Making Ordering Easier & More Efficient For Your Restaurant With Warner Siebert (Ep 143)

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Making Ordering Easier & More Efficient For Your Restaurant With Warner Siebert

Welcome to the Running Restaurants. We're bringing you the tips, tools, and techniques you need to make your restaurant more profitable and successful. I'm your host, Jaime Oikle. We have a great episode featuring Warner Siebert, Senior VP of Sales and Marketing at Cut+Dry, an app for making restaurant operations more efficient.

Warner, welcome. How are things where you are?

Things are good. I'm in the New York Metro area. Luckily, things have been pretty calm around here. We've been in an extended quarantine for the most part. I have three unvaccinated kids at home, but things are good. I’ve had a great summer so far.

You have to be careful. We have some older kids. We got the older two vaccinated. The younger still isn’t. It’s a challenge out there. It brings me to a point. We are heading right into September 2021. COVID is still a giant concern for restaurants and for everybody. We wish it had gone away, but COVID remains a big issue.

Supply issues for restaurants are also a big issue, but the biggest issue for restaurants is the labor crisis. We're seeing a shortage of people. We're seeing it where I am, outside of Orlando, Florida. I see it when I travel. I'm sure you see it where you are as well. Before we get into what you do specifically, what are you seeing out there in the marketplace for clients dealing with all these ongoing challenges?

The Labor Crisis In The Restaurant Industry

It's an interesting time with everything going on. We are seeing that restaurants are a little bit more open to technology than they may have been in the past. A lot of restaurants have been I don’t want to say stigmatized but turned off by front-of-house tech over the past 10 or 15 years. A lot of the reservation platforms and order delivery platforms that are all consumer-facing are tolling people on the way in and tolling food on the way out. Restaurants have been pretty hesitant to adopt the technology. We’re seeing that restaurants are starting to look at technology in a different light and realizing that not all technology is so taxing from a financial standpoint. There's a lot of tech out there that can help them run a more profitable business.

Restaurants are beginning to view technology differently, recognizing that not all of it is financially burdensome. In fact, many tech solutions can help them run a more profitable business.

Adoption Of Technology In Restaurants

If you went back in time 10 or 20 years ago, tech was a big giant like, "What the heck is going on? How do I make it work for my restaurant?" It was very confusing. Only the big companies could do it. Fast forward to today, app-based, cloud-based services, some stuff is free, $19 or $29 a month. Everything is accessible, which has been great for restaurants. We have seen with COVID a shift to technology that streamlines different parts of the operation.

With the delivery, a lot of people learned so much about delivery over the last year. They're learning how to cut costs. We're going to talk about what you do on the back-of-the-house stuff. It's been a lot of stuff. I do echo your thoughts that people are more receptive to it because they know it can shrink a percentage here and 2% there. You have to fight for those percentages. It’s crazy.

If you don't do that, you're going to be in trouble. Let’s give you a little bit more background because you’ve been with this company for a little bit, but you’ve also been in the restaurant tech space for years at this point. What have you seen change? You’ve seen more than I have over the last 5 or 10 years. What do you think?

A lot has changed. I got into the restaurant technology industry back in 2010. This is my second go-around at killing clipboards, which we’ll get into in a minute. My first company was called BuzzTable, which was acquired by Cisco Food Service. We were replacing pen-and-paper clipboards and hockey-puck pagers, and notifying people when their tables were ready. It was a very novel idea back then. Pretty standard for a lot of casual dining restaurants now.

It’s little things like that. Cloud-based point of sale wasn’t a thing back in 2010. When I joined Cisco, we merged with another company, and the whole platform was called Cake. The Cake platform from Cisco merged front-of-house tech with waitlist, table management, reservations, cloud-based point of sale, integrated ordering, digital payments, and everything that you need in front-of-house.

All of that didn’t exist when I started in restaurant tech. Now it more or less become ubiquitous in the industry to see Toast POS systems and Square. Everybody has a way to very quickly order and pay, which is a great step forward for the industry. I still see a ton of cash registers out there too. I still laugh that some laggards in the industry still exist.

