Fatigued from owning your restaurant? Between constantly trying to hire while adapting to labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and the growth of takeout and delivery, the challenges seem never-ending.
With a goal of helping the restaurant and foodservice professional find solutions to those challenges, CrunchTime! provides a cost-effective approach with its industry leading restaurant operations platform. From sales forecasting and perpetual inventory management, to automated team scheduling, labor law compliance, and management of the supply chain, CrunchTime offers a comprehensive portfolio of back-of-house solutions, all supplemented by AI-based automations.
CrunchTime Founder and CEO Bill Bellissimo brings a long legacy of creating industry-specific software that has helped countless operators across the nation. The Yale University graduate, who grew up in the restaurant industry, set his early sights on a Wall Street finance career.
Bellissimo swore that he would never return to his restaurant roots, but in the 90’s, just as the Internet started to blossom, he saw an irresistible opportunity to create CrunchTime – which had the explicit goal of streamlining restaurant operations on the Web. “Every Venture Capitalist I pitched my idea to told me I was crazy, and that no one would ever put mission critical systems on the Internet,” Bellissimo noted.
“I believed in the idea and bootstrapped the launch. I knew the restaurant industry needed software that could solve the day-to-day challenges facing the restaurateur,” Bellissimo said. “Most importantly, with my operating background in finance and restaurants, I knew the pressure points that the restaurateur was dealing with every day.”
“The goal of CrunchTime was to enable the restaurant team to focus on the priorities of serving its guests with consistently great food, while leveraging technology to ensure everyone was making smart, fact-based decisions.”
One of the keys to CrunchTime’s success has been its nearly 30 years of experience serving its customer base. “Three decades of intense focus on the challenges our user community faces each day has driven innovation and enhancements to meet the everchanging needs of our restaurant customers. Empathy runs deep at CrunchTime and the community we have created has been an amazing resource that benefits all,” Bellissimo added.
Another key CrunchTime advantage is that it was the first company in the hospitality industry to offer a SaaS BOH solution. “We’ve combined in-the-trenches restaurant experience with a great team of technologists to design, develop and test our platform, and ensure our infrastructure is secure, robust and scalable. A quarterly release cycle allows us to think critically about new capabilities and be super agile in meeting the dynamic demands of the marketplace.” Bellissimo said.
CrunchTime offers comprehensive user training and on-boarding with the goal that every member of a restaurant’s staff understands how to be a great user of CrunchTime. They offer deployment expertise with a customer-facing team that combines deep restaurant expertise and technological know-how.
“In recent years, we have also become a favorite of restaurant franchise operators. CrunchTime allows a franchisor to create a robust playbook for how to maximize the productivity and profitability of its franchise community, while institutionalizing its core operating standards,” Bellissimo said.
CrunchTime maintains a help desk located in Boston, MA, that is dedicated to supporting its customer base. In addition to comprehensive context-sensitive help, the company has also embedded adaptive learning tools that proactively guide users through core processes of the system. CrunchTime also offers a full Learning Management and Talent Development suite that consists of over 200 courses that include video, direct platform interaction, company defined course curriculums, custom content, professional development, and certifications.
There is no denying the pandemic continues to challenge the industry. Picking the right technology partner to help you manage what will become the “New Normal” is crucial to the ability of a restaurant to pivot and optimize the guest experience. Bill Bellissimo’s experience at the helm of CrunchTime offers the restaurant operator the back-office solution needed to meet that challenge head on, without compromise.
To learn more about CrunchTime, visit their website.
