Revolutionizing Inventory Management with David Greschler, Co-Founder and CEO of Nomad Go

In this episode of the 'Restaurant Technology Guys' podcast, the host and guest David Greschler, Co-Founder and CEO of Nomad Go, discuss the transformative role of Nomad Go's technology in restaurant inventory management. Nomad Go uses computer vision, spatial intelligence, and augmented reality to audit and count inventory in real time with up to 99% accuracy, revolutionizing traditional inventory methods. The technology caters for complexities such as substitutions, batch recipes, and storage issues, ultimately aiming to improve accuracy, save time, reduce wastage and increase profit for restaurants.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:31 Guest Background and Company Overview
02:22 The Problem with Traditional Inventory Management
09:16 Introducing Nomad Go's Solution
09:40 How Nomad Go Works
13:20 Addressing Substitutions and Partial Cases
17:47 The Future of Inventory Management
19:24 The Importance of Accurate Inventory in Restaurants
19:36 How We Improve Prep Lists with Scientific Precision
20:38 Dealing with Pre-Produced Items in Inventory
21:38 The Challenges of Receiving Products
23:56 The Role of Technology in Inventory Management
24:35 Making Inventory Fun with Augmented Reality
25:26 The Future of Inventory with Nomad Go
27:31 Resolving Inventory Variances
31:09 The Future of Supply Chain and Distribution
32:41 The Vision for Nomad Go
34:50 Getting Connected with Nomad Go

Transcript

0:02

This is the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, helping you run your restaurant better.

Jeremy Julian: 0:12

Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Thank you everyone out there for joining us. As I say each and every time, you guys have got lots of choices, so we appreciate you guys spending time with us. Today, we are talking about everyone's favorite topic, inventory management, and what is inventory management and the ways that things have been done. But, I'm going to introduce you to our guest here. David, why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners? Who is David? What is David done career wise? And then we'll talk a little bit about what you guys are trying to solve for. Cause I think it's a really unique story and I'm super excited to get, get the word out about what you guys are doing.

David Greschler: 0:44

Absolutely, Jeremy. And thanks for having me. I really appreciate that. I'm co founder and CEO of Nomad Go. and we, we're the future of inventory. We're the future of counting basically. And I hope today I can explain why I make such a bold statement, but, we really believe, counting is a fundamental human activity and, with the help of AI, we are making it. A lot easier than A little bit about me. Background is, I've been doing, computer things all my life. I started a company in the 90s. Remember those days? right when the internet came out, it was all about deploying software over the internet, which now sounds tripe, but back then it was actually novel. and sold that company to Microsoft in 06. I did another, startup around, distributing content. And then about six years ago. with my co founder, Jonah Friedel, started this company and, really it's all about, using AI specifically computer vision, spatial intelligence, augmented reality, combining it all together to solve the worst problem out there, which is counting inventory. I know you, Jeremy, you're in food service. it's got to be the least, favorite job.

Jeremy Julian: 1:59

Yeah,

David Greschler: 2:00

maybe,

Jeremy Julian: 2:00

save maybe the guy that has to change the oil in the, fryer, it's gotta be one of the most, most painful things that people have to do. and I'm laughing about it a little bit because, David, you talk about the back in the nineties, it's sad that we're now in 2024 and you think about the nineties, that was 35 years ago, and, in, in the early nineties. And so I'm in that same genre. Talk to me, and the other piece I have to say is we're only two minutes into the recording and we've already mentioned AI and computer vision. So there's not an episode that we've done in the last 20 episodes where we haven't talked about how AI is impacting, these items, but I guess give me a little bit of a history lesson as to what. It is that you talk about counting what, counting burgers, counting patties, counting, talk to me a little bit about, about how you would define the problem as we see it within restaurant and inventory. Cause I think it's critical for people to understand what are we trying to solve for before we start talking about how you guys are solving it.

David Greschler: 2:52

Yeah. what we're trying to solve for is the fact that, people store inventory, whether it's burgers, drinks, frozen items, bottles of ketchup on Metro shelves, produce sitting in a walk in fridge, anything you can imagine that's sitting in the back of house or in the front of house that needs to be counted, right? And, what we've learned in our journey over the last six years is that can be anywhere. It can be in cabinets, it can be any kind of environment. And what we've developed is a way to really allow, count any of those, w without having to worry about, the numbers being wrong. it taking a long time. What we do is effectively allow you to quickly scan any of those environments and get literally 99 percent accuracy. And if for that 1 percent right on the app that you're using, you can make an adjustment, right? Super fast, right? Like our customers, one Metro shelf filled with stuff. It used to take them five minutes. It now takes 30 seconds. So high accuracy, very fast and all you need. Is an iPad or an iPhone.

