May 12, 2025 • 36 mins
In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guides podcast, hosts Jeremy Julian and Angelo Esposito, Founder and CEO of WISK, delve into the innovative solutions WISK offers for inventory management in the restaurant industry. They discuss the challenges of traditional inventory methods, the development of WISK's technology combining AI and user-friendly features, and the significant impact these solutions can have on managing prime costs in bars and restaurants. The conversation also touches on AI's role in the restaurant technology arena, offering insights into how modern tools can streamline operations and improve accuracy. Listeners are encouraged to explore WISK's platform and the potential benefits it can bring to their inventory processes.
00:00 Wisk
01:21 Introduction and Guest Welcome
01:30 Understanding Prime Costs in Restaurants
01:58 Introducing WISK.ai: Streamlining Restaurant Operations
02:50 Challenges in Restaurant Inventory Management
04:05 The Origin Story of WISK.ai
06:47 Digitizing Old School Processes
08:31 The Evolution of WISK.ai
12:08 Current Inventory Management Practices
14:45 Common Mistakes in Inventory Management
17:38 Receiving Product Correctly
18:59 Understanding the Inventory Formula
19:30 Simplifying Inventory and Purchasing
20:36 Handling Item Variations
22:24 The Importance of Demos
27:27 AI in Inventory Management
32:36 Whisk's Full Capabilities
33:32 How to Get in Touch and Learn More
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
This is the RestaurantTechnology Guides podcast,
helping you run your restaurantbetter.
Jeremy Julian (00:15):
In today's episode, Angelo and I talk a
bunch about really the visionbehind Whisk and why it was
created, some of the pain thathe saw some of his friends
suffering through as it relatesto inventory in bars and
restaurants over the years.
Angelo and I have known eachother online for quite some
time, but this is the first timehe and I got a chance to sit
(00:36):
down and talk.
And my goodness, he's got somuch to offer.
I would encourage all of you tocheck out what he and the team
built at Whisk, how it's reallychanging the game of inventory
management and how you are gonnado bar inventory, how you're
gonna do restaurant food serviceinventory, and how you're going
to take one of your prime costsand ensure that you are staying
(00:57):
above board with it and that youare continuing to make money.
In the right ways.
If you don't know me, my name isJeremy Julian.
I am the Chief Revenue Officerfor CBS North Star.
We sell the North Star point ofsale product for multi-units.
Please check usout@cbsnorthstar.com and now
onto the episode.
(01:21):
welcome back to the RestaurantTechnology Guys podcast.
I thank everyone out there forjoining us, as I say each and
every time.
I know you guys got lots ofchoices, so thank you guys for
joining us today.
one of the biggest topics I talkto restaurateurs about is their
prime costs.
And, our guest today is gonnashare with you some of the good
and the bad and the ugly of,restaurants and prime costs and
why they've hurt themselves anddone some really cool things
(01:42):
with, with some software thatyou built.
But Angela, why don't youintroduce yourself to our
audience.
let's talk a little bit aboutwho you are first before we jump
into kind of what you guys havebeen doing.
Angelo Esposito (01:50):
Awesome.
So first of all, thanks forhaving me on.
it's always fun, to be on thereceiving side of the, of a
podcast, so I appreciate that.
yeah, so listen, I'm the founderand the CEO at Whisk Ai Wisk is
WS K do ai.
And what we do is we reallyjust.
Try to give restaurateurs theirtime back by streamlining a lot
of the.
Back of house operations.
(02:12):
So what that looks like is thinkabout things that restaurants
are doing already, but how do wemake it a lot easier?
So think about inventory, thinkabout ordering to their
suppliers, maybe entering theirinvoices, maybe costing out
their recipes, all that kind ofstuff.
the boring but super importantstuff.
The things that restaurantsdidn't know they were gonna do,
and they're like, let's juststart a restaurant.
(02:32):
And they're like, this sucks.
we try to help with all that andalleviate as much of that,
stress off their plate.
Jeremy Julian (02:37):
I love that.
And as I said in the intro, kindof prime costs are one of the
biggest things that peoplestruggle to figure out how to
keep their arms around.
Can you and I talked pre, prehitting the record button, gimme
the origin story, like where didit all come from?
Because.
Does every anybody really needanother inventory package?
and I'm teasing about it, but atthe same time, does anybody
really need another inventorypackage?
(02:57):
There's hundreds of'em outthere.
They're, going back to REM maxand the DOS days.
I've been around long enough toremember remix from dos.
in general, it's one of thehardest things, as you said,
that most restaurants don'trealize that they have to do.
But if they don't do it, itreally has an opportunity to
hurt them from a businessperspective.
Angelo Esposito (03:14):
look it, it's one of those things that in
every other industry it's likesuper obvious, but in the
hospitality industry it's ah,it's okay.
It's the way it is.
it's fine.
And I always give the analogyof, take, I know a Best Buy
style store.
Like you're selling computers,right?
It's not that hard.
It's like you're looking at.
To make it simple, you have, Idon't know, let's just call it
an iPhone.
iPhone 15.
Great.
All the same color.
(03:35):
Cool.
So you got 10 of those.
the end of the night, you checkyour inventory.
You got eight.
Oh, so we are missing two.
Let me check my sales.
Oh, we sold two.
Perfect.
Makes sense.
But in the restaurant and barworld, the reason it's so hard
and such a pain is becauseyou're not just dealing with
one-to-one, right?
iPhone equals iPhone, you'redealing with hamburger equals
(03:55):
some beef and a bun and a thisand the sauce.
And the sauce was made in apre-match.
And so where a cocktail, itcould be many different things.
So it's, you're buying raw itemsand then you're building a
finished product.
So because it's very hard totrack, All this to say the
origin story of Whisk, reallywhen we started, we now do food
and beverage fully, but when westarted it was really focused on
beverage.
And I always joke around likesometimes with some of my
(04:16):
teammates whisk got me good.
I started off with a project andhere I am 10 years later.
But the project at the time wasI wonder if I could help my
friends in the industry withtheir bar inventory.
'cause I realized they weredoing it often, like either
weekly, some of them even moreoften.
But at the very.
minimum weekly.
It was taking hours upon hoursand they were using pen and
(04:38):
paper Excel.
And so I started going aroundand say, okay, maybe it's just
this nightclub friend.
Let me talk to this high endrestaurant.
It's no, he's doing it likethat.
Okay, let me talk to this hotelfor sure.
A hotel's gotta have a system.
It's no, they're also doingExcel.
And what I realized, at least atthat time, 10 years ago, it
wasn't a budget thing.
They all, a lot of theserestaurants were nice.
They were busy.
They had the budget.
It was, I think the tech wasnot.
(05:00):
Easy enough to use back thenthat a lot of people tritech and
then they're like, forget it,and went back to pen and paper
or spreadsheets.
So when I started, it is funny,but I started as a project to
say, I wonder if I can makesomething.
That's better than pen and paperand Excel that people would use.
And so that was the mission,super hyperfocused.
It was just inventory and justbar inventory.
So it was very much hyperfocusedon here's a bottle.
(05:23):
What's the best way to figureout what's inside of this?
'cause most people just look atit and say, ah, it's about a
0.3, it's about a 0.5.
The old tenting method.
And that was it.
That's where it started.
And then it evolved and we canget into it, but at the core of
it, that was why, how Whisk wasborn.
Jeremy Julian (05:39):
It's so funny 'cause I try and remind people
that are not restaurant peopleand any of our longtime
listeners know that I'm going onclose to 30 years working in
restaurants.
It's really a manufacturingfacility inside of a restaurant.
It's manufacturing, it's a, thecar manufacturer's got seats and
steering wheel and tires andrims and all of that kinda
stuff.
Very similar to the restaurant,but people don't think of it
that way because to your point,it's a bottle of tequila, it's
(06:01):
some orange juice.
It's all of these differentcomponents that will make up
that drink and they have tomanufacture them on the fly,
which makes it reallychallenging because the other
thing that most people don'trealize that aren't in the
restaurant industry is that.
Your prime costs.
Ultimately moving them onesingle point on a restaurant,
doing a million dollars in salesis a whole lot of money that's
(06:23):
going to your bottom line andnot managing those things is
huge.
Talk to me a little real quick,Angela.
where did the bar stuff comefrom?
Was it just'cause of your friendgroup?
Is that, you said that it, wasit because you, you really like
high-end tequila and you were,you knew if I can help these
guys out, they'll give
Angelo Esposito (06:37):
give some.
Jeremy Julian (06:38):
service on Saturday
Angelo Esposito (06:39):
not, no.
Yeah.
Funny enough, IW Yeah, it's agood, it's a good question.
funny enough, I was actuallyworking on a, another startup,
before this.
and it was actually at the time,this is, I don't know, maybe
2012, but at that time, or maybe2013, at that time, it was, a
guest list app.
and again, now it sounds like,nah, this is so easy to do, but
back then it was somewhat novel.
(07:00):
It was basically just digitizingso you could see the theme.
I'm just trying to digitize oldschool processes or processes.
so I, the original app I wasworking on was basically, a
digital guest list.
So the idea was like a lot ofplaces have a guest list, like
an open table, but more for thenight lifestyle places, just to
make it easier to track who'scoming.
If you've got a bunch ofdifferent promoters, they could
update it on their phone.
Everything's synced.
(07:21):
You're building a CRM, youcould.
Remarket to people.
'cause I found even the coolestplaces in the coolest cities
just had clipboard with a penand paper.
And it's yeah, throw it out atthe end of the night.
I'm like, that's crazy.
They're not keeping any of thedata.
So I was working on that andthat's when I started seeing
this kind of trend.
like I was getting close to allthese different bars and working
with them or whatever.
And I'd see people at the end ofthe night and the night, I'll
(07:42):
never forget that.
It really hit me was I sawsomeone doing it.
They were going one by one,eyeballing.
He had a pen and paper with hisclipboard.
It was like stains all over thepaper.
'cause the bars wet andwhatever.
And I'm like, what are youdoing?
Huh?
I'm doing the inventory.
How often do you do this?
And in that case it was everynight.
'cause it was more of anightclub.
how long does it take you?
Three hours?
I'm like, you do three hoursevery night.
So I'm like, okay, it's gotta beimportant.
(08:02):
And that's when it started.
And then I started talking toother friends in the industry,
Fine dining, restaurant, hotel.
Lemme talk to casual dining.
And I saw this recurring trendthat it's man, yes there's some
systems that exist, but nah,it's just easier.
I'll go back to pen and paper.
And so that was a challenge.
Can we make this as easy as penand paper, but better?
And it's hard.
It's hard'cause pen and paper isfree form anything.
(08:23):
I see something, I just writeit.
So it was a, I know it soundssilly, but it was a hard
challenge.
Like how do I make this easierto adopt than pen and paper?
Jeremy Julian (08:31):
Yeah.
So talk me through that processbecause I think, 10 years ago,
technology isn't even where itis today.
