PODCASTS

Data Collaboration is Key for Food Away from Home

00:29
All right, before we get things started, I did want to thank Tibersoft for sponsoring this episode today. Tibersoft’s industry leading food service optimization, performance software solutions deliver actual insights for growth. Tibersoft provides transaction verified location level visibility into food service data, allowing manufacturers to make strategic decisions that drive sales and improve profitability. And to learn more, you can visit Tibersoft.com. So with that out of the way, I want to welcome Chris Hart to the show. And Chris, I was hoping to start things off today. You could talk a little bit about yourself.

00:58
your career trajectory and how you ended up working with TiberSoft and a little bit about what TiberSoft does for the food away from home sector. Great Chris. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to take a step back and look at, look at the big picture and have an opportunity to talk about the industry. We’re all so busy in our day-to-day work. It’s a, it’s a real treat to carve some time out and talk about where the food away from home industry is going. I’ve been in the restaurant business my entire life, in the food away from home business my entire life.

01:28
going all the way back to I was raised hanging out in restaurants with my mom as a line cook and a front of the house manager at restaurants when I was a kid. When I came out of college, I studied computer science and economics and kind of thought I wanted to go off into the corporate world, but pivoted and my passion for food brought me to Whole Foods Market in the 90s. I worked there for five or six years in leadership roles.

01:55
I learned at Whole Foods a lot of fundamental pieces of my experience were informed in my years at Whole Foods. I learned about quality, learned about building teams, and delighting customers. All these things were really foundational for me at Whole Foods. And also the importance of kind of having, running maybe somewhat independently and having each market focusing on their local communities and the needs of a community.

02:25
college town are different than the needs of a community in Manhattan. And that was a really important piece of learning for me working at Whole Foods. And one thing that happened, it was probably like 96 or somewhere around that timeframe, I was working at the Wellesley, Massachusetts Whole Foods Market, and Mary Wilson and Chris Martin walked into my store. And they were in the early stages of

02:51
an internet startup concept to sell food online. That was actually at the time the name of the business, Food Online. And this was, you know, in the days of AOL accounts and 56K modems, and it was a completely different world. But they were very future thinking. And I gravitated to it immediately and kind of partnered with them at Whole Foods. And we stood up an online ordering system where people that didn’t live close to

03:20
a market like Whole Foods and they wanted something like acanacea or a homeopathic remedy or kimchi. They would go on this ordering site and order it and we would ship food all over the United States and that was in the 90s, which was an incredible experience. I chose around that time frame to leave Whole Foods and open my own restaurant. That called to me and I opened a fine dining restaurant in the Boston area in the late 90s called Tremont 647.

03:47
They had a nice long run. I left after maybe three or four years. Building a restaurant was really a great experience. The day-to-day grind of operating a restaurant wasn’t well aligned with me, and I moved on. And the first call I made was to Chris and Mary at Food Online, and they actually, in that time period, had transformed their business into TiberSoft. And they had just landed Cisco.

04:17
as their first customer. And Cisco was looking to build an online ordering site for all the restaurants across the United States. And I joined Chris and Mary in maybe around 97 as a product manager. And it was quite an experience flying down the Houston, working with Cisco, and just being involved in like an internet startup right around that turn of the millennium dot com boom.

04:44
being all part of that was something else. And we continued to scale our business throughout the 2000s and off we went. As soon as I settled into that work at TiberSoft, being able to bring together food and technology and work in that space, it really, it felt like home to me. The right, it was a right mix of challenges and interests to me. And I’ve been going at it ever since. I really appreciate the background, both on your own personal,

05:13
journey there. It’s really interesting, I think, to talk to people to have like this cross-sectional kind of history in the industry, right? Like I’ve worked at a supermarket, I worked in restaurants, I think it’s helpful to kind of have that, you know, overall viewpoint of what’s going on in food. So I really appreciate that. And we’re going to just take that history and leverage it immediately. I want to talk a little bit about those early food away from home digitization efforts, some of the stuff you were doing with Cisco while you were working with TiberSoft. I’d just love to take a look at maybe like the last 10 to 20 years in your opinion.

05:41
what these digital transformation efforts originally look like and like where we got to today. So could we talk about that a little bit? Yeah, yeah. At TiberSoft, we continued on providing service for Cisco. They actually ultimately went off and built the eCisco V2 and they ran that project on their own in-house. But TiberSoft continued to make progress working with operators during the odds with operators like Aramark in the United States

06:10
Recipe Unlimited in Canada and many others, which was a real fundamental part of our business. But as we were out in the marketplace talking to people and making connections and collaborating, one problem that we consistently observed was food manufacturers not understanding who their customers were, in Food Away From Home in particular. I think we talked to a lot of vice presidents of business developments.