Jeremy Julian: 4:06

and I'd love to talk a little bit about when you guys go into a deployment or into an engagement today, historically, they've tried to. I tried to put these things to the computers, but whether it's connectivity or it's pack sizes or it's just human error, a lot of restaurants that I know that do physical count still have a clipboard and still have pen and paper where they still take. So let's walk through for those that maybe don't live in the restaurants every day. What does life look like prior to no med go? Because I do think it's critical for people to understand even what that five minutes looks like because it is walking through the walk in. Top to bottom, left to right, counting the number of chicken breasts. How many cases of chicken breasts I have and how many chicken breasts do I actually have? And then they write them down and then they go back to the back and then they get a variance report and then they go, Oh crap, I missed that other place where they might have it. Talk me through what it looks like when you guys start an engagement prior to you guys, blowing them away with all the stuff you guys can do.

David Greschler: 5:04

And by the way, Jeremy, I'm listening to and thinking, I think you've had firsthand experience

Jeremy Julian: 5:10

there may or may not be some scars that I've had from having to count. and truthfully, the, in fairness, we've deployed inventory systems and I get these calls that says my food cost is totally off, my variances are wrong. You guys have a screwed up inventory system. And it's yes, but you missed the pack size or you entered it in pounds instead of ounces. And now everything is 16 X, what you should have done or whatever those things may be. So I've lived the pain of. The restaurants that enter it wrong because you've got a human being in between, and there's multiple steps in that process, not only looking at it, then writing it down, then come into the back and entering it outside of just how they received it. Cause that's the other problem that we'll talk about later in the show is how do they receive it when it comes in the back door.

David Greschler: 5:55

You got it. So I think you've done a great job of describing exactly what a person who works in a restaurant has to deal with every day, right? And, it is this incredible manual account. You said pen and paper and we discovered the largest companies in the world are still. Paper. Now, a few of them have migrated to a Google forms, if you will, where you're still doing the manual count. You're still going, okay, that many chicken breasts, but then they're like typing it in, which is equally painful as putting on a paper and pen. And so that's what we have found is that we're not competing against any great technology. We're competing against paper and pen. now there are some technology, barcode readers, right? Yeah. You have to scan. It's still manual accounting, right? You, barcode only understands that two dimensional barcode. It doesn't understand the full 3D space, right? And, people have tried RFID and that's fine for like palace and all that. At the individual level, you can't put an antenna on each item. On each chicken breast, you're not going to put an antenna. That's the that's what we've seen. And the point you've made people make errors, huge errors, especially around this. like you said, right? Oh, I meant boxes. Instead, I put individual items or I put individual items. And, it's actually about whatever it is. I've heard story after story, just like you described, of people making these huge errors, and all of a sudden they walk in their back room and they've got 10 boxes of, syrup when all they needed was a few of them, right? so really that, and if you really look at the problem, that's the problem at that level is of course obvious, but there's a double click on that and a more impactful problem, which is I've overordered, therefore I've got food waste worse yet. And here's the worst one of all, I under ordered and now my customer who came to me thinking, Oh, I really want that special blah, blah, blah, item, Came in and they were told no. and what does that mean? You just lost revenue. And worse yet, you may have lost a customer.

Jeremy Julian: 8:00

Yeah. Cause they came for that one item. I was telling the story on a recording the other day to somebody that does predictive order accuracy and Matt and I were talking about it, they just came out with a new burger and I got the commercial and they hooked me and then I showed up and they didn't have the burger and it pissed me off cause I was like, you know what? So it was fine from that perspective. But now I've left disappointed because they didn't have the item that I wanted. And now my, the brand itself is not in a good place.

David Greschler: 8:25

Yeah. And I think that, that has direct impact on revenue. So you don't have the item, you're out of luck.

Jeremy Julian: 8:32

And then on the flip side, you're talking about the overordering has a direct impact on your food cost and on your waste, which is not something that food cost is either number one or number two, depending upon where your labor wages at of costs within the business. And if you don't do it properly, it's a huge opportunity for, leakage within the business and opportunities for costs, overruns.