The iPhone had just come out,like even having a phone in your
pocket that can do these things.
I remember early days'causeagain, I remember, working on
inventory packages where itwould sync offline because you'd
go into the walk-in or you'd goto the dry storage.
But wifi 10 years ago sucked.
(08:51):
the battery life on these
Angelo Esposito (08:52):
yeah.
That too.
Yeah.
Jeremy Julian (08:53):
So it was like, it was hard.
again, to your point, I think ithas to get done because that one
or two points of margin make ahuge difference.
And technology is constantlyevolving.
And today it's significantlyeasier than it was 10 years ago.
But even in that, it was hard.
So talk me through why did youthink that you could solve this
with the technology that existed10 years ago?
(09:14):
Because, it's continued toevolve and I'm sure the product
that you would almost beembarrassed about from 10 years
ago now you're like, oh, Ishould have thought it, but
thought about it this
Angelo Esposito (09:23):
yeah, no, a hundred percent.
look, first off, to your pointabout the percentage points I
think people sometimes don'trealize, so just to emphasize
like one point off a million, inrevenue is 10 K and on average
Ws.
we typically can drop at threeto 5%.
We have cases where it's beensix, seven, 8%, but realistic
it's three to 5%.
improvements in, in cost ofgoods.
And, that's on a million insales.
A lot of our clients are doingtwo to 3, 4, 5, 6.
(09:45):
So it's it's a lot of money.
And sometimes what people don'trealize is when you save, call
it 25,000 or 50,000 in yourbottom line, what's really
powerful is you have to give ortake on the type of restaurant,
but multiply it roughly, let'ssay by four or five.
To, to
Jeremy Julian (09:59):
In top point
Angelo Esposito (10:00):
exactly.
To reach
Jeremy Julian (10:01):
cost savings.
Angelo Esposito (10:02):
And that's what people, yes.
People forget that They're like,oh.
Jeremy Julian (10:06):
you saved, it's$4 less in revenue that you have to
Angelo Esposito (10:08):
exactly.
that's the one gap in that.
I just wanna emphasize, becausethis could be great for your
audience potentially, butsometimes people forget that
they're, okay, let's just workon this marketing campaign and
we'll do this in this and get anX amount of guess.
And hopefully that'll bring in ahundred thousand.
But cool, a hundred thousandsales maybe is, let's say 25,000
in bottom line.
So just not to confuse the two.
But anyways, back to the corequestion.
I think it was a bit of naivety.
(10:29):
I was a bit naive.
I was like, oh, I wonder if Icould do this.
I, if I knew so much about tech,I would've maybe been more
scared and been like, oh, thisis impossible and there's giants
out there, and how can I dothis?
I was just like naive and Ithink because I was doing it
more as like a project I.
It made it palatable.
I was like, okay, I wonder ifyou know the iPhone's out now.
It was like the, one of theearlier ones, I think it was
even maybe an iPod touch, and Iwas like, all right, I wonder if
(10:51):
we could do this.
And the concept was simple.
I was like, I wonder with thephone, if we could point the
camera, scan the barcode, if itcould detect the image, okay,
pose it up and then we can waitwith a Bluetooth scale.
And so that, that's where westarted.
And.
The first while we hit was like,I guess we gotta build a
database.
So I started going to some of myfriends' restaurants and bars
(11:12):
and weighing the most commonbottles.
So I'd be like, Hey, can I comebuy a closing or opening?
And I'd weigh empty bottles, I'dweigh full bottles and I'd build
the, start building thedatabase.
So think of all the typical, orpopular, vodkas, gins, whiskeys,
your typical.
So at least I have a startingpoint.
and that's how it started.
It was like building thisdatabase.
And for me, what got me reallyexcited is once I saw.
the first few restaurants, likewith a very shitty basic app,
(11:36):
but using it and enjoying it andsaying oh wow, this is pretty
good.
I knew I was onto something.
I knew it was a long way to go.
'cause the app was very basic,but just that initial thought of
pointed to the bottle.
It knows it's a seven 50 ml, Idon't know, CAS Amigos, Blanco.
And then being able to place onthe scale and be like, oh,
there's 4.2 ounces left.
Just that was magic.
(11:56):
What I didn't realize back thenwas that's 5% of it, and then
once you open the door, it'slike, what about my ordering and
my invoicing and my point ofsale and my recipe?
And I was like, that's when itwent from my little project to
okay, we gotta turn this into areal thing,
Jeremy Julian (12:08):
I love that.
walk us through what, when youwalk into a client that doesn't
have whisk, doesn't have whisk,or quite frankly doesn't have
anything, you're now, 2025, youwalk into a bar nightclub.
What is the most typical thingthat you see?
Is it the still the pen andpaper and then somebody goes
back to the office and puts in aD Excel and hopes that it's
right and maybe pulls point ofsale?
Is that kind of the normal,because I want you to talk to
(12:30):
our listeners out there thatprobably are sitting in their
shoes going.
crap, that's me and I wanna seea future that's beyond where I'm
at
Angelo Esposito (12:36):
Yeah, that's totally fair.
Listen, the truth is, I wouldsay, generally speaking, most
industries still very much callit Excel or spreadsheet.
So pen and paper and maybespreadsheet generally.
So that's still our biggestcompetitor, quote unquote.
Like even some of our directcompetitors, that's 10, 20% of
the time.
Oh, this person comes up there.
Why you better, why youdifferent?
Ah, it depends on your case.
(12:57):
Okay, cool.
Fine.
But 80% of the time they'reusing, Pen and paper
spreadsheets.
I've seen a shift post,C-O-I-D-I think because everyone
was locked down and had time andfiguring his stuff out and
realizing the value of managingtheir cost of goods really,
There's a little more, I wouldsay like education around it.
Like even I feel it within thecompany, there's less like, why
should I do inventory?
It's not that talk track isn'tthere anymore.
(13:19):
so definitely people are moreaware and shopping for it.
So that percentage I would sayhas gone up of people who are
like very much aware.
but the one thing I would say iswe try to focus on people who
are doing something.
So what I mean by that, ifthey're doing pen and paper in
Excel, that's fine.
'cause the intention's there,it's not ideal.
It probably takes long, it'sprobably inaccurate, but.
Those type of restaurants alwaysend up loving whisk, or the
(13:41):
majority.
There's always, you can't pleasethat one.
But generally end up lovingWhisk.
Where we've had issues and we'velearned this, the hard way is if
someone's doing nothing.
Because if you're doing nothing,yeah, I don't do inventory, I
don't need it now number one, Igotta educate you, train you,
whatever.
But now your staff also resentsrisk'cause they were doing
nothing.
Now they're doing something, sothere's no appreciation.
I was spending zero minutes onthis thing, now I'm spending an
(14:04):
hour.
Whereas the minute they're, ah,whisk guys, I hate it.
But if they were doingsomething, there's usually a big
appreciation.
'cause man, I was spending sixhours a week, now I'm spending
two hours or two and a halfhours a week.
So they're happy.
So I would say generally we tryto focus on people who are doing
something.
But to, to your point, it'sstill very much manual.
and that looks like paper andspreadsheets.
(14:25):
Typical restaurant, I would sayis probably going around with a
piece of paper, then enteringinto a spreadsheet and then
sending it to the, head officeor to the bosses or whatever,
with little to no understandingof why they're doing it.
They're just, oh yeah, I countit, sent it, I'm done.
which I think is also a gap.
The more you can empower yourstaff on why they're doing it
and what it means, I thinkgenerally the better you can do
as a restaurant.
Jeremy Julian (14:45):
and the other piece that I would love for you
to, dig into a little bit deeperon is you talked about getting,
so you've got the actuals, yougot what's still left in the
bottles.
You talked about how you guysare tracking those bottles.
But a lot of times, there,there's a lot of different ways
or reasons why inventory mightbe.
Off.
You've got over pours, you'vegot under pours, you've got
theft.
There's a lot of different ways,and I think a lot of times, at
(15:06):
least what I've seen when peopleare using Excel.
They look at it and go, oh yeah,I'm just off.
And they never go figure out theroot cause of the problem.
Talk me through that because Ithink all too often, and again,
part of the desire for this, I'dlove for people to check out,
whisk, no questions asked, andthey need to learn that, you
know what?
Some of the stuff, even inExcel, and pen and paper,
(15:26):
there's times that your staff isdoing the wrong thing and
costing you$10,000 a yearbecause they're overp pouring
the whiskey or whatever it mightbe.
Angelo Esposito (15:33):
yeah.
Listen, an analogy I givesometimes is like pulling back
the curtain, right?
It's like you are using excel.
It's hard to find the mistakesand when there is a mistake,
there's this, there's thismentality where it's okay, look,
there's probably a mistake, butit's fine.
It's probably just a mistake.
Our beverage cost or food costis outta whack, but it's
probably just a mistake.
And then when it's good.
You assume it's good.
So there's this natural bias,and I've seen that happen
(15:55):
unfortunately also withsometimes third parties.
Don't get me wrong, thirdparties could be great, but the,
I've seen that similar biashappen where you have a third
party company come in and countfor you.
And when the report makes sense,you're like, cool, thank you.
And the report doesn't makesense.
You're like, you guys messed upsomewhere.
So there's like this kind ofjust natural bias.
I'm like, data good.
Yay.
Data bad.
It's a mistake.
so what I recommend is this,what the typical mistakes I see
(16:17):
is a lot of systems out thereincluding pen and paper, but
even some.
Of our main competitors stillrely on like shelf to sheet.
So like I got this sheet, it'sjust maybe instead of a paper
Excel, it's now their system orwhatever.
But it's still like I'm enteringin this table.
What I see in front of me, andI'm trying to add things up, is
I got some tomatoes here andsome there, so I'm like, okay,
one case there too.
(16:37):
And I'm typing where I thinkwhisk.
is different is we built it withthe intention that number one,
you could split up the work.
So you could be 10 peoplecounting.
Everyone goes to the separatearea and everyone's counting.
Everything's sinking in realtime.
Number two, it works offline.
So if there's areas like afridge or whatever, where wifi
is week, it works.
But number three, and this isthe shelf to sheet part, you
don't have to count shelf tosheet.
(16:57):
Our philosophy is forget theshelf to sheet.
That makes sense.
If you're stuck on paper or inExcel.
With whisk, we tell people,count what In the order.
You see it?
If I'm gonna in my pantry, Isee, I don't know, tomatoes.
Okay.
And then next to it I seesomething else.
Okay?
And I just keep going.
And then later if there's moretomatoes, there's more tomatoes.
But most people force you to goshelter sheet.
(17:18):
And that's where a lot of themistakes are made.
'cause you're trying to add thisand this, then you forgot that
you counted that.
So all this to say we're bigfans of trying to make it as
easy as possible.
So scan or search what in theorder.
You see it if it's if it's open,you can use our Bluetooth scale.
If it's closed, you can use ourvisual mode.
You can count by the case.
You can count by the unit.