06:39
who maybe grew up in retail, where they’re typically historically has been great data, very digitized. Every single thing is getting scanned out at the front of a supermarket. You’re giving them a loyalty card. There’s instant data in that retail space. And the trend of course, around that time period was the ratio of retail versus food away from home was changing fundamentally in the 2000s.

07:05
moving more and more towards food away from home than historically had been the case. And as a result that those lines of business were getting increased scrutiny and investment and interest by manufacturers. And it was surprising, I think, to many to walk over into that space and find that there was no data. How are we going to run our business? Who’s actually buying products? I think a classic example would be

07:31
You know, we filled up a truck full of our products and we sent it out into the marketplace and we observe a trend at the top line. Particular category is doing well, first half of the year. Well, why? What segment of the food away from home market is driving that trend? We knew the answer to that question, we could lean into it, right? And just generally manufacturers had, in the, let’s say 2008 to 2010, timeframe roughly just didn’t have that kind of location level granular.

08:01
visibility in their business, there was still a lot of green bar trade claim reports being sent around between partners and the main phrase there that that we heard a lot was a way and pay it because it wasn’t really a right an actionable piece of data. There was collaboration though within the industry around 2010, I might be off a couple of years here or there, where there was somewhat of a mandate to say if we’re gonna

08:30
If we’re going to provide trade claims and invest in these business channels, we need electronic data. And that was the real transformation around that timeframe was distributors and manufacturers and operators collaborated and created real digitized data for the first time in that industry’s history and opened up many, many doors from both.

08:54
Internally, sales teams and finance teams and business development teams to have better insights to who their customers were. And frankly, also the vendors like Kuybersoft who had an opportunity to provide services on top of that data. It was a real boom change in the food away from home industry. And I think that’s really interesting because when you come to the current day, some of the things I hear at trade shows is that there’s almost too much data at this point. People aren’t sure exactly how to use it. So

09:21
I’d love to talk about some of the major advancements. You know, we kind of covered that part, but maybe on the same side, it’s some of the issues that are coming up too. So in the current day, when you take a look at digital transformation efforts and just data in the food away from home industry, how would you compare it to, you know, that timeline you just shared with us? What does it look like in the current day? Yeah, I think we, in this industry, by the way, I’m still getting my arms around food away from home. I’ve been calling it food service for 30 plus years, but food away from home certainly is…

09:49
I think a nice step up in accurately describing our space. What we saw was just huge enthusiasm for leveraging this data and many, many great wins with our partners over the last 15 years since that change. I think in general in the industry what we hear though, what the new challenge that has cropped up is too much data.

10:18
In particular, too much point data, non-integrated data. Needing to go to one system for a particular question and a different system for a slightly different question is common and almost in a kind of a data lake concept, many partners find themselves in a position where I actually might have too much data that I don’t know what to do with. Going into…

10:43
doing business development for TiberSoft and walking into a potential partner’s office and talking about what we do at TiberSoft. And one thing that we hear often is please don’t drop a whole bunch of data on top of me that I don’t know what to do with because that overwhelms with the amount of data in our data lakes. And it’s not actionable. I think that one of the real fundamental requirements.

11:08
of a data program in really in any business, but in food away from home in particular, this is a pain point for us right now, is one sheet of music. Having multiple people in your organization across different departments, finance or trade or business development or product. If these groups ask the same question, they get the same answer. That sounds maybe easier than it is. But if one…

11:36
users looking at some export from a contract management system, and other subject matter experts looking at data from a distributor, and they’re asking the same questions. They also often get very different answers. And that’s really frustrating as we collaborate and try to work together on particular business needs within our organizations when we don’t have the same sheet of music to answer the questions we need to answer. And that’s been a real focus area for TiberSoft.

12:05
in terms of the services that we provide. Yeah, and I love that reference to collaboration. It’s definitely something I’ve seen in the industry in the post pandemic areas, that people seem to be much more willing to work together. But I think one of the major challenges, at least from what I’m hearing, is just about the interoperability of a lot of these data platforms. So I know you’re saying that different organizations using different data sets, they should be getting the same answers, but sometimes the data is not even coming through in the correct way because of this interoperability issue. So I’m just wondering,

12:33
In your position, are you hearing the same thing from food away from home manufacturers and, you know, all along the supply chain up to the restaurant? Is there difficulty in navigating these complex systems? Is this something that’s getting better? What are you seeing right now? Yeah, I think the tactic that is, is most successful is you just can’t just have data only. Just a pure data product on its own, hand, just kind of hand it off to a group, a BI tool with some data integrated into it.