Can you imagine that? I do see it. I'm in Orlando, Florida, and we've seen some of the stuff here. I was telling Warner before this interview that I took a trip up his way and I saw a lot more tech in restaurants up there. We were in Pittsburgh, Philly, New York, and all that. I saw a lot of the “scan your menu to order” and “scan your receipt to pay” stuff. I’ve interviewed folks who do that stuff. I love that idea of time savings and so forth. For me as a customer, contactless for germ considerations.

I saw a lot of restaurants using that stuff. I am seeing it more and more, and it's getting easier and easier to use. Everybody, including myself and you, has our phones or a $1,200 computer sitting in our pockets. We can do all that stuff. Let’s get into what you do at Cut+Dry. You’re back-of-the-house focused. Tell me what’s going on. We can even go out to the website and keep it in the background. If you want to go somewhere else, let me know. Before that, what’s the skinny?

The skinny is we are creating a platform for restaurants that allows them to take control of their order management process. Our app is free, which is pretty unique in the restaurant technology world. Restaurants can create an account and sign up in a matter of seconds on our website, where they can download our mobile app and create an account.

The beauty of our app is that it's one single app where you can place any order from any supplier on our platform. You add all the various vendors, distributors, and suppliers that you order from, and we will create an order guide for you. If you're using an online interface from one of the big broadliners, you enter your username and password, and we'll pull out your order history and put that into a structured order guide.

For smaller regional distributors that may not have an online ordering interface, all you have to do is scan a photo of a recent invoice. We'll use some OCR tech to pull that off and put it in the same structured order guide format. You have one app. If you're ordering from 5 or 6 different suppliers multiple times per week, you have your order guides in your pocket. No more physical checklists on a clipboard, stacks of papers, or creating your par levels. All of that is built right into the app.

Cut+Dry's Unified Ordering Platform

With every restaurant publishing the need for a cook, a chef, a staff, and wait, the first thing that jumps out to me is they can save time with something like this that everybody would be interested in. Is that one of the biggest things people are talking about for you?

Ordering is one portion of what we do, but for the current labor crisis, this is the biggest value that our platform offers. I can quote numerous case studies, but for a three-location restaurant group in New York City that's ordering from 4 to 5 different suppliers, three times per week per location, we’re able to cut their ordering time in half.

It takes them 40 minutes to go around, do their inventory check, get their par levels, get their order teed up, pick up the phone, place a phone call, and send an email or a text message. All of the different processes that you have to go through to place a single order take about 40 minutes per order. When you cut that down to 20 minutes, that restaurant was saving 60 hours per month across all of their locations. Give that time back to your kitchen staff and allow them to do other higher-value actions within the back of the house.

When you reduce the time spent placing and taking orders, you give that time back to your kitchen staff, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks in the back of the house.

That's an amazing amount of time when you think about it. I'm going to scan it down. You can tell me where to stop. It looks like the main things you talk about are this order, pay, and cash.

Cut+Dry's Cash Program

Let's talk about pay and cash because those are pretty unique to us as well. Order, we've already gone over it. That's the primary value that most restaurants see right out of the gate. Cash is attached to ordering. I'll talk about that next. We have partnered with a number of major manufacturers. The cash program puts money back in the restaurant operator's pocket. Not only is it free, but we're putting cash back into an owner's bank account.

What we do is we have a data structuring engine on the back end that will find items that are reward-eligible. We will deposit cash rewards into your Cut+Dry cash wallet in the app. That is deposited in a number of different ways. There are order-and-earn opportunities, which means you need to continue ordering an item that has rewards available from manufacturers.

The second is switch-and-earn, where we will find comparable items. If you're buying a private-label mayonnaise, we can offer a Kraft Heinz mayonnaise, for example. If Kraft Heinz is a partner on our platform, they will offer an incentive for you to switch that product. If you switch that product, you will get a cash reward back.

We're also about to launch a sample-and-earn opportunity. A lot of chefs will want a sample of that comparable product. We will cash back for the lowest unit of measure for that product. You can sample the product. What the restaurant has to do is fill out a quick little survey on what their product sampling was. All that information goes back to the manufacturer, and then you get the amount back in cash for that item you sampled. Lastly, we have refer-and-earn, which is our referral program. If a restaurant refers another restaurant to Cut+Dry, they'll get a $50 cash bonus for helping us grow our platform. There are a lot of different ways to earn cash on the platform. Not anybody else is doing it like we are out there. We're pretty proud of that.