That's it.
That's all
Jeremy Julian (17:37):
Love it.
So the flip side of that andwhere I see things come up and
I've watched people get inalmost fist fights because
they're not gonna make theirbonus'cause they didn't hit
their
Angelo Esposito (17:46):
right.
Right, right.
Jeremy Julian (17:46):
is that they received product in incorrectly
through the back door.
They received a case when itshould have been a box.
And that also will throw offyour inventory.
'cause it's saying you shouldhave 16 of these, you should
have a case of wine.
You should have 12 bottles ofwine.
And you really only received onebottle of wine.
You ordered one bottle of wine.
But you, you received it intothe system.
As a case.
Talk our audience through, yourexperience in watching people
(18:09):
because if you order itproperly, but you receive it in
wrong, it's in the systemincorrectly.
and that's where you got a lotof those variances.
'cause that's what the systemsays you should have.
But then when I go to count, I'moff by 11 bottles And now a word
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Angelo Esposito (18:55):
Yeah, you nailed it.
I could tell you've been in theindustry 30 years.
'cause you're hitting all thepoints we see all the time.
Look, the truth is, this is howI like to explain it to
restaurants and to peoplelistening is the formula is a
formula, right?
So whether you're using whiskpen and paper.
A third party, it's guess what?
They're gonna count yourbeginning inventory, they're
gonna add your purchases,they're gonna subtract your
ending inventory, that's gonnagive'em the, what we call
(19:16):
consumption.
Some people will call usagewhatever, and then we compare
that to the sales.
But the sales are speaking adifferent language, right?
Jeremy Julian (19:22):
Yeah, they're theoretical.
Angelo Esposito (19:24):
the recipe to convert the theoretical, and
that's what we call the famousactual versus theoretical.
So no matter what, you'll needthat.
Our philosophy is we think ofeach of those points and we're
like, how can we make them aseasy as possible?
So on the inventory, we spoke abit about it, but it's okay if
it works offline.
If it works real time.
If I can use the camera on thephone, if I can just count in
the order, I see it, blah, blah,blah, blah, blah.
(19:44):
You get the idea.
It's great.
That should be easier.
On the purchasing side, youcan't get easier than just snap
in a picture.
So for us, when invoices comein, all you have to do is you
take your mobile app.
Snap a picture of the invoice ormultiple pages of an invoice and
submit it.
That's it.
The AI does its thing and thenwe have a human team internally
from WS that reviews it.
You can also upload it.
(20:04):
You can also forward it viaemail.
And also we have some EDIintegrations with the bigger
suppliers like GFS and Cisco andUS Foods and that kind of thing.
But even that aside, anyinvoice, just snap a picture.
What's nice about Wsc is thathuman review, to your point, is
where we really make surethere's no mistakes, because
that's where everything goesoutta whack.
On the beverage side, it'seasier generally,'cause it's
(20:25):
usually by the unit, by thecase.
The sizes are usually similar,seven 50 ml, one liter, that
kind of thing.
Cases of beer, cases of one.
Where it gets tricky is the foodside, where a lot of people fall
short, but.
We built this specifically fromthe ground up is what we call
item variation.
So not to get too technical, butthis happens a lot.
So I think you're a listener.
Yeah.
Jeremy Julian (20:43):
and you get products that get shipped in,
breast chicken, breast sizes aredifferent because they're out of
it at the warehouse.
sorry.
I'll let you keep going.
Angelo Esposito (20:49):
no, that's perfect.
But you're nailing it.
You're nailing it.
So that's exactly what happensis it's either they're, they,
ran out, so they send youdifferent size, or sometimes you
order tomatoes from supplier Aand supplier B, or sometimes
it's the same supplier, butdifferent pack sizes.
So it's different distributorcodes.
Most systems handle it very.
Basic, which is just oh, if thistomato was this distributor
code, and this one's a differentdistributor code and different
pack size, so it's just a newitem, which is a pain.
(21:11):
Whisk has the ability to merge.
Not merge,'cause you still wantthem separate, but to link them,
I should say, to a master item.
And the master item is in yourrecipe.
So if you have a hamburger and aslice of tomato is, I don't
know, 22 cents.
now if you just received adifferent pack size of tomatoes.
With most systems, you now haveto go in, take out that tomato,
replace it with a new tomatofrom the other vendor so you can
(21:33):
have an accurate recipe cost.
With whisk, it's just gonna pullit automatically'cause it's
linked that master tomato.
I know that seems supertechnical, but it's super
Jeremy Julian (21:41):
No,
Angelo Esposito (21:41):
Yeah.
Common.
Yeah,
Jeremy Julian (21:42):
both pack sizes and especially in these
replacements, you now get stuck.
Is that gonna be the newproduct?
I actually heard something thatis almost embarrassing.
You talked about not.
Replacing that item, but linkingthat item.
I heard some really well knownsystems don't even keep
historical pricing on thatprevious item.
So it's it's all just what isreal time that I paid on this
(22:04):
invoice today.
And with the fluctuation even,we're recording this in March of
2025.
I.
The fluctuation of the cost ofeggs has gone up, up and down so
significantly over the lastthree months.
can you imagine it only being atthe cost that it was, that you
bought it today versus what youbought it two weeks ago for?
So
Angelo Esposito (22:19):
keep that history.
Yeah, it's super important.
Yeah.
We keep the history, but it'strue.
I'm glad you called it out.
'cause there's a lot of, and bythe way, biggest recommendation
to people listening if you're inthe market or you're not.
Ha, either you're not happy withyour current system, even if
it's pen and paper, or you'rejust in the market or you're
curious.
I say this full transparencybook, a demo with Whisk and.
(22:39):
Book a demo with a few otherpeople in the industry because
what makes a difference is thedemo and on the demo.
This is my biggest advice I cangive people listening is don't
be shy to really ask, how doesthis work?
Can you show me that when Ireceive different tomatoes, can
you show me?
Can you show me?
Show me is the key word.
Because where most competitors,and I've seen this.
We'll get people, is they, it'smore of a high level
(23:01):
presentation, right?
It's less of a demo, more of apresentation.
It's less of the how.
It's more of just the output.
Here's all the nice reporting.
Owners will buy it, and then thepeople implementing are like,
man, this sucks.
I really encourage people do thedemo and ask the how.
So you set inventory is faster.
How do you do it?
Okay.
Mobile app scan.
Oh, Bluetooth scale.
Okay.
You mentioned invoices, but how?
(23:22):
Show me.
Show me recipes.
How you said integration.
'cause some people are gonna sayPOS integration and they mean
export the sales and upload it.
It's oh, you actually have anAPI integration.
Show me how that works.
So in general, whether they gowith wisk or not, that's my
bigot advice.
'cause in the industry, goingback to that formula, everyone
does the same thing on paper,which is hard for us'cause it's
hard to market.
(23:43):
But everyone will tell you, Hey,yes, we do inventory.
Yes, we help you order.
Yes, we help you invoice, andyes, we help you recipe cost, et
cetera, et cetera.
So from, I get it from a buyer'sperspective, you're like, oh,
they all do the same thing, butthis thing is better half the
price.
I'll just choose that.
I wouldn't want to be so naiveto say yes.
They're just happen to beexactly what you do when they're
half the price.
(24:03):
So that's where I recommendpeople really take the time,
book the demo.
You don't have to book 20, pickyour top three that you're
looking at.
Book the demo, see it foryourself, and then make the best
decision for you and your team.
Jeremy Julian (24:14):
Yeah, and there's two other pieces of advice on
that I would suggest.
Before you book the demo, defineyour
Angelo Esposito (24:20):
Yes.
Jeremy Julian (24:20):
Are you doing just bar inventory?
Are you doing full theoretical?
Are you doing down to slices oftomatoes or am I just doing the
protein that's on the patties?
Because unfortunately, I thinkpeople try and bite off too
much.
They go from zero or they gofrom pen and paper to biting off
too much'cause they got a newsystem now and it's gonna make
life easier.
And then they give up after.
It's like the diet, by February15th, nobody's dieting from
their New Year's resolution.
(24:41):
Same idea with inventory.
The other thing I would tell youis just to be careful that you
don't just go with yourbroadliners suggestion, because
unfortunately the broadlinershave been known to play around
with pricing from time to time.
Contract pricing doesn'tnecessarily get honored, whereas
somebody that's independent ofyour broadliner, and I'm not
suggesting that they're all bad,but they need to be held
(25:01):
accountable to both the contractpricing and.
To what those items are, whereasyou guys can help them with that
as it goes into those things.
So those would show the piecesof advice that
Angelo Esposito (25:09):
that's no.
Yes.
A hundred percent agree.
A hundred percent.
and just to echo the first one,'cause that one, I, I so
passionate about that one that Imade a YouTube video about it.
But literally, I tell peopledon't, sometimes people get lost
in the demo.
And the best example is likewhen choosing a POS, but same
thing with inventory.
But they'll be like, oh, I'mlooking at this and this.
And then they end up gettingdistracted with bells and
whistles.
I tell people, write down what'syour top, like non-negotiables.
(25:31):
If you're, if the most importantthing was like.
I gotta be able to split thebills easily.
But someone else is showing youabout, I don't know, their
online ordering.
don't get distracted, stayfocused.
cause no one's gonna doeverything amazing.
So stay focused.
And so our example would be likeif someone's a full service
restaurant and they have a wineprogram and they have food and
then someone else is maybe a hasone or two little features that
(25:52):
might be a little better thanWhisk on the food side.
But I don't know, 50% of yoursales are coming from MO
alcohol.
Maybe you're gonna lean towardsWhisk'cause that's important to
you.
Agreed.
And yes.
Take that advice.
'cause that's really somethingI've seen people make a mistake
on over and over again.
Jeremy Julian (26:07):
and I tell people all the time,'cause we do sell P
oss.
Write down what Wsc can do whenyou're looking at it.
Because unfortunately by thetime you're at, you threw your
third demo.
You're like, was it Wsc that didit their competitor that did
that?
And then they come back to yourimplementation team and go, you
showed it to me.
It's we don't even have thatfeature, so I promise you we
didn't show it to you.
'cause that happens a lot in the
Angelo Esposito (26:24):
Yeah.
and you know what, I'll throwin,'cause this actually just
happened recently.
I won't name the competitor, butthere was a big established
competitor of ours.
And, I was disappointed to seeit, but I guess it's the
industry.
one of our clients that we'reworking on was like, Hey, they
sent me this comparison sheet,whisk versus X and can you take
a look?
And I took a look and I waslike, this is sad.
'cause like half of is justWrong.
(26:46):
yes, we do this.
Yes, we do that.
Yeah, we do.
And I walked the client throughit.
I'm like, you remember the demo?
We do this.
We have a mobile app.
I showed you the invoice.
So in a way it kinda worked inour favor.
'cause then they're like, oh Iguess this competitor's kinda
lying, which didn't sit wellwith them.
but it goes to show you just togo back to book the demo for
yourself because anyone cancreate a quick cheat sheet
comparison and say what theywant.