13:01
without necessarily strong food away from home domain knowledge embedded in such a project, they don’t work. What’s critical is to have the domain experts and food away from home, almost a 50 50 partnership with data. It’s you know, half of the solution is data and the other half are people that really understand food away from

13:27
And the challenges and the objectives can embed that thinking into the data. So it’s people and technology always. If it’s technology only, it rarely works. So that’s what we’ve done at Tibersoft over the past 10 years. We’ve transformed from a technology company to a real 50, 50 mitts. We’ve invested in professional services team where everyone in that group is from industry and from food away from home. And every decision we make on the tech side.

13:57
is food away from home oriented, purpose built for this industry. So that combination of tech that’s purpose built and people from the industry together is a critical part of the equation. And where you start going when you have that combination is you stop talking about data and you start talking about jobs to be done. What do I want to accomplish in my business? I want to grow the K through 12 segment with the following products.

14:26
That’s what we’re enabling. We’re not enabling data, really, it’s a tactic or a tool but the end result is a particular job our colleagues and Food Away From Home want to accomplish. For instance, we see often folks from like heavy in the retail space and I want to grow my business into Food Away From Home. And well, it’s not just about data, but what are the jobs that we need to do in order to execute on that tactic?

14:54
We see that at Tibersoft, but we also see that elsewhere in successful data products and projects in the space. Now, the problem that that starts, that has vetted out a bit over the last couple of years in particular is as these data products and solutions are becoming more valuable, it’s highlighted data latency issues in our industry, where

15:19
Yeah, it’s great. We’re getting data. We can integrate it. We can answer questions. We can get everyone on the same sheet of music We can transform our business, but we’re not doing it fast enough it’s unfortunate that here we are in February and you know, my signal may only be through November 2024 and That slows us down that that kind of drags on the value of it imagine if I could make a decision this month for

15:49
for January and bring that signal in right up to current time. There’s a variety of reasons for some of that latency, but the way to solve it without question is a collaboration, similar to the collaboration we all were involved with 15 years ago when we created digitization in the space. I think the next step and the next challenge is how do we collaborate together and…

16:17
create faster signals so that we can be more experts in the moment when it comes to understanding our customers. So now that we’ve talked, Chris, about some of the pain points and some of the trajectory we’ve seen since the mid-aughts there, as you said earlier, what about the future? What issues do you think companies are really going to have to navigate regarding data in the next few years as they start to put a lot of these programs online? I’m assuming interoperability will improve in the years to come. So

16:45
What do you think is really going to be the issue for companies when they’re handling data and trying to use it to, you know, improve the business? One of the key opportunities that I see in food away from home moving forward over the next few years is many businesses have made great progress in integrating their data, getting teams on the same sheet of music, having reliable answers to their questions and food away from home to better understand their customers. I think the real opportunity on leveraging that, that

17:13
hub of data that could be the center of your organization is supporting delivering that data wherever our teams work and live. One tangential problem in point data solutions is there’s also point ways to consume that data. And the idea that we need to have our teams toggle from one system to the next system to the next system to answer a suite of questions doesn’t work.

17:42
And we see that at TiberSoft is that if we, sometimes we try to pull users out of somewhere they’re comfortable, we don’t always get the engagement. Don’t make me learn another system. Now, this is the problem statement that we hear. And strategically, TiberSoft, and I think just a general approach is support that, is to support delivering insights at the point of consumption. Where do users live? Do they live in email?

18:10
Do they live on their phone with an SMS text? Do they live in the CRM system? Has the organization already stood up a great BI platform and have some of the data integration questions solved? Those are great. Let’s support that. Let’s take that, our data assets, and make sure we’re delivering it where our users are. Where are the people that are using these products and these insights live?

18:37
So that’s again a big collaboration product between vendors, building new APIs and integration points between our partners and understanding that we’re a CRM organization and that’s where we want our team to live. Great, let’s work with Salesforce or whoever the CRM vendor is and integrate data into that point and level up to help you level up that implementation. I think in the next couple of years,

19:04
better collaboration between vendors and industry partners is a real opportunity for all of us. And I know that TiberSoft solution is really trusted by the industry’s larger manufacturers. And I’m wondering, you know, what can you tell us about TiberSoft products that can kind of alleviate address or even, you know, help solve for some of these problems we talked about today? Yeah, I touched on it earlier. I think, you know, where we start is purpose-built data products for food away from home, side by side with a

19:33
a team from industry, many decades of experience in the space and integrating those two pillars of the business together. I think the third leg of what TiberSoft does is somewhat novel in data products in general is we don’t just have individual partner customers. We have a collaboration circle called off-trade.

