payment provider partner's service is obtained when a client is signing up for Foodetective.
The benefits of a plug-and-play technology for restaurant owners to select partner platforms they use in-house or to search services they might need, is not lost upon clients.
"Having to manage two locations, many tools and systems on a daily basis, Foodetective has transformed my business operations," Raphael Tamman, Molokai's founder and a Foodective client, said in a press release about the funding round. "I can now seamlessly and effortlessly manage all my platforms in one place."
Key clients using Foodetective services include Shiso Burger in Geneva, Neko Ramen in Paris and Tommy's Burgers in London.
Angel investors Serge Schoen, Flippo Catalano, Imai Jen La Plante and Charles Lorenceau fueled the Pre-A funding round.