(27:06):
And unfortunately not everyone'ssuper truthful.
So I hate for clients to justlook at a cheat sheet, let's
say, between your P os and otherPs and say, oh yeah.
XPOS told me this, so I guess Iwon't book a meeting, So
definitely do your own duediligence.
Don't just trust a competitor'scheat sheet.
'cause you know it's probablygonna be biased.
Jeremy Julian (27:22):
Absolutely no different than the conversation
about the, about thebroadliners, in your guys' name.
and it wouldn't be a podcast in2025 unless we talked about ai.
How is ai, and you chuckle, youhave your own podcast.
I.
a AI is a big thing, and I knowthat more and more people are
integrating AI into theirapplications.
You've been around since, AIexisted 10 years ago, but nobody
(27:43):
knew about it.
Now it's like a, it's likeeverybody wants to AI it.
And I just got done with themulti-unit restaurant, tech show
in Vegas last week, andeverybody was all about ai.
It's explain to me what ai, buttalk to me about how a AI is
playing a part in inventory,both machine learning.
As well as computer vision, aswell as large language models,
(28:03):
like those are the three thateverybody's been talking about.
And how are you guys thinking
Angelo Esposito (28:06):
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's it's a really interestingquestion.
It's funny, I was talking tosomeone today and I was just
saying it's like.
AI is like a love hate.
'cause on one hand it's likesuch a buzzword that sometimes
it's like easy to turn your headaway and say ah, I don't wanna
hear about an ai.
But then sometimes you'll getdeep into some stuff and you're
like, wow, this is, I'm livingin a moment.
It's like when the internet cameout, like it's such a.
Critical moment that you'relike, I don't wanna miss out.
(28:26):
So I want to be more involved inAI'cause I want to see what's
possible.
So I'm leaning more towards thatcamp'cause I see so much
potential and we've beenimplementing in many ways and
ways.
So the way I see it is, listen,AI and restaurants in general,
there's so many differentapplications where obviously my
brain is more, leaning towardsall the back of house stuff.
'cause that's what we do.
So when I think about ai, Ithink about it from an inventory
perspective, maybe from invoiceprocessing, from maybe
(28:49):
recommending recipes.
So specifically with Whisk rightnow and futuristic right now,
what we do.
Is we implemented AI when itcomes to the invoice,
processing.
Historically, we used to justuse basic, basic, it's still
cool technology, but we used touse, object, character
recognition, OCR, try to readit.
Now, we actually use largelanguage models and based on the
invoice, if it's, Cisco or GFSor this, it could read it
(29:10):
instantly.
It could detect if it'sscratched out with a pen and
things like that.
So that's one area that's beenreally nice and we've been
leveraging it a lot and it, theinvoices get better over time.
So there's like that kind of.
Again,
Jeremy Julian (29:21):
the accuracy is likely gonna be so much better
than the OCR stuff.
'cause the OCR stuff came out in
Angelo Esposito (29:26):
Exact.
exactly.
And the cool thing is when weget volume going back to machine
learning, it gets better andbetter.
so if it's a larger distributor,it's better.
'cause we have so many clients,let's say, I dunno, GFS or Cisco
scanning those invoices.
So those just the learning modeljust.
gets, learns faster, I guess isthe short answer.
So that's one obvious one.
a second one was more of justmore, a way to help with
cleaning up their account.
(29:46):
So detecting, duplicates,recommending when to merge
things, on the recipe side,being able to see suggested
recipes.
'cause no matter anyone's gonnahave their own recipe, but be
able to see like in general,this is how you make an old
fashioned, but now you can makeyour old fashioned with your
product in house.
and then the third area, andI've seen.
Other people do.
This is more on the inventoryside.
On the inventory side.
(30:07):
For now, we're still very muchmobile app, real time.
There's a lot of cool tech, butit's not really AI on our side
where I've seen people get intothe computer vision stuff and
it's been interesting.
It's been one of our visions,but it's hard to execute, but is
the idea of going around with,RayBan glasses or meta glasses I
should say, or whatever, butwith a camera and being able to
the computer recognize what's infront of'em.
(30:28):
I've seen some interestingapplications.
I would argue like accuracy isimportant and you nailed it
before, like one invoice iswrong, one item variation is
wrong.
So full on food, beverage,inventory right now, I still
think it's tough for a regularrestaurant.
Where I see it having been doneis, I think there's use cases,
like if you think of maybecatering, I've seen someone do
it for airlines.
So with airlines, when you openup those things, maybe like
(30:49):
hotel, mini bars, those type ofthings seem to be a bit easier
'cause all the mini bottles arethere or things are prepackaged
and the camera could justdetect.
Okay,
Jeremy Julian (30:57):
Yeah, there's a lot less variance in, in all of
the different things.
'cause even as you get tomulti-units, the bar layout is
gonna be different between them
Angelo Esposito (31:03):
there's a lot.
So I've seen, that one, I'mstill like, it's still early.
Like I know people are like, oh,look, I, you can just.
Point your camera tells you.
Yeah, that one I think is likeless accurate.
I've seen good applications,like I said, in airlines and
what you can see, so don't getme wrong, there's really cool
stuff happening.
you think about casinos, they'vehad security cameras that could
detect what's, what people arepouring while they're punching.
So the tech is superinteresting.
(31:24):
where we wanna head towards, andthis will be a glimpse,
hopefully by the time this isout, it'll be live, is, we
wanted to get towards a full onlike video inventory.
so you're just talking out loudand videoing and then whatever.
But then what hit us is what ifwe can do whisk audio inventory?
So this is low key, but the ideais you walk around, you're just
like.
Two cases of tomatoes.
okay, I got three and a halfjars of, one liter, milk,
(31:47):
whatever.
And you're just talking out loudbecause we have their invoices
in our system.
We could use, transcription,language models to, like whisper
whatever to transcribe, audiointo text and then match that
text with what they have in it.
So that's one area that's.
Not existing yet, but that we'retesting out, I'll call it alpha
version.
so hopefully by the time thiscomes out, maybe it's yes, it
(32:08):
was success or people hated itand no one wants to do audio
inventory.
so we'll find out.
Jeremy Julian (32:12):
That's really cool though.
I hadn't considered that.
We actually had, you alluded tothe computer vision stuff.
the founders of Nomad Go, wereon the show and they've got some
unique, computer vision stuffthat, you know, as everything
does, they've got a vision that,that they can help make
inventory easy and they'reworking on it and we'll see how
it, pans out.
I think, is there anything Imissed, I guess as far as whisk
and where you guys are at, otherthan, love to let the, listeners
(32:34):
know how to get in touch withyour team to, to
Angelo Esposito (32:36):
a hundred percent.
Look, the one thing I'd say,'cause I know just by default we
ended up talking a lot about,the bar side.
So one thing just to emphasizeis Whisk started on the bar side
and then about five years ago welaunched the food side.
So Whisk.
Now, today, sometimes peopledon't know this, but really to
emphasize, it's not oh yeah, wecan, if you have some bar
snacks, we could do, no, we cango full on food.
(32:56):
multi-unit QSRs or a full onfull service restaurant, food
menu, batches and prep items,and they create their own aioli
and this, and I buy my fish andI yield, my yield is the.
not to get crazy, but we do allthat.
just to be clear, I just wannaemphasize to the listeners out
there, we do full on food andbeverage management and we help
with everything, inventory,ordering, and w related.
(33:17):
And the nice thing is weintegrate with about 60, point
of sale system.
So that's just to really justemphasize,'cause I know by
default I always give beverageexamples and cocktail examples,
but we go full on, on the foodside and have food only clients
as well.
Jeremy Julian (33:31):
Love that.
how do people get in touch?
How do people learn more?
How do people book that demothat you alluded to
Angelo Esposito (33:35):
Yeah, super easy.
So the easiest way wisk.ai, sojust WIS k.ai, everything's on
the website.
My philosophy's like the websiteshould be so easy that we don't
have to create sales materialthat's separate.
So you can find all the details,the feature pages, the demo page
there, there's a book of freecall at the top.
one, one thing we've beentesting after hours speaking
about AI is a ai qualifier,which is.
(33:59):
Been pretty fun.
during hours of course we'regonna answer.
and we made it clear it's a bot.
We don't want people, we're nottrying to trick people.
It's just Hey, it's after hours.
We're not here.
Instead of leaving us avoicemail, if you wanna just see
if you're a good fit, just talkto our bot.
So we just launched like a weekago.
We got a couple recordings.
It's been interesting, but weshort answer Whisk ai.
You can book a call, we'll talkto you to make sure it's a good
(34:21):
fit.
And then if we think you're agood fit, is we book a demo and
the worst case scenario isyou're like, no, I don't like
it.
The best case is you get to seeit for yourself.
It's something you think you cansee yourself using and great,
right?
But like it's really a nopressure demo.
So that's one thing weemphasize.
We're really not that teamthat's gonna call you 75 times,
it's like book the demo, see itfor yourself.
If you like what great.
(34:41):
If not, don't worry.
There's no strings attached.
Jeremy Julian (34:44):
Love that.
and as I said earlier, I knowyou've got your own show.
You wanna plug that for
Angelo Esposito (34:48):
Sure.
Yeah.
Jeremy Julian (34:49):
those that want to learn more about, what you
do.
Angelo Esposito (34:50):
absolutely.
so like I said, websites,wist.ai, and the good thing is
we try to put everything there.
So you can also find the podcastthere, under like resources.
All the podcast episodes will bethere and you can watch the
YouTube if you like, video, oryou could listen to it on,
Spotify, apple, et cetera, etcetera.
the podcast is called WhiskingIt All.
whisking it all.
And the idea is we meet with,restaurant.
Tours, bar operators or justpeople in the industry as a
(35:13):
whole, whether it's tech relatedor not.
So we've had people that,operate 200 franchise locations
to just like a guy, ahospitality group that might
have 15 locations, two techrelated businesses.
we're gonna have you on the showsoon, this that'll be fun.
Or maybe by the time this airs,maybe you'll already have been
on the show.
but yeah, so if anyone wants tocheck that out, W ai, you'll
find the podcast, you'll findthe resources and.
(35:35):
If you wanna follow me onLinkedIn, I post a lot of
hospitality style content, youcan follow me, Angelo Esposito
on LinkedIn.
And I also, this is less wellknown'cause it's just, I do more
just for me and to help people.
But angelo esposito.com, all Ido is I post learnings of me
building the business with myteam, so like hiring people how
to do this, delegating better,how to be less stressed.
(35:56):
So I just, every week, everySunday I post an article.
So that's more just if anyonewants more.
Business advice, I post it.
It's free angelo esposito.com,but if not everything can be
found on a whisk ai.
Jeremy Julian (36:09):
thank you for like I said, when you and I,
before we hit the record button,I've been watching your journey
over the last couple years.
