As any restaurateur will tell you, purchasing for a restaurant can be an exhausting, painstaking process that is often the difference between a struggling restaurant and a flourishing one. As the years go on, and technology continues to embrace our lives, restaurateurs are finally taking notice of tech solutions to make things easier, more efficient, and to give them better information faster.
Amongst them as one of the originals is a company called ChefMod. This New York based company provides independent, small group and even enterprise level foodservice establishments with business class, member focused, cloud based purchasing and recipe management solutions. We sat down with ChefMod’s founder and president John Oldweiler to learn their story and dive into their full-service model.
With a history in foodservice and hospitality service, Oldweiler and his team have the industry insights and experience to create a stress-free, user-friendly purchasing experience. Unlike others, the ChefMod team takes an active role in the purchasing lifecycle and never leaves the member to struggle alone. Since Oldweiler partnered up with Eduard Spivak in 2002, the company’s interface has been one of their top priorities. Spivak and Oldweiler come out of the foodservice world giving them an advantage over the tech driven companies popping up today.
“We created this much-needed solution for ourselves because it simply didn’t exist. What happened next was remarkable. Our friends who moved on and started their own restaurants came back and wanted in,” said Oldweiler. It was at that point that Oldweiler saw that there was a gap in the market for something restaurants needed. That need being systems and support in the purchasing of food, beverage, and supplies. In the early days, the focus was simply to drive food and beverage costs down in a more efficient way. Soon it became equally about providing efficient systems and consultative approach with a high level of supporting services. “We were very fortunate in the sense that we already had a built-in member base when we started out,” Oldweiler added. With an original offline system, it was not until 2002 when Oldweiler met Spivak and began developing the online solution. In 2005 Oldweiler and Spivak seamlessly launched ChefMod and have been perfecting and updating since.
The concept for ChefMod has always been a member based model to ensure volume incentives for best in class suppliers, efficient enterprises class systems for members and the best quality of service for all. Today ChefMod can be found in nine states along the east coast, Midwest, and with some members as far as Las Vegas.
With the restaurant industry continuing to boom and a lot of consolidation going on, Oldweiler and Spivak have decided to take ChefMod to the next level. “We wanted to provide even better solutions to allow operators to be more efficient. So, over the past seven years we have been investing even more in our technology,” Oldweiler added. ChefMod’s features and functionalities continue to grow and are now able to offer their members with a plethora of unique, exclusive features and tools. ChefMod has expanded their portfolio to cover recipe and menu management, analytics, financial integration, document storage, and cost accounting solutions and is in development of an integrated inventory solution.
There is a lot of redundancy and data entry in the corporate environment. ChefMod’s solution makes the entire purchasing process more efficient while giving people more actionable data to allow decisions in real time. It’s the dedication to members (their customers) and their interface that makes ChefMod unique.
Only the future will tell but one thing is certain, foodservice technology is not going anywhere and ChefMod will continue to lead the innovation.