I'll head into pay. Pay is very similar to order. It is a universal payment platform. You can pay any vendor invoice with ACH or with a credit card, which is valuable for any restaurant that wants to keep additional cash on hand, extend their payment terms, or do it yourself for 30 days. It's very simple. You pull out your phone and snap a photo of the invoice. We use that same OCR tech to pull all the information off. You select your payment method, and then Cut+Dry takes care of the rest. We'll drop a physical check in the mail, and mail it to the vendor on your behalf with an actual printed photograph of the invoice. The vendor knows exactly who the payment is coming from.

Is there anything else on the homepage you would want me to pop to?

That's about it. It's great that you're giving some visuals here. We're in the process of onboarding more and more manufacturers. We're partnered with IFMA, the International Food Service Manufacturers Association. They've been a fantastic partner that has gotten a number of very large brands participating in the Cut+Dry cash program.

Everybody would agree. There are these rewards floating around in the background that are eligible. It’s like being at the grocery store. Sometimes there's a BOGO and sometimes there’s not. You want to take advantage of it. You feel like you sometimes miss those opportunities. It’s great to see all that in one place. I had a couple of other notes about technology and the inventory process. You talk about ordering and making it easy. Do you give any tips or thoughts on how folks, as they receive the stuff, can make sure everything is working out, and doing inventory well? What do you think?

Supplier Chat And Order History Management

A supplemental feature of the ordering component is the check-in functionality. Once an order is delivered from any given supplier, you can go into your app, select order history, and find the order that you placed with the supplier. There’s a lot of great information in that order history. We also have a supplier chat functionality. A general manager, an owner, or a head chef can look at all of the interactions that their staff has had with all of their suppliers in one single place.

They can see who placed the order and what items were ordered, which is great. If somebody places the order and then the order is delivered, you can go back and have that digital record. Once the order hits your back-of-house, you can pull out that app and check in individual items. You can make sure that all of the items you ordered were delivered or if there were damaged items. If you ordered four cases and only received three, you can very simply select in the application that you’d like to get a credit from the supplier for the specific amount that is missing or damaged, and then click one button to send the credit request back to the supplier. It's a great way to keep tabs on ensuring that all of the items you ordered are in-house.

I will bring it to the consumer side for a second because we did some grocery ordering here at the house. It’s the same frustrations that you have. You checked in everything. Did you get everything? In this case, they screwed up. They missed about 40% of the order. You're like, "What the hell?" I hope this is where your tech can be good. My wife had to spend about two hours going back and forth trying to deal with it. In this case, it was like $80. It’s annoying to spend time dealing with that. Does the tech help that process when something goes awry?

It could not be easier. It's a toggle of “Yes, I received it. No, I did not. Would you like to send a credit? Yes, I would.” You can select the reason for why you're sending the credit. It takes a matter of seconds. It does make things a lot easier once those orders are delivered. Additionally, even if you're not interested in paying the invoice, there is still value in scanning the invoice. You can keep digital records of all those invoices and easily share them with accounting. No more stacks of dirty invoices on a clipboard. All of it is stored in the cloud and accessible to anybody within your restaurant to whom you give access.

Big help there too. One of the things I noticed on your site while poking around was a focus on independent operators. Talk about their specific challenges as they relate to this compared to a big chain that may have more systems in place or whatnot. What do you see as one of the main differences?

I think you said it. There are not many systems in place. I was the general manager at an ice cream store in my early twenties, throughout my college years. The order-placing and order-receiving process has not changed much. It was paper and pen, phone calls, and emails. Once the orders were received, it was the same process. Not much has changed there in twenty years. A lot of the large chains have procurement technology and teams. They have that dialed in. For the independent operator, a lot of times, the chef is the owner and the front-of-house manager.

For people wearing multiple hats and for people who are short-staffed, it’s a great tool to allow you to do more with the existing staff that you have on hand. The same thing goes for the trade rebate dollars that are out there. A lot of the larger groups will either be part of GPOs or have contracted pricing. They’ll be getting big chunks of trade rebates directly from distributors or manufacturers.

For those wearing multiple hats or dealing with staff shortages, our app is an excellent tool to help you accomplish more with your existing team.