You've had some people that one,one have been on the show, two
friends of mine, and so Ireached out just to say, Hey,
how do I learn more?
Because at the end of the day.
Whether people use Whisk or not,a lot of the principles of what
you talked about they have to doin order to run a successful
restaurant.
So thank you for that education.
(36:29):
to our listeners guys, thank youguys for hanging out with us
this week.
if you haven't alreadysubscribed, please do so on your
favorite player.
Angelo, thank you so much.
And to our listeners, make it agreat day.
Angelo Esposito (36:37):
Thank you for having me.
This is great.
Thanks for listening to TheRestaurant Technology Guys
podcast.
Visit restaurant technologyguys.com for tips, industry
insights, and more to help yourun your restaurant better.
This is the RestaurantTechnology Guides podcast,
helping you run your restaurantbetter.
Jeremy Julian (00:15):
In today's episode, Angelo and I talk a
bunch about really the visionbehind Whisk and why it was
created, some of the pain thathe saw some of his friends
suffering through as it relatesto inventory in bars and
restaurants over the years.
Angelo and I have known eachother online for quite some
time, but this is the first timehe and I got a chance to sit
(00:36):
down and talk.
And my goodness, he's got somuch to offer.
I would encourage all of you tocheck out what he and the team
built at Whisk, how it's reallychanging the game of inventory
management and how you are gonnado bar inventory, how you're
gonna do restaurant food serviceinventory, and how you're going
to take one of your prime costsand ensure that you are staying
(00:57):
above board with it and that youare continuing to make money.
In the right ways.
If you don't know me, my name isJeremy Julian.
I am the Chief Revenue Officerfor CBS North Star.
We sell the North Star point ofsale product for multi-units.
Please check usout@cbsnorthstar.com and now
onto the episode.
(01:21):
welcome back to the RestaurantTechnology Guys podcast.
I thank everyone out there forjoining us, as I say each and
every time.
I know you guys got lots ofchoices, so thank you guys for
joining us today.
one of the biggest topics I talkto restaurateurs about is their
prime costs.
And, our guest today is gonnashare with you some of the good
and the bad and the ugly of,restaurants and prime costs and
why they've hurt themselves anddone some really cool things
(01:42):
with, with some software thatyou built.
But Angela, why don't youintroduce yourself to our
audience.
let's talk a little bit aboutwho you are first before we jump
into kind of what you guys havebeen doing.
Angelo Esposito (01:50):
Awesome.
So first of all, thanks forhaving me on.
it's always fun, to be on thereceiving side of the, of a
podcast, so I appreciate that.
yeah, so listen, I'm the founderand the CEO at Whisk Ai Wisk is
WS K do ai.
And what we do is we reallyjust.
Try to give restaurateurs theirtime back by streamlining a lot
of the.
Back of house operations.
(02:12):
So what that looks like is thinkabout things that restaurants
are doing already, but how do wemake it a lot easier?
So think about inventory, thinkabout ordering to their
suppliers, maybe entering theirinvoices, maybe costing out
their recipes, all that kind ofstuff.
the boring but super importantstuff.
The things that restaurantsdidn't know they were gonna do,
and they're like, let's juststart a restaurant.
(02:32):
And they're like, this sucks.
we try to help with all that andalleviate as much of that,
stress off their plate.
Jeremy Julian (02:37):
I love that.
And as I said in the intro, kindof prime costs are one of the
biggest things that peoplestruggle to figure out how to
keep their arms around.
Can you and I talked pre, prehitting the record button, gimme
the origin story, like where didit all come from?
Because.
Does every anybody really needanother inventory package?
and I'm teasing about it, but atthe same time, does anybody
really need another inventorypackage?
(02:57):
There's hundreds of'em outthere.
They're, going back to REM maxand the DOS days.
I've been around long enough toremember remix from dos.
in general, it's one of thehardest things, as you said,
that most restaurants don'trealize that they have to do.
But if they don't do it, itreally has an opportunity to
hurt them from a businessperspective.
Angelo Esposito (03:14):
look it, it's one of those things that in
every other industry it's likesuper obvious, but in the
hospitality industry it's ah,it's okay.
It's the way it is.
it's fine.
And I always give the analogyof, take, I know a Best Buy
style store.
Like you're selling computers,right?
It's not that hard.
It's like you're looking at.
To make it simple, you have, Idon't know, let's just call it
an iPhone.
iPhone 15.
Great.
All the same color.
(03:35):
Cool.
So you got 10 of those.
the end of the night, you checkyour inventory.
You got eight.
Oh, so we are missing two.
Let me check my sales.
Oh, we sold two.
Perfect.
Makes sense.
But in the restaurant and barworld, the reason it's so hard
and such a pain is becauseyou're not just dealing with
one-to-one, right?
iPhone equals iPhone, you'redealing with hamburger equals
(03:55):
some beef and a bun and a thisand the sauce.
And the sauce was made in apre-match.
And so where a cocktail, itcould be many different things.
So it's, you're buying raw itemsand then you're building a
finished product.
So because it's very hard totrack, All this to say the
origin story of Whisk, reallywhen we started, we now do food
and beverage fully, but when westarted it was really focused on
beverage.
And I always joke around likesometimes with some of my
(04:16):
teammates whisk got me good.
I started off with a project andhere I am 10 years later.
But the project at the time wasI wonder if I could help my
friends in the industry withtheir bar inventory.
'cause I realized they weredoing it often, like either
weekly, some of them even moreoften.
But at the very.
minimum weekly.
It was taking hours upon hoursand they were using pen and
(04:38):
paper Excel.
And so I started going aroundand say, okay, maybe it's just
this nightclub friend.
Let me talk to this high endrestaurant.
It's no, he's doing it likethat.
Okay, let me talk to this hotelfor sure.
A hotel's gotta have a system.
It's no, they're also doingExcel.
And what I realized, at least atthat time, 10 years ago, it
wasn't a budget thing.
They all, a lot of theserestaurants were nice.
They were busy.
They had the budget.
It was, I think the tech wasnot.
(05:00):
Easy enough to use back thenthat a lot of people tritech and
then they're like, forget it,and went back to pen and paper
or spreadsheets.
So when I started, it is funny,but I started as a project to
say, I wonder if I can makesomething.
That's better than pen and paperand Excel that people would use.
And so that was the mission,super hyperfocused.
It was just inventory and justbar inventory.
So it was very much hyperfocusedon here's a bottle.
(05:23):
What's the best way to figureout what's inside of this?
'cause most people just look atit and say, ah, it's about a
0.3, it's about a 0.5.
The old tenting method.
And that was it.
That's where it started.
And then it evolved and we canget into it, but at the core of
it, that was why, how Whisk wasborn.
Jeremy Julian (05:39):
It's so funny 'cause I try and remind people
that are not restaurant peopleand any of our longtime
listeners know that I'm going onclose to 30 years working in
restaurants.
It's really a manufacturingfacility inside of a restaurant.
It's manufacturing, it's a, thecar manufacturer's got seats and
steering wheel and tires andrims and all of that kinda
stuff.
Very similar to the restaurant,but people don't think of it
that way because to your point,it's a bottle of tequila, it's
(06:01):
some orange juice.
It's all of these differentcomponents that will make up
that drink and they have tomanufacture them on the fly,
which makes it reallychallenging because the other
thing that most people don'trealize that aren't in the
restaurant industry is that.
Your prime costs.
Ultimately moving them onesingle point on a restaurant,
doing a million dollars in salesis a whole lot of money that's
(06:23):
going to your bottom line andnot managing those things is
huge.
Talk to me a little real quick,Angela.
where did the bar stuff comefrom?
Was it just'cause of your friendgroup?
Is that, you said that it, wasit because you, you really like
high-end tequila and you were,you knew if I can help these
guys out, they'll give
Angelo Esposito (06:37):
give some.
Jeremy Julian (06:38):
service on Saturday
Angelo Esposito (06:39):
not, no.
Yeah.
Funny enough, IW Yeah, it's agood, it's a good question.
funny enough, I was actuallyworking on a, another startup,
before this.
and it was actually at the time,this is, I don't know, maybe
2012, but at that time, or maybe2013, at that time, it was, a
guest list app.
and again, now it sounds like,nah, this is so easy to do, but
back then it was somewhat novel.
(07:00):
It was basically just digitizingso you could see the theme.
I'm just trying to digitize oldschool processes or processes.
so I, the original app I wasworking on was basically, a
digital guest list.
So the idea was like a lot ofplaces have a guest list, like
an open table, but more for thenight lifestyle places, just to
make it easier to track who'scoming.
If you've got a bunch ofdifferent promoters, they could
update it on their phone.
Everything's synced.
(07:21):
You're building a CRM, youcould.
Remarket to people.
'cause I found even the coolestplaces in the coolest cities
just had clipboard with a penand paper.
And it's yeah, throw it out atthe end of the night.
I'm like, that's crazy.
They're not keeping any of thedata.
So I was working on that andthat's when I started seeing
this kind of trend.
like I was getting close to allthese different bars and working
with them or whatever.
And I'd see people at the end ofthe night and the night, I'll
(07:42):
never forget that.
It really hit me was I sawsomeone doing it.
They were going one by one,eyeballing.
He had a pen and paper with hisclipboard.
It was like stains all over thepaper.
'cause the bars wet andwhatever.
And I'm like, what are youdoing?
Huh?
I'm doing the inventory.
How often do you do this?
And in that case it was everynight.
'cause it was more of anightclub.
how long does it take you?
Three hours?
I'm like, you do three hoursevery night.
So I'm like, okay, it's gotta beimportant.
(08:02):
And that's when it started.
And then I started talking toother friends in the industry,
Fine dining, restaurant, hotel.
Lemme talk to casual dining.
And I saw this recurring trendthat it's man, yes there's some
systems that exist, but nah,it's just easier.
I'll go back to pen and paper.
And so that was a challenge.
Can we make this as easy as penand paper, but better?
And it's hard.
It's hard'cause pen and paper isfree form anything.
(08:23):
I see something, I just writeit.
So it was a, I know it soundssilly, but it was a hard
challenge.
Like how do I make this easierto adopt than pen and paper?
Jeremy Julian (08:31):
Yeah.
So talk me through that processbecause I think, 10 years ago,
technology isn't even where itis today.
The iPhone had just come out,like even having a phone in your
pocket that can do these things.
I remember early days'causeagain, I remember, working on
inventory packages where itwould sync offline because you'd
go into the walk-in or you'd goto the dry storage.
But wifi 10 years ago sucked.
(08:51):
the battery life on these
Angelo Esposito (08:52):
yeah.
That too.
Yeah.
Jeremy Julian (08:53):
So it was like, it was hard.
again, to your point, I think ithas to get done because that one
or two points of margin make ahuge difference.
And technology is constantlyevolving.
And today it's significantlyeasier than it was 10 years ago.
But even in that, it was hard.
So talk me through why did youthink that you could solve this
with the technology that existed10 years ago?
