restaurant-operations
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Taylor Andersen and the Business Behind the Plate
His career runs from the dining room to the production floor. In Utah's food-business corridor, Taylor Andersen has made an operating life out of the details customers are never supposed to notice.
Rebel Foods took the restaurant out of the restaurant business
Faasos escaped punishing rents by moving dinner upstairs. Rebel Foods turned that experiment into a network of shared kitchens, food brands and a $1.4 billion valuation. Making the whole machine profitable is the harder course.
Fourth Put AI on the Schedule - Now It Wants to Run the Whole Restaurant
The hospitality software veteran already helps millions of workers clock in, swap shifts and count stock. Its bigger bet is that twenty-five years of back-office data can tell every restaurant manager what to do next.
Henry Nneji Built a Restaurant With 16 Menus. Then Came the Hard Part.
A failed marketplace, a family restaurant lesson and a stubborn Lagos kitchen led Henry Nneji to rethink food delivery. FoodCourt's 2026 pause now puts his operating philosophy to its sharpest test.
Shannon McNiel Is Building a Sports Bar for the $200,000 Friday
At Tom's Watch Bar, a quiet Wednesday can become a six-figure Friday. Shannon McNiel's answer is part forecasting, part choreography, and a stubborn belief that people come before concrete.
Justin Holmes Learned to Build Systems Where Shifts Get Messy
Before Justin Holmes sold restaurant operators on better scheduling, he had already lived the problem - at tables, in gyms, and inside a fast-growing ecommerce company. His career is a study in turning coordination headaches into systems people can actually use.
Kelly Esten Keeps Toast Close to the Table
A sales-floor education, a four-and-a-half-year detour through Europe, and years beside restaurant operators shaped an executive who treats marketing and operations as two views of the same customer.
Clique Hospitality
Clique Hospitality built a sizable business by making itself less famous than the rooms it runs. Now its venue-making machine is stretching from hidden cocktail bars to a 50,000-square-foot sports pool - and exporting the Las Vegas playbook without copying Las Vegas.
Arcos Dorados
Behind Latin America’s Big Macs sits a Montevideo company running 2,520 restaurants, a 115-million-user data engine and one of the region’s largest first-job machines. Its real product is consistency at continental scale.
Toast
Toast began with a stubbornly specific idea: restaurants deserved technology built for the rush. Now its software, payments, hardware and AI sit at the center of 180,000 locations - turning every order into a useful piece of operating data.
Vistify, Inc
Vistify, Inc is a Santa Ana, California restaurant-technology company whose flagship platform, vMenu, turns static digital menu boards into centrally controlled, software-defined menus for multi-unit and quick-service restaurant brands. The cloud platform lets operators design menus with a drag-and-drop Menu Builder, push changes to thousands of screens in real time, sync pricing with point-of-sale systems in under 30 seconds, and monitor what is actually displaying across every location. Founded in 2015 as Embed Digital and rebranded to Vistify in March 2025, the company serves brands including Craveworthy Brands, WaBa Grill, Urban Plates and Urbane Cafe, and is led by CEO Michael Mathieu.
Meadow AI
Meadow AI is a Seattle-based multimodal AI platform that gives restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical operations. By combining computer vision, natural language processing, and data from existing point-of-sale, labor, inventory, video, and audio systems, Meadow automates the manual 'secret shopper' audits that chains have long done by hand - continuously evaluating customer experiences and staff performance, then surfacing AI recommendations to lift revenue, tighten consistency, and reduce labor costs. The company emerged from stealth in November 2025 with $6M raised and more than $2.5M in contracted annual recurring revenue.
OrderOut
OrderOut is a Miami-based restaurant integration company that pipes orders from third-party delivery apps - Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, ChowNow and more - directly into a restaurant's point-of-sale system. Instead of a countertop crowded with buzzing tablets and mismatched printers, OrderOut gives operators a single queue and one dashboard, plus a developer API and an AI operations layer that POS companies and aggregators can resell under their own brand.
Thibault Le Conte
Thibault Le Conte is the founder, CEO and CTO of OrderOut, a Miami-based software company that funnels orders from UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub and other delivery apps straight into a restaurant's existing point-of-sale system, killing the tablet pileup that clutters kitchen counters. A computer-science engineer trained at EPITECH and UC Berkeley, he built roughly eight or nine companies before OrderOut, reusing the same core technology each time. OrderOut is deliberately bootstrapped, grown on a single $250,000 partner investment made during COVID and organic revenue since, and now runs a lean distributed team across Miami, Brazil, India, China, Ecuador and Mexico. His latest push moves OrderOut beyond integrations into restaurant finance, with same-day UberEats payouts and a delivery API that lets any business shop for the cheapest or fastest courier.
Expo
Expo is an AI platform for multi-unit restaurant operators that consolidates fragmented data from POS, inventory, labor, and guest-feedback systems into a single intelligent dashboard. Non-technical managers can ask their restaurant data questions in plain English and get answers - no analysts, no SQL, no Tableau build required. Founded by chef-turned-operator Will Pacio and tech veteran Dave Lu (the team formerly behind restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared), Expo connects to systems like Toast, Restaurant365, Crunchtime, Square, and DoorDash to automate reporting and surface operational insights for chains from QSR to fine dining.
Will Pacio
Will Pacio is the co-founder and CEO of Expo, a Dallas-based AI platform that pulls a restaurant's scattered data - POS, inventory, labor, guest feedback - into one dashboard operators can talk to. A Stanford psychology grad who walked away from a planned medical career to cook on the opening team at Thomas Keller's Per Se, he ran IT for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, founded the fast-casual chain Spice Kit, then built the restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared before spinning it into Expo. His pitch: bring the 'Moneyball' approach to multi-unit restaurants so non-technical owners can make decisions with data instead of gut feel.