David Greschler: 8:51

you bet. if you think about margins are already tight in restaurants and if you're throwing away food, you're throwing away profit, it's that, right? And it's an essential problem, right? that needs to be fixed. Again, humans, we love them, but they're not very accurate, especially 1030 at night, which is usually when inventory is done, right?

Jeremy Julian: 9:12

it's stuff that they don't really want to do. As we started talking about at the onset of the call, nobody really wants to go do inventory. They dread inventory day because it takes them away from doing what they're in the restaurant to do, which is to serve guests and to work with their fellow team members.

David Greschler: 9:26

You got it. So what does Nomad Go do? How do we solve this problem? The end result is really simple. You literally have an iPhone or an iPad, and you just scan your shelf. You scan your walk in, freezer. You scan the, front of house merch. You, anything that can be counted, any item, can be counted anywhere it is without changing anything. that's our goal, right? And the way we do that is three fold. So I'll keep it real simple, right? And it's not unlike how humans do it, but it's more accurate and a lot faster. If you think about doing inventory, what's the first thing you do? You look at that Metro shelf and you see the ketchup bottle and you're like, Oh, it's ketchup in your mind. it's ketchup. we use computer vision, right? The ability for the computer to recognize and say, this is this. That's what we do that for. We're like, Oh, there's ketchup. But the second piece is equally important. We understand the world in 3d. That's why we call what we do spatial inventory, because it's very, so think about you as a human, you're like, there's that ketchup bottle. And then I look at that row and I go, Oh, one, two, three, four, five. And so we're doing that using the understanding of the world in 3d. And so then we're able to say, okay, it's ketchup. There's five of them. And then the last thing you want to do is give the human using that iPad feedback like I gotcha. I got it right, which is it puts a little medallion on the front of the first ketchup and it says ketchup and it then puts a number in there by. And so it's like instantaneous feedback and all that AI. We call it Edge AI. A lot of AI today, you use chat GP and all those other things, they're taking your stuff and sending it to the cloud, right? And so using up your network and then, running inference in the cloud and giving you back a response on your phone or whatever, your computer. We don't do that. We actually do all that hard inference work right on the device you're using. So what that means is from a network perspective, it's super light. All we send up to the network is everything we've added up. Oh, you've got five ketchups, you've got three lemonades, you've got, two bottles of this. That's all. So it's like a text file being sent up, right? Very light from a network perspective. But what it's doing is giving you real time understanding of what's in your space. And I'll get a little techie here if you don't mind. But basically,

Jeremy Julian: 11:50

a restaurant technology guys. So you got a lot of tech providers that are going to be like, Oh, okay. We're going to challenge David. They'll send them a note offline saying, Hey, how does it do this? And how does it do that? But I'll let you, I'll let you keep going. Oh,

David Greschler: 12:02

right? Like a representation of something, but in a digital world, like even like a virtual world, right? What we're really doing is we're like going around your back of house, your front of house. We're going five lemonades, in that spot, right there in that spot. And in that spot, there's, Oh, there's two more lemonades right over there in another shelf. And then, Oh, under the counter in the front of house. There's three more lemonades. So what we do is we know where all the lemonades are in your space. We add up and send it up and say, Oh, totally you've had X number of lemonades, right? But the other thing we're doing by doing this, because we understand the world in 3D, we're also telling you about how much space you're using up. And this becomes really important because no,

Jeremy Julian: 12:47

no, it's it's shelf space. it's if you're not using it, it's costing you money. Sorry. I'll let you keep going.

David Greschler: 12:53

you got it right. It's so if you're only over time realizing, Oh my God, I'm only using 50 percent of my self space. maybe you should take some of your shelves away and open it up for your customers. The flip side is true too, though. If you've got a small store, but you've got incredible demand, You'd be like, Oh, we have so much demand. We should send this many items to the store. it's you don't know that store only has a limited amount of space for storage, because otherwise you'll end up with items being stored, in your lobby, which you don't want to do. So it's this combination of data about what. is on hand and how much capacity do I have and that's how you can get to that Really good number around the right kind of inventory

Jeremy Julian: 13:33

have so many questions, so I'm going to start down the thread of how do you train the computer to know, David, that's ketchup because a lot of, computer vision and machine learning, they're going to suggest it's a bottle of ketchup, but it might be your special sauce. It may be barbecue sauce. It may be something that looks a lot like a ketchup bottle to an untrained eye, but you've now got the specialty sauce that's put into a ketchup bottle that's made by your supplier, that might be different. So talk to me, talk me through how you guys train the AI. And the machine learning pieces to know that's catch up, so that they understand it.