(09:14):
Because, it's continued toevolve and I'm sure the product
that you would almost beembarrassed about from 10 years
ago now you're like, oh, Ishould have thought it, but
thought about it this
Angelo Esposito (09:23):
yeah, no, a hundred percent.
look, first off, to your pointabout the percentage points I
think people sometimes don'trealize, so just to emphasize
like one point off a million, inrevenue is 10 K and on average
Ws.
we typically can drop at threeto 5%.
We have cases where it's beensix, seven, 8%, but realistic
it's three to 5%.
improvements in, in cost ofgoods.
And, that's on a million insales.
A lot of our clients are doingtwo to 3, 4, 5, 6.
(09:45):
So it's it's a lot of money.
And sometimes what people don'trealize is when you save, call
it 25,000 or 50,000 in yourbottom line, what's really
powerful is you have to give ortake on the type of restaurant,
but multiply it roughly, let'ssay by four or five.
To, to
Jeremy Julian (09:59):
In top point
Angelo Esposito (10:00):
exactly.
To reach
Jeremy Julian (10:01):
cost savings.
Angelo Esposito (10:02):
And that's what people, yes.
People forget that They're like,oh.
Jeremy Julian (10:06):
you saved, it's$4 less in revenue that you have to
Angelo Esposito (10:08):
exactly.
that's the one gap in that.
I just wanna emphasize, becausethis could be great for your
audience potentially, butsometimes people forget that
they're, okay, let's just workon this marketing campaign and
we'll do this in this and get anX amount of guess.
And hopefully that'll bring in ahundred thousand.
But cool, a hundred thousandsales maybe is, let's say 25,000
in bottom line.
So just not to confuse the two.
But anyways, back to the corequestion.
I think it was a bit of naivety.
(10:29):
I was a bit naive.
I was like, oh, I wonder if Icould do this.
I, if I knew so much about tech,I would've maybe been more
scared and been like, oh, thisis impossible and there's giants
out there, and how can I dothis?
I was just like naive and Ithink because I was doing it
more as like a project I.
It made it palatable.
I was like, okay, I wonder ifyou know the iPhone's out now.
It was like the, one of theearlier ones, I think it was
even maybe an iPod touch, and Iwas like, all right, I wonder if
(10:51):
we could do this.
And the concept was simple.
I was like, I wonder with thephone, if we could point the
camera, scan the barcode, if itcould detect the image, okay,
pose it up and then we can waitwith a Bluetooth scale.
And so that, that's where westarted.
And.
The first while we hit was like,I guess we gotta build a
database.
So I started going to some of myfriends' restaurants and bars
(11:12):
and weighing the most commonbottles.
So I'd be like, Hey, can I comebuy a closing or opening?
And I'd weigh empty bottles, I'dweigh full bottles and I'd build
the, start building thedatabase.
So think of all the typical, orpopular, vodkas, gins, whiskeys,
your typical.
So at least I have a startingpoint.
and that's how it started.
It was like building thisdatabase.
And for me, what got me reallyexcited is once I saw.
the first few restaurants, likewith a very shitty basic app,
(11:36):
but using it and enjoying it andsaying oh wow, this is pretty
good.
I knew I was onto something.
I knew it was a long way to go.
'cause the app was very basic,but just that initial thought of
pointed to the bottle.
It knows it's a seven 50 ml, Idon't know, CAS Amigos, Blanco.
And then being able to place onthe scale and be like, oh,
there's 4.2 ounces left.
Just that was magic.
(11:56):
What I didn't realize back thenwas that's 5% of it, and then
once you open the door, it'slike, what about my ordering and
my invoicing and my point ofsale and my recipe?
And I was like, that's when itwent from my little project to
okay, we gotta turn this into areal thing,
Jeremy Julian (12:08):
I love that.
walk us through what, when youwalk into a client that doesn't
have whisk, doesn't have whisk,or quite frankly doesn't have
anything, you're now, 2025, youwalk into a bar nightclub.
What is the most typical thingthat you see?
Is it the still the pen andpaper and then somebody goes
back to the office and puts in aD Excel and hopes that it's
right and maybe pulls point ofsale?
Is that kind of the normal,because I want you to talk to
(12:30):
our listeners out there thatprobably are sitting in their
shoes going.
crap, that's me and I wanna seea future that's beyond where I'm
at
Angelo Esposito (12:36):
Yeah, that's totally fair.
Listen, the truth is, I wouldsay, generally speaking, most
industries still very much callit Excel or spreadsheet.
So pen and paper and maybespreadsheet generally.
So that's still our biggestcompetitor, quote unquote.
Like even some of our directcompetitors, that's 10, 20% of
the time.
Oh, this person comes up there.
Why you better, why youdifferent?
Ah, it depends on your case.
(12:57):
Okay, cool.
Fine.
But 80% of the time they'reusing, Pen and paper
spreadsheets.
I've seen a shift post,C-O-I-D-I think because everyone
was locked down and had time andfiguring his stuff out and
realizing the value of managingtheir cost of goods really,
There's a little more, I wouldsay like education around it.
Like even I feel it within thecompany, there's less like, why
should I do inventory?
It's not that talk track isn'tthere anymore.
(13:19):
so definitely people are moreaware and shopping for it.
So that percentage I would sayhas gone up of people who are
like very much aware.
but the one thing I would say iswe try to focus on people who
are doing something.
So what I mean by that, ifthey're doing pen and paper in
Excel, that's fine.
'cause the intention's there,it's not ideal.
It probably takes long, it'sprobably inaccurate, but.
Those type of restaurants alwaysend up loving whisk, or the
(13:41):
majority.
There's always, you can't pleasethat one.
But generally end up lovingWhisk.
Where we've had issues and we'velearned this, the hard way is if
someone's doing nothing.
Because if you're doing nothing,yeah, I don't do inventory, I
don't need it now number one, Igotta educate you, train you,
whatever.
But now your staff also resentsrisk'cause they were doing
nothing.
Now they're doing something, sothere's no appreciation.
I was spending zero minutes onthis thing, now I'm spending an
(14:04):
hour.
Whereas the minute they're, ah,whisk guys, I hate it.
But if they were doingsomething, there's usually a big
appreciation.
'cause man, I was spending sixhours a week, now I'm spending
two hours or two and a halfhours a week.
So they're happy.
So I would say generally we tryto focus on people who are doing
something.
But to, to your point, it'sstill very much manual.
and that looks like paper andspreadsheets.
(14:25):
Typical restaurant, I would sayis probably going around with a
piece of paper, then enteringinto a spreadsheet and then
sending it to the, head officeor to the bosses or whatever,
with little to no understandingof why they're doing it.
They're just, oh yeah, I countit, sent it, I'm done.
which I think is also a gap.
The more you can empower yourstaff on why they're doing it
and what it means, I thinkgenerally the better you can do
as a restaurant.
Jeremy Julian (14:45):
and the other piece that I would love for you
to, dig into a little bit deeperon is you talked about getting,
so you've got the actuals, yougot what's still left in the
bottles.
You talked about how you guysare tracking those bottles.
But a lot of times, there,there's a lot of different ways
or reasons why inventory mightbe.
Off.
You've got over pours, you'vegot under pours, you've got
theft.
There's a lot of different ways,and I think a lot of times, at
(15:06):
least what I've seen when peopleare using Excel.
They look at it and go, oh yeah,I'm just off.
And they never go figure out theroot cause of the problem.
Talk me through that because Ithink all too often, and again,
part of the desire for this, I'dlove for people to check out,
whisk, no questions asked, andthey need to learn that, you
know what?
Some of the stuff, even inExcel, and pen and paper,
(15:26):
there's times that your staff isdoing the wrong thing and
costing you$10,000 a yearbecause they're overp pouring
the whiskey or whatever it mightbe.
Angelo Esposito (15:33):
yeah.
Listen, an analogy I givesometimes is like pulling back
the curtain, right?
It's like you are using excel.
It's hard to find the mistakesand when there is a mistake,
there's this, there's thismentality where it's okay, look,
there's probably a mistake, butit's fine.
It's probably just a mistake.
Our beverage cost or food costis outta whack, but it's
probably just a mistake.
And then when it's good.
You assume it's good.
So there's this natural bias,and I've seen that happen
(15:55):
unfortunately also withsometimes third parties.
Don't get me wrong, thirdparties could be great, but the,
I've seen that similar biashappen where you have a third
party company come in and countfor you.
And when the report makes sense,you're like, cool, thank you.
And the report doesn't makesense.
You're like, you guys messed upsomewhere.
So there's like this kind ofjust natural bias.
I'm like, data good.
Yay.
Data bad.
It's a mistake.
so what I recommend is this,what the typical mistakes I see
(16:17):
is a lot of systems out thereincluding pen and paper, but
even some.
Of our main competitors stillrely on like shelf to sheet.
So like I got this sheet, it'sjust maybe instead of a paper
Excel, it's now their system orwhatever.
But it's still like I'm enteringin this table.
What I see in front of me, andI'm trying to add things up, is
I got some tomatoes here andsome there, so I'm like, okay,
one case there too.
(16:37):
And I'm typing where I thinkwhisk.
is different is we built it withthe intention that number one,
you could split up the work.
So you could be 10 peoplecounting.
Everyone goes to the separatearea and everyone's counting.
Everything's sinking in realtime.
Number two, it works offline.
So if there's areas like afridge or whatever, where wifi
is week, it works.
But number three, and this isthe shelf to sheet part, you
don't have to count shelf tosheet.
(16:57):
Our philosophy is forget theshelf to sheet.
That makes sense.
If you're stuck on paper or inExcel.
With whisk, we tell people,count what In the order.
You see it?
If I'm gonna in my pantry, Isee, I don't know, tomatoes.
Okay.
And then next to it I seesomething else.
Okay?
And I just keep going.
And then later if there's moretomatoes, there's more tomatoes.
But most people force you to goshelter sheet.
(17:18):
And that's where a lot of themistakes are made.
'cause you're trying to add thisand this, then you forgot that
you counted that.
So all this to say we're bigfans of trying to make it as
easy as possible.
So scan or search what in theorder.
You see it if it's if it's open,you can use our Bluetooth scale.
If it's closed, you can use ourvisual mode.
You can count by the case.
You can count by the unit.
That's it.
That's all
Jeremy Julian (17:37):
Love it.
So the flip side of that andwhere I see things come up and
I've watched people get inalmost fist fights because
they're not gonna make theirbonus'cause they didn't hit
their
Angelo Esposito (17:46):
right.
Right, right.
Jeremy Julian (17:46):
is that they received product in incorrectly
through the back door.
They received a case when itshould have been a box.
And that also will throw offyour inventory.
'cause it's saying you shouldhave 16 of these, you should
have a case of wine.
You should have 12 bottles ofwine.
And you really only received onebottle of wine.
You ordered one bottle of wine.
But you, you received it intothe system.
As a case.