Independents don’t see a lot of that. You mentioned that there are a lot of trade rebate dollars out there, but it's a pretty cumbersome process. A lot of times, you have to download a form, print it out, fill it in, and send it in the mail with proof of purchase. We have all of that proof of purchase built into our application. We make the trade dollars that are out there much easier for the independent restaurant to capture.

I love that aspect of it. Let's go towards wrap. I'm going to put the website back up here, CutAndDry.com. Anything else you do? Are you big on social, like Instagram or LinkedIn? Where are you at?

Wrap-Up And Where To Find Cut+Dry

We took a little different approach to our social channels. We are active on Instagram. We have a channel called @Deconstructed_dish. We decided to highlight chefs and dishes and do the backstory on how those dishes were conceived. We deconstruct them and do interviews with chefs. We got that going about a month and a half ago. We had a national launch at the beginning of July. We're only 60 days out of the gate of offering this platform to restaurants around the US.

We were primarily in the Bay Area. We focused on working with a few hundred restaurants in the Bay Area where we could have direct access to learn from and get feature requests. Right after the 4th of July, we took the lock off the door. We used to make people fill out a lead form. We'd reach out to them and set up an account, but now we've created a very easy self-service onboarding flow.

Once you create the account, you're taken through product tutorials. We have a live in-app chat. Our customer support team is there to assist with onboarding. We'll guide you through adding a supplier, creating your first order guide, and placing that first order. That's all relatively new, along with our social approach. The only other thing I'll mention is that we are partnering with a number of distributors. We have a quality premium shopping experience for our supplier partners.

We're partnered with a handful of distributors, primarily in California. We're in the process of reaching out to other distributors across the US. We take it a step further than just ordering. We work with suppliers to photograph and create what we like to say is an Amazon-like shopping experience, where we feel the industry is headed in this direction. Not only will you have product photos but we also have a 360-degree photography device where you can zoom in and look at the marbling on various proteins. You can spin the item.

We have very rich product details as well, attributes that allow people to filter and search an entire distributor's catalog, bone-in, bone-out for proteins. You can search for any item. The value for restaurants there is that they don't have to rely on the sales rep to be that source of information. They can start shopping on their own like they're used to on Amazon and all these other e-commerce sites, and add products to their catalog.

We're seeing that it's a benefit for both restaurants and suppliers. Restaurants have that slick shopping experience, and suppliers love it because restaurants are discovering new products they didn’t even know they had. We are seeing supplier revenue go up because restaurants are finding new items, adding them to their order guides, and it's showing up on the truck the next time that supplier makes the delivery.

The best part is that our app was designed with ease of use in mind. We often hear from owners that even their technophobic or less tech-savvy staff have no trouble using it.

A couple of notes there. First of all, I like the Instagram approach. I'll have to check that out. I like digging into the chefs and getting the background there. That’s good. The premium shopping experience, we're all used to it, whether it's Amazon or elsewhere. Getting the full details and pictures, and cycling through them adds to it. That looks good. I want to try that versus boring text-based lists and click here to order. I like that as well, so I made a note. The other thing you talked about is being available anywhere. I think I saw on the site that you can be anywhere in the US at least and get started. It takes a couple of days to get running. Is it quicker than that?

It's quicker than that. If you want to manually build an order guide, which you easily can, you can create an account and start ordering from any supplier in a matter of minutes. If you have an integrated supplier or any of the large broadliners, we will log in. It’s like what Mint does with financial institutions, and we'll pull all your information in. That takes under an hour. I think we're closer to 5 to 10 minutes, where we'll create that first integrated order guide.

Otherwise, if you are uploading a physical invoice and using our OCR tech, we turn it around in 24 hours. We're looking to condense that even quicker as well. At the most, you're up and running in 24 hours for the most part. The great part is our app was built with ease of use in mind. It's great when we hear from owners that even their technophobic or technically illiterate staff has no problem picking it up. That's a great job by our product and engineering team for designing such a simple application that does so much.

Technology challenged is the word. I appreciate it. That was Warner Siebert of Cut+Dry. Make sure to check them out at CutAndDry.com. For more great restaurant marketing, operations, service, people, and tech tips, be sure to stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. We'll see you next time. Thanks much.

Thanks, Jaime.

Important Links

• CutAndDry.com