Managing food costs at an independent restaurant is a constant challenge for owners and has a long list of startups, like MarginEdge, an order, TouchBistro, PreciTaste, ConverseNow, blessing, Owner.comstep by step with their solutions.
Zitti’s app displays detailed information about food prices. Image credits: Zitti
ZittiDante DiCicco’s co-founder is tackling this, but from a unique perspective: as a restaurateur. He watched his parents’ Italian restaurant locations shrink during the economic downturn of 2007–2008 and now he is witnessing a global pandemic that Similar consequences for restaurants.
While opening a new location for his family restaurant and attracting all the caterers, that’s when DiCicco realized that the process required technology.
Luckily, he knows a little about that. As an executive at Snap who led the company’s international revenue growth, he leveraged that knowledge and partnered with Erek Benz, co-founder of real estate marketplace CREXi, to development of Zitti aims to put independent restaurants on an equal footing, technologically intelligent, on a large scale. shackles.
The result is a payment software platform that streamlines transactions between restaurants and caterers through payment tools, price comparison, and supplier discovery.
“Food price optimization is the future of the restaurant business,” he told TechCrunch. “Much of the emerging technology is focused on ordering and inventory management, but what is severely lacking is the actual business intelligence to help restaurants make smarter purchasing decisions. That is an important part of our mission.”
Zitti launched in March 2022 after receiving $4 million in seed funding by the end of 2021. DiCicco’s restaurant and his family’s restaurants were the first test customers.
Over the past two months, the company has started charging for its product — $150 per month, per restaurant location — and is seeing “really good sales traction as we ramp up our efforts.” its sales,” said DiCicco.
He added: “Our goal was to save money on their food costs more than that and ideally many times that, so it was very well received. “We had a significant amount of conversions from our test team to customers.”
The company is now back with $3.5 million in a seed round co-led by Oceans 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 with the company in 2019.
The funding will be implemented into technology development with additional automation and artificial intelligence to be added to the platform soon. One of DiCicco’s goals is to be able to show price changes in real time and then use AI to predict the price of a certain product over the coming year.
Meanwhile, Zitti is currently focusing on the Southern California and Chicago markets, and sees Austin as an emerging market, DiCicco said.
He added: “The company’s next steps are to expand into new markets, but we are taking a city-by-city approach. “That will be very important as we build density on both the restaurant and supplier side so that we can have more market intelligence and therefore more price information.”