Talk our audience through, yourexperience in watching people
(18:09):
because if you order itproperly, but you receive it in
wrong, it's in the systemincorrectly.
and that's where you got a lotof those variances.
'cause that's what the systemsays you should have.
But then when I go to count, I'moff by 11 bottles And now a word
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Angelo Esposito (18:55):
Yeah, you nailed it.
I could tell you've been in theindustry 30 years.
'cause you're hitting all thepoints we see all the time.
Look, the truth is, this is howI like to explain it to
restaurants and to peoplelistening is the formula is a
formula, right?
So whether you're using whiskpen and paper.
A third party, it's guess what?
They're gonna count yourbeginning inventory, they're
gonna add your purchases,they're gonna subtract your
ending inventory, that's gonnagive'em the, what we call
(19:16):
consumption.
Some people will call usagewhatever, and then we compare
that to the sales.
But the sales are speaking adifferent language, right?
Jeremy Julian (19:22):
Yeah, they're theoretical.
Angelo Esposito (19:24):
the recipe to convert the theoretical, and
that's what we call the famousactual versus theoretical.
So no matter what, you'll needthat.
Our philosophy is we think ofeach of those points and we're
like, how can we make them aseasy as possible?
So on the inventory, we spoke abit about it, but it's okay if
it works offline.
If it works real time.
If I can use the camera on thephone, if I can just count in
the order, I see it, blah, blah,blah, blah, blah.
(19:44):
You get the idea.
It's great.
That should be easier.
On the purchasing side, youcan't get easier than just snap
in a picture.
So for us, when invoices comein, all you have to do is you
take your mobile app.
Snap a picture of the invoice ormultiple pages of an invoice and
submit it.
That's it.
The AI does its thing and thenwe have a human team internally
from WS that reviews it.
You can also upload it.
(20:04):
You can also forward it viaemail.
And also we have some EDIintegrations with the bigger
suppliers like GFS and Cisco andUS Foods and that kind of thing.
But even that aside, anyinvoice, just snap a picture.
What's nice about Wsc is thathuman review, to your point, is
where we really make surethere's no mistakes, because
that's where everything goesoutta whack.
On the beverage side, it'seasier generally,'cause it's
(20:25):
usually by the unit, by thecase.
The sizes are usually similar,seven 50 ml, one liter, that
kind of thing.
Cases of beer, cases of one.
Where it gets tricky is the foodside, where a lot of people fall
short, but.
We built this specifically fromthe ground up is what we call
item variation.
So not to get too technical, butthis happens a lot.
So I think you're a listener.
Yeah.
Jeremy Julian (20:43):
and you get products that get shipped in,
breast chicken, breast sizes aredifferent because they're out of
it at the warehouse.
sorry.
I'll let you keep going.
Angelo Esposito (20:49):
no, that's perfect.
But you're nailing it.
You're nailing it.
So that's exactly what happensis it's either they're, they,
ran out, so they send youdifferent size, or sometimes you
order tomatoes from supplier Aand supplier B, or sometimes
it's the same supplier, butdifferent pack sizes.
So it's different distributorcodes.
Most systems handle it very.
Basic, which is just oh, if thistomato was this distributor
code, and this one's a differentdistributor code and different
pack size, so it's just a newitem, which is a pain.
(21:11):
Whisk has the ability to merge.
Not merge,'cause you still wantthem separate, but to link them,
I should say, to a master item.
And the master item is in yourrecipe.
So if you have a hamburger and aslice of tomato is, I don't
know, 22 cents.
now if you just received adifferent pack size of tomatoes.
With most systems, you now haveto go in, take out that tomato,
replace it with a new tomatofrom the other vendor so you can
(21:33):
have an accurate recipe cost.
With whisk, it's just gonna pullit automatically'cause it's
linked that master tomato.
I know that seems supertechnical, but it's super
Jeremy Julian (21:41):
No,
Angelo Esposito (21:41):
Yeah.
Common.
Yeah,
Jeremy Julian (21:42):
both pack sizes and especially in these
replacements, you now get stuck.
Is that gonna be the newproduct?
I actually heard something thatis almost embarrassing.
You talked about not.
Replacing that item, but linkingthat item.
I heard some really well knownsystems don't even keep
historical pricing on thatprevious item.
So it's it's all just what isreal time that I paid on this
(22:04):
invoice today.
And with the fluctuation even,we're recording this in March of
2025.
I.
The fluctuation of the cost ofeggs has gone up, up and down so
significantly over the lastthree months.
can you imagine it only being atthe cost that it was, that you
bought it today versus what youbought it two weeks ago for?
So
Angelo Esposito (22:19):
keep that history.
Yeah, it's super important.
Yeah.
We keep the history, but it'strue.
I'm glad you called it out.
'cause there's a lot of, and bythe way, biggest recommendation
to people listening if you're inthe market or you're not.
Ha, either you're not happy withyour current system, even if
it's pen and paper, or you'rejust in the market or you're
curious.
I say this full transparencybook, a demo with Whisk and.
(22:39):
Book a demo with a few otherpeople in the industry because
what makes a difference is thedemo and on the demo.
This is my biggest advice I cangive people listening is don't
be shy to really ask, how doesthis work?
Can you show me that when Ireceive different tomatoes, can
you show me?
Can you show me?
Show me is the key word.
Because where most competitors,and I've seen this.
We'll get people, is they, it'smore of a high level
(23:01):
presentation, right?
It's less of a demo, more of apresentation.
It's less of the how.
It's more of just the output.
Here's all the nice reporting.
Owners will buy it, and then thepeople implementing are like,
man, this sucks.
I really encourage people do thedemo and ask the how.
So you set inventory is faster.
How do you do it?
Okay.
Mobile app scan.
Oh, Bluetooth scale.
Okay.
You mentioned invoices, but how?
(23:22):
Show me.
Show me recipes.
How you said integration.
'cause some people are gonna sayPOS integration and they mean
export the sales and upload it.
It's oh, you actually have anAPI integration.
Show me how that works.
So in general, whether they gowith wisk or not, that's my
bigot advice.
'cause in the industry, goingback to that formula, everyone
does the same thing on paper,which is hard for us'cause it's
hard to market.
(23:43):
But everyone will tell you, Hey,yes, we do inventory.
Yes, we help you order.
Yes, we help you invoice, andyes, we help you recipe cost, et
cetera, et cetera.
So from, I get it from a buyer'sperspective, you're like, oh,
they all do the same thing, butthis thing is better half the
price.
I'll just choose that.
I wouldn't want to be so naiveto say yes.
They're just happen to beexactly what you do when they're
half the price.
(24:03):
So that's where I recommendpeople really take the time,
book the demo.
You don't have to book 20, pickyour top three that you're
looking at.
Book the demo, see it foryourself, and then make the best
decision for you and your team.
Jeremy Julian (24:14):
Yeah, and there's two other pieces of advice on
that I would suggest.
Before you book the demo, defineyour
Angelo Esposito (24:20):
Yes.
Jeremy Julian (24:20):
Are you doing just bar inventory?
Are you doing full theoretical?
Are you doing down to slices oftomatoes or am I just doing the
protein that's on the patties?
Because unfortunately, I thinkpeople try and bite off too
much.
They go from zero or they gofrom pen and paper to biting off
too much'cause they got a newsystem now and it's gonna make
life easier.
And then they give up after.
It's like the diet, by February15th, nobody's dieting from
their New Year's resolution.
(24:41):
Same idea with inventory.
The other thing I would tell youis just to be careful that you
don't just go with yourbroadliners suggestion, because
unfortunately the broadlinershave been known to play around
with pricing from time to time.
Contract pricing doesn'tnecessarily get honored, whereas
somebody that's independent ofyour broadliner, and I'm not
suggesting that they're all bad,but they need to be held
(25:01):
accountable to both the contractpricing and.
To what those items are, whereasyou guys can help them with that
as it goes into those things.
So those would show the piecesof advice that
Angelo Esposito (25:09):
that's no.
Yes.
A hundred percent agree.
A hundred percent.
and just to echo the first one,'cause that one, I, I so
passionate about that one that Imade a YouTube video about it.
But literally, I tell peopledon't, sometimes people get lost
in the demo.
And the best example is likewhen choosing a POS, but same
thing with inventory.
But they'll be like, oh, I'mlooking at this and this.
And then they end up gettingdistracted with bells and
whistles.
I tell people, write down what'syour top, like non-negotiables.
(25:31):
If you're, if the most importantthing was like.
I gotta be able to split thebills easily.
But someone else is showing youabout, I don't know, their
online ordering.
don't get distracted, stayfocused.
cause no one's gonna doeverything amazing.
So stay focused.
And so our example would be likeif someone's a full service
restaurant and they have a wineprogram and they have food and
then someone else is maybe a hasone or two little features that
(25:52):
might be a little better thanWhisk on the food side.
But I don't know, 50% of yoursales are coming from MO
alcohol.
Maybe you're gonna lean towardsWhisk'cause that's important to
you.
Agreed.
And yes.
Take that advice.
'cause that's really somethingI've seen people make a mistake
on over and over again.
Jeremy Julian (26:07):
and I tell people all the time,'cause we do sell P
oss.
Write down what Wsc can do whenyou're looking at it.
Because unfortunately by thetime you're at, you threw your
third demo.
You're like, was it Wsc that didit their competitor that did
that?
And then they come back to yourimplementation team and go, you
showed it to me.
It's we don't even have thatfeature, so I promise you we
didn't show it to you.
'cause that happens a lot in the
Angelo Esposito (26:24):
Yeah.
and you know what, I'll throwin,'cause this actually just
happened recently.
I won't name the competitor, butthere was a big established
competitor of ours.
And, I was disappointed to seeit, but I guess it's the
industry.
one of our clients that we'reworking on was like, Hey, they
sent me this comparison sheet,whisk versus X and can you take
a look?
And I took a look and I waslike, this is sad.
'cause like half of is justWrong.
(26:46):
yes, we do this.
Yes, we do that.
Yeah, we do.
And I walked the client throughit.
I'm like, you remember the demo?
We do this.
We have a mobile app.
I showed you the invoice.
So in a way it kinda worked inour favor.
'cause then they're like, oh Iguess this competitor's kinda
lying, which didn't sit wellwith them.
but it goes to show you just togo back to book the demo for
yourself because anyone cancreate a quick cheat sheet
comparison and say what theywant.
(27:06):
And unfortunately not everyone'ssuper truthful.
So I hate for clients to justlook at a cheat sheet, let's
say, between your P os and otherPs and say, oh yeah.
XPOS told me this, so I guess Iwon't book a meeting, So
definitely do your own duediligence.
Don't just trust a competitor'scheat sheet.
'cause you know it's probablygonna be biased.
Jeremy Julian (27:22):
Absolutely no different than the conversation
about the, about thebroadliners, in your guys' name.
and it wouldn't be a podcast in2025 unless we talked about ai.
How is ai, and you chuckle, youhave your own podcast.