20:03
each one of our partners has a seat at that table. And that collaboration pays off in a few ways. One is it’s a data sharing capability. So it’s kind of like a giant Venn diagram where we have information about each one of our customers and the book of business for each one of our customers. And we create a superset of all of the locations.

20:30
Ultimately, that collaboration has created a database of pretty much everywhere you go out to eat in the United States and Canada. And through that collaboration and sharing approach, and the benefit from that, from like a new customer evaluating TiberSoft as a partner, is you couldn’t create that kind of data on your own. You could bring your book of business into this opt-rate database.

20:58
and see where you have new opportunities. Where’s your white space? We have, you know, just pick a segment like the K through 12 segment. We have a complete snapshot of all of the K through 12 locations in the United States with the school district information, the trade programs they use, the distribution channels they use, and we can provide that kind of information to any one of our partners in the Optre database.

21:27
And so that kind of information is not something you’re going to be able to create all on your own. So the collaboration approach, I think has been critical on the Tiber soft front and it’s not just a data play. It’s also a trusted business partner service as well, where certainly there’s collaboration between our professional service teams and a partner, but there also is partner to partner collaboration as well.

21:52
We come together once a year in a conference that TiberSelf owns. This year it’s in April out in Denver. The conference is called Navigators and we create a space to bring food away from home manufacturers together, talk about best practices, talk about their wins and losses, talk about where the industry needs to go. And we listen very carefully to that and embed that into our product roadmap.

22:19
and our strategic thinking of how to transform our business to be better aligned with the needs and vision of our customer partners. So I think that if I just had to roll it up into a single concept of what has made us successful as a business and food away from home and where I see things going moving forward over the next few years, it’s collaboration. So thanks for sharing that Chris. I think collaboration obviously is going to be a massive part I think of the food away from home industry for the years to come.

22:49
But I’m wondering more specifically, how does the Tiber soft solution to help companies drive sustainable and profitable growth? Yeah. I, the, the sustainable profitable part is, is key to that, to that question is without good data and when I say good data, I mean a circle of data, well informed from a diverse set of data that has multiple important pieces of information about our customers, not just volume and

23:18
Certainly that was a big step up maybe 10 years ago, which is how much volume are we driving with a particular customer? Where are their trends up and down? But as we matured the solution at Tibersoft, one of the technical areas we’ve certainly have invested heavily in is integrating data sources and blending those data sources into reliable, actionable insights. And one of the key areas that we’ve blended into that

23:47
that volume, true volume kind of data and food away from home is bringing in cost centers. So all of our various trade investments, from rebates to bill back to distributor change trade to marketing allowances to growth programs, blending all of that information into the mix as well as particularly potentially other areas like cost of goods sold. And

24:13
What that starts allowing us to do is not just see trends in volume changes, but trends in where are my investments giving the return that I expect, where has a trade investment driven volume, and maybe also where has a trade investment underperformed. And be able to look at that not just at the top line, but be able to debug it and get underneath the covers and understand.

24:40
which categories or distribution channels or operator partners or areas of the country or sales representatives, however you wanna kind of look at it in your own business, where not only is volume moving in a particular direction, but where are my trade investments paying off and where are they maybe not? That kind of view into food away from home,

25:06
where we can drive not only volume, but sustainable, profitable volume has been a real game changer in some of the services that we provide to our customers. And before we wrap it up, Chris, if anyone wants to learn a little bit more about TiberSoft and a lot of the solutions we talked about today, where can they go? Yeah, you know, tibersoft, www.tibersoft.com. We have stories about our customer success, products, of course, various cuts on the product capabilities we have.

25:34
And there’s a contact section there, of course, where you can get in touch with us all. We’d love to connect and talk. So yeah, anybody listening in, take a look in the description of this episode. We’ll have links directly to those websites. But Chris, I really want to thank you for spending some time with us today on the Food Institute podcast. I learned a lot. I really loved taking a look at the data kind of journey from, you know, about 20 years ago to now and seeing how things have changed. I’m looking forward to seeing how it impacts, you know, food away from home in the future. So once again, thanks for spending some time with us today. Thanks for the time, Chris. Take care.

26:03
All right, that’s going to do it for us on this episode of the Food Institute podcast. As always, take a look at the description of this episode to learn a little bit more and to find links to everything we talked about today. And before we go, once again, thanks to Chris Hart for spending some time with us today and to TiberSoft for sponsoring this episode. Catch you next time. This is Chris Campbell, signing off.