David Greschler: 14:06

great and never mind the pun. This is our special sauce that we do technology

Jeremy Julian: 14:11

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David Greschler: 14:56

but, yes, so we have multiple ways of deciding that's a ketchup bottle and that it's, whatever, 12 ounces, 24 ounces, and it's really a combination of, training around the imagery of it, right? And, when we have multiple ways to do that, to scan it, we also, though, use other inputs to help us be 100 percent confident that when we say, Oh, it's the 12 ounce, ketchup, it really is that so remember how I mentioned the other piece we have is spatial intelligence, understanding the space in 3D. a 12 ounce looks has a different volumetric transcript. set up than a 24 ounce. So there's a lot of different ways. A lot of inputs we use to go. Yeah, we're confident this is the 12 ounce Heinz catch up.

Jeremy Julian: 15:41

Okay, perfect. So the second piece, as it relates to that is a supplier's broad liners, oftentimes will sub your ketchup. They'll move, Heinz ketchup because they're out of it and you don't really care because you don't have a national contract with Heinz and you move to hunts ketchup and hunts ketchup. The bottle might look different than my physically be look different. And so substitution, how do you guys deal with substitutions on that?

David Greschler: 16:03

Yeah. Great question, by the way. that's like the real world, right?

Jeremy Julian: 16:06

it is.

David Greschler: 16:07

So we have, we call it the triple A strategy, right? Which is you're there, you're scanning with us. it's it's Heinz. And we automatically, That's the first day go. Yep. Heinz 12, there's four of them, but that's the automated. There's a chance that, like you said, something got substituted. And that's where this really important piece of our philosophy of design comes into play. We believe the human is still in the loop. Okay. We, a lot of people go, Oh, why don't you just put fixed cameras everywhere? apart from the fact that's. If you've been in food service, that's totally impractical, you've got two inventory problems. You're managing your inventory. Now you're managing a bunch of fixed cameras and power and network, right? That it'll never scale. It's never, it has never scaled, right? Instead, put a human behind it, make it fast, right? So you're not like, it's going to take as long as an inventory thing. No. Instead of 45 minutes, it's taking five minutes, right? But the other thing the human can do is they can go, Huh, it's not picking this up, but I know it's catch up. And so what we've got is a way to do what we call an augmented Approach. So I've got my world. I'm catching up my lemonade, my this and that all of a sudden get to there. It's not there. All I have to do and we do it through voice recognition. You just push a button and you go 12 ounce ketchup and it puts that there places it and then you can. This is the third of the A's. You can adjust it and You can put how many there are, right? So it's this ability to add to the world that we're creating, this 3D world we're creating that eventually gets summed up and sent to the server. that last piece allows you to make those adjustments. Let's say there's a box that you can't see, it's there. Same idea, you just augment. Mix. And we've realized, there, there's, this is a very complicated problem. The real world is, it's complicated. It's, we know what backup houses look like. They are not the prettiest things in the world. So what we've tried to do is make it so that 98 percent 99 percent of the time you're just scanning and automating and then you're adding to it because you as the human know that you need to supplement the data that you're collecting. That's the approach.

Jeremy Julian: 18:20

and I love that you guys have the proof, again, it's training the AI to make sure that it's seeing that, but then you're also auditing it as you guys are going through. And if for whatever reason you need a human to interact with it again, I guess that really goes David to the next question, which is, I've got a, I've got three cases of chicken breasts, but then I've got a half a case of chicken breasts and, again, I'm. Clearly, I've got scars from back when I was 16 and 17 having to do inventory in restaurants. And so with that, you've got these, you got full cases, you got half cases, you got cases of tomatoes. Some of them are full, some of them are half, because you might've only taken four tomatoes out of that case. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys deal with that. is it that same theory where, it knows it's tomatoes because it sees that box and it knows that's the supplier you guys have for tomatoes. And it says, I think this is a whole case, but you then go, no, it's three quarters of a case.

David Greschler: 19:07

So two approaches there. one is like you described, you can adjust it and just, it's really easy. If you go to our website, nomadgo. com, you'll see videos on this. that's, it's, being,

Jeremy Julian: 19:17

job with the website.

David Greschler: 19:18

yeah, it's his first time ever in a company where I have like the world's greatest eye candy to go along with the product. But, so the, so one way is to just do this little paddle where you plus and minus and you make adjustments, but, yeah. We also can look inside of boxes. So like one of the things that we do for a couple of our customers is make lines. And this is exactly, this is actually the other thing that I think is really important to understand. We don't just do ordering, People count inside of restaurants for a million reasons, okay? One is to place orders. Think about prep lists for make lines though,

Jeremy Julian: 19:53

Yeah. Oh no. I get it.