I.
a AI is a big thing, and I knowthat more and more people are
integrating AI into theirapplications.
You've been around since, AIexisted 10 years ago, but nobody
(27:43):
knew about it.
Now it's like a, it's likeeverybody wants to AI it.
And I just got done with themulti-unit restaurant, tech show
in Vegas last week, andeverybody was all about ai.
It's explain to me what ai, buttalk to me about how a AI is
playing a part in inventory,both machine learning.
As well as computer vision, aswell as large language models,
(28:03):
like those are the three thateverybody's been talking about.
And how are you guys thinking
Angelo Esposito (28:06):
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's it's a really interestingquestion.
It's funny, I was talking tosomeone today and I was just
saying it's like.
AI is like a love hate.
'cause on one hand it's likesuch a buzzword that sometimes
it's like easy to turn your headaway and say ah, I don't wanna
hear about an ai.
But then sometimes you'll getdeep into some stuff and you're
like, wow, this is, I'm livingin a moment.
It's like when the internet cameout, like it's such a.
Critical moment that you'relike, I don't wanna miss out.
(28:26):
So I want to be more involved inAI'cause I want to see what's
possible.
So I'm leaning more towards thatcamp'cause I see so much
potential and we've beenimplementing in many ways and
ways.
So the way I see it is, listen,AI and restaurants in general,
there's so many differentapplications where obviously my
brain is more, leaning towardsall the back of house stuff.
'cause that's what we do.
So when I think about ai, Ithink about it from an inventory
perspective, maybe from invoiceprocessing, from maybe
(28:49):
recommending recipes.
So specifically with Whisk rightnow and futuristic right now,
what we do.
Is we implemented AI when itcomes to the invoice,
processing.
Historically, we used to justuse basic, basic, it's still
cool technology, but we used touse, object, character
recognition, OCR, try to readit.
Now, we actually use largelanguage models and based on the
invoice, if it's, Cisco or GFSor this, it could read it
(29:10):
instantly.
It could detect if it'sscratched out with a pen and
things like that.
So that's one area that's beenreally nice and we've been
leveraging it a lot and it, theinvoices get better over time.
So there's like that kind of.
Again,
Jeremy Julian (29:21):
the accuracy is likely gonna be so much better
than the OCR stuff.
'cause the OCR stuff came out in
Angelo Esposito (29:26):
Exact.
exactly.
And the cool thing is when weget volume going back to machine
learning, it gets better andbetter.
so if it's a larger distributor,it's better.
'cause we have so many clients,let's say, I dunno, GFS or Cisco
scanning those invoices.
So those just the learning modeljust.
gets, learns faster, I guess isthe short answer.
So that's one obvious one.
a second one was more of justmore, a way to help with
cleaning up their account.
(29:46):
So detecting, duplicates,recommending when to merge
things, on the recipe side,being able to see suggested
recipes.
'cause no matter anyone's gonnahave their own recipe, but be
able to see like in general,this is how you make an old
fashioned, but now you can makeyour old fashioned with your
product in house.
and then the third area, andI've seen.
Other people do.
This is more on the inventoryside.
On the inventory side.
(30:07):
For now, we're still very muchmobile app, real time.
There's a lot of cool tech, butit's not really AI on our side
where I've seen people get intothe computer vision stuff and
it's been interesting.
It's been one of our visions,but it's hard to execute, but is
the idea of going around with,RayBan glasses or meta glasses I
should say, or whatever, butwith a camera and being able to
the computer recognize what's infront of'em.
(30:28):
I've seen some interestingapplications.
I would argue like accuracy isimportant and you nailed it
before, like one invoice iswrong, one item variation is
wrong.
So full on food, beverage,inventory right now, I still
think it's tough for a regularrestaurant.
Where I see it having been doneis, I think there's use cases,
like if you think of maybecatering, I've seen someone do
it for airlines.
So with airlines, when you openup those things, maybe like
(30:49):
hotel, mini bars, those type ofthings seem to be a bit easier
'cause all the mini bottles arethere or things are prepackaged
and the camera could justdetect.
Okay,
Jeremy Julian (30:57):
Yeah, there's a lot less variance in, in all of
the different things.
'cause even as you get tomulti-units, the bar layout is
gonna be different between them
Angelo Esposito (31:03):
there's a lot.
So I've seen, that one, I'mstill like, it's still early.
Like I know people are like, oh,look, I, you can just.
Point your camera tells you.
Yeah, that one I think is likeless accurate.
I've seen good applications,like I said, in airlines and
what you can see, so don't getme wrong, there's really cool
stuff happening.
you think about casinos, they'vehad security cameras that could
detect what's, what people arepouring while they're punching.
So the tech is superinteresting.
(31:24):
where we wanna head towards, andthis will be a glimpse,
hopefully by the time this isout, it'll be live, is, we
wanted to get towards a full onlike video inventory.
so you're just talking out loudand videoing and then whatever.
But then what hit us is what ifwe can do whisk audio inventory?
So this is low key, but the ideais you walk around, you're just
like.
Two cases of tomatoes.
okay, I got three and a halfjars of, one liter, milk,
(31:47):
whatever.
And you're just talking out loudbecause we have their invoices
in our system.
We could use, transcription,language models to, like whisper
whatever to transcribe, audiointo text and then match that
text with what they have in it.
So that's one area that's.
Not existing yet, but that we'retesting out, I'll call it alpha
version.
so hopefully by the time thiscomes out, maybe it's yes, it
(32:08):
was success or people hated itand no one wants to do audio
inventory.
so we'll find out.
Jeremy Julian (32:12):
That's really cool though.
I hadn't considered that.
We actually had, you alluded tothe computer vision stuff.
the founders of Nomad Go, wereon the show and they've got some
unique, computer vision stuffthat, you know, as everything
does, they've got a vision that,that they can help make
inventory easy and they'reworking on it and we'll see how
it, pans out.
I think, is there anything Imissed, I guess as far as whisk
and where you guys are at, otherthan, love to let the, listeners
(32:34):
know how to get in touch withyour team to, to
Angelo Esposito (32:36):
a hundred percent.
Look, the one thing I'd say,'cause I know just by default we
ended up talking a lot about,the bar side.
So one thing just to emphasizeis Whisk started on the bar side
and then about five years ago welaunched the food side.
So Whisk.
Now, today, sometimes peopledon't know this, but really to
emphasize, it's not oh yeah, wecan, if you have some bar
snacks, we could do, no, we cango full on food.
(32:56):
multi-unit QSRs or a full onfull service restaurant, food
menu, batches and prep items,and they create their own aioli
and this, and I buy my fish andI yield, my yield is the.
not to get crazy, but we do allthat.
just to be clear, I just wannaemphasize to the listeners out
there, we do full on food andbeverage management and we help
with everything, inventory,ordering, and w related.
(33:17):
And the nice thing is weintegrate with about 60, point
of sale system.
So that's just to really justemphasize,'cause I know by
default I always give beverageexamples and cocktail examples,
but we go full on, on the foodside and have food only clients
as well.
Jeremy Julian (33:31):
Love that.
how do people get in touch?
How do people learn more?
How do people book that demothat you alluded to
Angelo Esposito (33:35):
Yeah, super easy.
So the easiest way wisk.ai, sojust WIS k.ai, everything's on
the website.
My philosophy's like the websiteshould be so easy that we don't
have to create sales materialthat's separate.
So you can find all the details,the feature pages, the demo page
there, there's a book of freecall at the top.
one, one thing we've beentesting after hours speaking
about AI is a ai qualifier,which is.
(33:59):
Been pretty fun.
during hours of course we'regonna answer.
and we made it clear it's a bot.
We don't want people, we're nottrying to trick people.
It's just Hey, it's after hours.
We're not here.
Instead of leaving us avoicemail, if you wanna just see
if you're a good fit, just talkto our bot.
So we just launched like a weekago.
We got a couple recordings.
It's been interesting, but weshort answer Whisk ai.
You can book a call, we'll talkto you to make sure it's a good
(34:21):
fit.
And then if we think you're agood fit, is we book a demo and
the worst case scenario isyou're like, no, I don't like
it.
The best case is you get to seeit for yourself.
It's something you think you cansee yourself using and great,
right?
But like it's really a nopressure demo.
So that's one thing weemphasize.
We're really not that teamthat's gonna call you 75 times,
it's like book the demo, see itfor yourself.
If you like what great.
(34:41):
If not, don't worry.
There's no strings attached.
Jeremy Julian (34:44):
Love that.
and as I said earlier, I knowyou've got your own show.
You wanna plug that for
Angelo Esposito (34:48):
Sure.
Yeah.
Jeremy Julian (34:49):
those that want to learn more about, what you
do.
Angelo Esposito (34:50):
absolutely.
so like I said, websites,wist.ai, and the good thing is
we try to put everything there.
So you can also find the podcastthere, under like resources.
All the podcast episodes will bethere and you can watch the
YouTube if you like, video, oryou could listen to it on,
Spotify, apple, et cetera, etcetera.
the podcast is called WhiskingIt All.
whisking it all.
And the idea is we meet with,restaurant.
Tours, bar operators or justpeople in the industry as a
(35:13):
whole, whether it's tech relatedor not.
So we've had people that,operate 200 franchise locations
to just like a guy, ahospitality group that might
have 15 locations, two techrelated businesses.
we're gonna have you on the showsoon, this that'll be fun.
Or maybe by the time this airs,maybe you'll already have been
on the show.
but yeah, so if anyone wants tocheck that out, W ai, you'll
find the podcast, you'll findthe resources and.
(35:35):
If you wanna follow me onLinkedIn, I post a lot of
hospitality style content, youcan follow me, Angelo Esposito
on LinkedIn.
And I also, this is less wellknown'cause it's just, I do more
just for me and to help people.
But angelo esposito.com, all Ido is I post learnings of me
building the business with myteam, so like hiring people how
to do this, delegating better,how to be less stressed.
(35:56):
So I just, every week, everySunday I post an article.
So that's more just if anyonewants more.
Business advice, I post it.
It's free angelo esposito.com,but if not everything can be
found on a whisk ai.
Jeremy Julian (36:09):
thank you for like I said, when you and I,
before we hit the record button,I've been watching your journey
over the last couple years.
You've had some people that one,one have been on the show, two
friends of mine, and so Ireached out just to say, Hey,
how do I learn more?
Because at the end of the day.
Whether people use Whisk or not,a lot of the principles of what
you talked about they have to doin order to run a successful
restaurant.
So thank you for that education.
(36:29):
to our listeners guys, thank youguys for hanging out with us
this week.
if you haven't alreadysubscribed, please do so on your
favorite player.
Angelo, thank you so much.
And to our listeners, make it agreat day.
Angelo Esposito (36:37):
Thank you for having me.
This is great.
Thanks for listening to TheRestaurant Technology Guys
podcast.
Visit restaurant technologyguys.com for tips, industry
insights, and more to help yourun your restaurant better.
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