Happy Thursday,

Coming off my trip to Chicago for the National Restaurant Association show, I had many conversations with partners, operators, and other tech companies about food cost and profit.  Sharing some thoughts below on how we think about this at meez.

We had back-to-back events with NRA in Chicago, and just prior to that, some of the team and I were in Miami for a chefs' night out with some incredible chefs, led by chef Brad Kilgore, checking out some of his favorite spots and sharing stories together on a party bus.  We will definitely be doing more of these.  I took the opportunity while I was down there to meet with the uber talented chef Thomas Buckley at Nobu for an IRL episode of the podcast coming out soon.

My buddy Sterling Douglass, CEO and co-founder of Chowly, joined us on the podcast to talk about his new podcast with his co-host, Chief Data Officer and co-founder of Thanx, Aaron Newton.  A show all about Ai in restaurants, called AI for Restaurants (on the nose name, I know).

To round us out, Memorial day weekend is coming up, so I’m sharing one of my all time favorite marinades for steak or chicken if you’re doing some grilling this weekend, plus a garlic confit recipe, which you’ll need for the marinade.

Can you know your food cost without dialed in recipe data?

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Restaurants may be the only business in the world where it is often normal to operate your business without knowing the precise margins of what you are selling.

Back office systems for restaurants have improved significantly over the years. And they continue to get better, especially with Ai driving innovation. But all of these systems, by design, are missing the most critical part of what will make them so powerful. Recipe data. Accurate, up-to-date, yield-adjusted, tightly structured recipe data.

And it is not the fault of these systems. The beauty of our business is that we are creators. Recipes are our IP. It’s what makes our brand our brand. They are what define what we value, what we love, how we do what we do, and how we differentiate ourselves from others. Restaurants are a business. But cooking is still a craft and an art.

Asking chefs to manage their recipes in financial software is like asking the engineers at Maserati to design their car engines in QuickBooks. It’s why I started meez. I wanted a digital tool for the kitchen, just as designers had Figma and architects had AutoCAD; I was surprised that chefs did not have something built for us. All I found when searching for recipe management was inventory software.

Now back to the recipe data. What I found was that every chef had to find ingredients and prep yields, unit conversions, allergens, etc., manually. Each of us is reinventing the wheel in a fragile spreadsheet. Or just defaulting to ‘back-of-the-napkin’ costs.

The problem is, we highly underestimate the impact of not adjusting for this yield loss or the need for proper unit conversions when trying to learn and analyze the cost of our menu. Cutting off the ends of those cilantro stems or just using the leaves takes that $8/lb herb up to $15/lb quickly. Plus costing ‘leaves’ is pretty damn difficult. Do that across 300 ingredients, and now your food cost is not even close to what you thought it would be.

But with a recipe tool designed for this (cough cough, meez, cough cough), this became seamless and automatic. Just write a recipe. Do what you do best. The rest is taken care of.

And those back office systems can now take all the data from your recipes to power inventory, purchasing, reporting, forecasting, and more. Culinary and finance finally align. If you want to learn more about how that works, just shoot me a note here. And btw, if you have not tried out the new Ai bulk-import, you should def check it out. Link at the bottom to chat with our team.

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🎙️ The meez Podcast

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In the AI Weeds with Sterling Douglass: Build or Buy is now a decision every restaurant can make with their tech stack.

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Sterling Douglass is the co-founder and CEO of Chowly and now the co-host of Ai for Restaurants with Aaron Newton from Thanx. He came on the pod with Mike and me to talk about why he launched his podcast, what AI is actually doing to the build-vs-buy decision, and what's happening inside Chowly as they rebuild themselves into an AI-enabled company.

• The Pokeworks weather MCP that does what McDonald's paid $400M for
• Burger King's Patty, Shake Shack's Project Catalyst, and enterprise AI
• "AI-native" vs "AI-enabled" and why most SaaS companies will pick wrong
• Local models are five months behind the frontier. What that mean for operators

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👉 Listen to the episode

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🤔🌶️ Hot Take

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Restaurants are building what used to cost millions

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McDonald's paid $400 million for Dynamic Yield to do weather-triggered menu changes. Think, for example, it's a hot day, the digital drive-thru board pushes ice cream. I think it costs in the 9 figures to buy.

A 30-location poke shop just built the same thing with a weather MCP connected to claude, and some basic code (generated by claude) that sends a free miso soup to a customer segment when it's about to rain. Zero engineering team. No nine-figure acquisition. A couple of dollars in tokens.

I know this feels a bit redundant from my last email, but this topic of build or buy in restaurants just keeps coming up, and it's getting more acute.  Everyone should be thinking about what problems they can solve or opportunities they can unlock, and question the notion of whether you should buy or build.  The best way to find out is just to start testing.  Ask [Claude].  If you want, feel free to shoot me a note here. If I can help, I will.  Go build!  And if you want to connect your recipe data to what you're building, we are here to help, too.

👉 Chime in on LinkedIn

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Recipe:

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Garlic Confit and Miso Tamari Marinade

I always keep garlic confit around.  It just works in so many applications.  Whip it into some butter with sea salt and chopped parsley for a killer garlic bread or over some grilled clams.  Sauté some prawns in it and deglaze with a nice sherry and some Sriracha.  

For this weekend, with Memorial Day upon us. I suggest making this miso tamari marinade.  I tend to marinate thin-sliced short ribs and cook them over a yakitori grill, but it works great with any steak, chicken, or even a fish like salmon or grouper.

👉 Garlic Confit

👉 Miso Tamari Marinade

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💬 Want to Be a Guest on The meez Podcast?

If you’re building at scale, or wrestling with hard zero-to-one problems worth talking about, I’d love to hear from you.

Apply to be a guest or nominate someone we should talk to.

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📚 Want to learn more about Ai builk import?

👉 Find some time with our team here

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