Interview with Valentina Berti, CEO of Foodea Lab, innovative start-up that deals with technological solutions for B2B and B2C catering.
Foodea Lab is a young and dynamic reality with a strong innovative and creative DNA. The mission of the company is to provide support through technology and innovation to operators in the catering industry, but also to provide cutting-edge solutions that meet the needs of customers. Foodea Lab is therefore a company that caters equally to both the B2B and B2C world. Latest arrival at Foodea Lab is Chuzeat, an app that promises to improve the customer experience at the restaurant and simultaneously to maximize revenue for the restaurateur. Let’s see what it’s about.
Chuzeat: how the Foodea Lab app works
The Chuzeat application is based on an artificial intelligence system that can make the process of choosing dishes faster for customers, reducing errors in orders and ordering times. It is an all-in-one system that offers catering activities a range of features that ensure the optimization of customer experience and of earnings.
Features of the Chuzeat app
Digitization of the menu
The restaurant owner can upload his menu and customize it graphically quickly and intuitively: thanks to artificial intelligence, the ingredients and allergens of the dishes are automatically suggested. The customer can register his food profile and choose the dishes according to his real needs (for medical, ethical, religious reasons, etc.) and preferences.
Dynamics QRCode
The QuID, generator of dynamic Qrcode (patented!), makes sure the start of the order process because it “certifies” the presence of the customer at the restaurant table. The restaurateur will never receive fake orders (for play or wilful). The Quid also allows easy and immediate registration at the tables. Customers can scan the QR code and start ordering immediately!
Reviews
The restaurant receives real reviews from customers, in private mode, for each dish consumed. This way you can always have control of the customer feedback to improve where necessary. The customer can send reviews after eating their meals.
Cooperative orders
Interactive and playful order among the diners. If a table is ordering from different smartphones, Chuzeat will automatically attack them in a single command. In addition, the waiter can interact with the customers of the assigned table, always via smartphone!
Simplified and divided accounts
If your customers need to pay separately, Chuzeat will do the work for you, splitting the accounts as required by your users. It is also possible to pay the bill through the app, without going to the cashier. And the receipt arrives directly on the customer’s smartphone!
If you want to know more about Foodea Lab and the services it offers, read the interview with Valentina Berti, CEO of the start up.
Hi Valentina, nice to meet you and thank you for your time. Foodea Lab: tell us about it?
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk about our platform! Foodea Lab is an innovative startup made up of a team of friends and colleagues with a wide range of skills and experience, mainly in the IT world, but also in marketing and sales. We believed and invested time and resources on an idea that in September 2018 (pre Covid) was immediately perceived as highly innovative.
How and when was the idea of founding a start-up in the catering sector born?
As often happens, the idea comes from the need: spring 2018, 2 friends-colleagues were bottled in traffic, late for a business lunch, the third friend-colleague waited for them at the restaurant. To optimize the little time available for lunch He sent them photos of the menu to speed up the choice of dishes and order; all this complicated by the fact that one of the latecomers has food allergies. Really complex! And so the light bulb turned on! Then the startup was established in September 2018 and since then we work continuously to make the platform more and more complete, adding skills and functionality useful for the user and for the restaurateur, with the dual objective of providing them with a highly technological tool (remember that the platform uses algorithms based on AI and machine learning) in a light, simple and usable way.
Chuzeat is your flagship product. How long did it take to create this fantastic app?
It certainly took a lot longer than we initially imagined. The initial project was to develop an app for restaurant customers; in fact we are very proud of its ease of use and also of the pleasant experience we offer to our users. But to satisfy users more, we needed to provide restaurateurs with the tools and information they needed to improve their offerings, work more efficiently and, why not, reduce some costs and increase the turnout at the tables. For this reason we have worked a lot on Chuzeat Business, the command console with which restaurateurs receive orders from the dining room, control the restaurant, modify the menus, make receipts, etc. We launched the platform in mid-2020, in full Covid pandemic, in a market quite devastated by intermittent closures and confused by countless and precarious digital menus. To us the arduous task of explaining that Chuzeat, in addition to the digital menu, offered much, much more.
How is the market responding?
When we introduce Chuzeat to restaurateurs, we feel great enthusiasm and extremely positive feedback both on the reliability of technology and on the aesthetic-functional aspect of the app. Chuzeat is perceived as a quality IT platform that speaks the common language. We also find a wider openness of mind of restaurateurs, compared to the past, towards technological tools; in fact, if we think about 3 years ago, the digital menu was unknown to most and the self-order almost unimaginable. Today, we are operating in a market that is certainly more aware, where the flexibility, usability and reliability of technology make the difference.
How much technology can still help companies to develop their business and how much, in Italy, have you found reticence in the application of technological and digital models?
This is a key point in our work. Italian catering has very strong roots in the past and restaurateurs are often attached to their habits and traditions. The key is to propose a technology that enters restaurants respecting their work, almost on tiptoe, and that gradually adapts itself to the routine of the restaurant owner, without pretending to upset it. A flexible and parameterized technology for specific needs, light because it does not involve the use of specific hardware, simple to use just like a user app, secure in the process and able to protect the privacy of users and restaurateurs. This is Chuzeat, man!
I like to quote a concrete example: we were convinced that our ideal customer was the local in the city with high turnout and instead one of our “historical customers”, to which we are particularly fond, is a farm in the Tuscan countryside. Technology, if it’s good, can be efficient anywhere!
How did you launch Chuzeat? Did you use crowdfunding campaigns?
Until now we have tried to walk with our legs; we liked the idea of running the startup between members, in harmony and serenity. It is obvious that in order to grow as we wish, we will necessarily have to open ourselves to the world and look at different solutions.
Curiosity: products and services coming?
We have just completed the integration of e-receipts in the app and the integration of Nexi as a payment provider (we are proud that they have chosen us as a technology partner!). We are already working on a “light” version of the user app accessible directly from the web and soon we will enrich the work already done on allergens, ingredients and special diets to make it predictive and therefore more useful to users and restaurateurs.
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