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Controlling food costs in an independent restaurant is a constant challenge for owners, and there is a long list of startups like MarginEdge, OneOrder, TouchBistro, PreciTaste, ConverseNow, Fudo, Owner.com with their solutions.
Ziti app shows food price insights. Image Credits: shut up
Ziti co-founder Dante DiCicco is approaching this problem, but in a unique way: as a restaurateur. In the year He watched his parents’ Italian restaurant locations shrink during the 2007–2008 recession, and now sees the global pandemic taking a similar toll on restaurants.
When he opened a new location for his family restaurant and acquired all the food suppliers, this process required technology when DCICO hit.
Fortunately, he knew a little about that. An executive at Snap, leading the company’s global revenue growth, he used that knowledge to co-develop Zitti with Eric Benz, founder of real estate marketplace CREXi, to put independent restaurants on par with, technologically, large chains.
The result is a payment software platform that streamlines transactions between restaurants and food vendors with payment, price comparison and vendor locator tools.
“Food price optimization is the future of the restaurant business,” he told TechCrunch. “A lot of new technology is focused on ordering and inventory management, but what’s sorely lacking is the right business intelligence to help restaurants make smarter purchasing decisions. That’s a big part of our mission.”
Ziti will launch in March 2022 after taking $4 million in pre-seed funding in late 2021. DiChico’s Restaurant and Family Restaurants were the first beta customers.
In the past two months, the company has been seeing very good sales traction for the product — $150 per restaurant location per month — and “as we ramp up our sales efforts,” DiCicco said.
“Our goal to save money on their food costs is above and beyond that amount, so it’s been incredibly well received. “We’ve had a significant conversion rate from our pilot group to customers.”
The company is now back with a $3.5 million seed round from Ocean Ventures and Serena Ventures with Crossbeam, its pre-seed investor, also participating. In total, the company has raised $7.5 million since DiCicco and Benz began working on the company in 2019.
The money will be used to develop artificial intelligence and more automation into the technology that will soon be added to the platform. One of DCICO’s goals is to be able to show price changes in real time and then use AI to predict how a particular product will sell in the next year.
Meanwhile, Ziti is currently focused on the Southern California and Chicago markets and is also eyeing Austin as a new market, DiCicco said.
“The company’s next steps are expanding into new markets, but we are taking a city-by-city approach,” he added. That will be important as we build strength on the restaurant and supplier side to have more market knowledge and therefore more pricing information.
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