David Greschler: 19:55

and we've, and there's a video on our site on this too. So instead of looking at a shelf, you're looking down on that make line and we're able to tell you the percentage of each item that's there. So if you've got sliced cucumber, we can tell you there's 30 percent left. And one of the things we've found is that people are, that's a very subjective number generally. So two people doing prep lists for make line are gonna find, their numbers are gonna look different. We're doing it much more scientifically. We're actually counting, how much is remaining in that bowl. And we give you a precise number. And to answer your questions about those tomatoes, you can do it different ways. And it all depends on what people want. What we're trying to build is a tool that's super flexible and It's what people's needs are because people have different needs. Like I said, sometimes they want to do it for ordering something, want to do it for prep. Sometimes they want capacity planning. there's a million different kind of data points that come out of the data that we collect.

Jeremy Julian: 20:51

Yeah, and I think, I know I talked with your coworker, Alex, about this is talk to me a little bit about, batch recipes. So I'm making, I'm making, Sorry, pancake batter. And I need to take flour and I need to take eggs and I need to take buttermilk and I put it into a Lexan and I've now got, a five gallon bucket of that. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys deal with those items that might be pre produced. I'm making ranch dressing. I'm making, pancake batter. How do you guys deal with that? Cause that's even a more complex issue than counting how many tomatoes I have or how many chicken breasts I have.

David Greschler: 21:21

well, again, and that's what it's similar to the make line problem, right? It's like the ability to understand that made product and then being able to understand where it is and how much there is in its storage capacity. So there's a lot of different approaches that you could take, but especially you'll see that if you look at the make line video on our website, that one really does show you how you could. We can tell the difference between sliced cilantro and sliced basil. that's

Jeremy Julian: 21:46

Oh my

David Greschler: 21:47

are.

Jeremy Julian: 21:48

Wow. That's incredible.

David Greschler: 21:49

It's insane.

Jeremy Julian: 21:51

So the flip side accounting is receiving product. That is, that must've been my least favorite job when I was doing inventory in the back of the house back in the day, cause you'd get these trucks and they only had a certain amount of time and they drop off a pallet or they drop off a whole bunch of crap at your back door and you've got 17 things to do. you may say, yeah, get out of here and I'm going to sign off of this invoice. But then when I actually look at the invoice and I look at the product, they miss something, they short ship something. They didn't send me the product that they said they were going to send them because they had to substitute, but the guy didn't really care enough to tell me that he substituted, these size tomatoes for these size tomatoes. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys helped solve that receiving on the backside of the store. Cause I, I think it's also another big pain point for people.

David Greschler: 22:35

Yeah, our customers tell us about that every day. The pain point there, and even the pain point at the distribution center, when you're building that pallet of goods, and it's being shipped off, and then they find out later, Ooh, we shorted them 500 buns, and now I've got to send a second truck out, maybe it has to be refrigerated. And it's going to drive for eight hours. literally pure waste. So yes, we can do items. We can do boxes. We can do pallets. It's all the same. at the end of the day, basically we have a, in our database, we have a unit of measure. system for each item that contains all its different sort of ways that it can be seen in an environment, whether it's an each, whether it's an item that's been cut up any of those, like you talk about the tomatoes, right? All different kind of Tomatoes have a lot of different personalities in the same tomato.

Jeremy Julian: 23:29

it's diced tomatoes, it's sliced tomatoes. And if you don't count all of them, you're stuck.

David Greschler: 23:33

Yeah, you don't have the right number. back of house validation is critical because let you describe it, right? Hey, here's the invoice. Just sign it and

Jeremy Julian: 23:40

Yeah. Get out of here. I got to get onto my next delivery. It's exactly, they don't give you more than three minutes to check everything's

David Greschler: 23:45

come on, right? And you're like, then you got a headphone set, but because you've got a customer out in your drive through. yes, the whole idea is that you could just take your phone out, scan it real fast, validate that number is right. In fact, one day we think we're going to replace that sheet of paper. Our goals didn't never have to use paper ever again, right? and that, they'll just send to you that you scan it, that gets validated, it moves on. But absolutely. Absolutely. and, so it's, at the end of the day, what are we really about? We're about absolutely saving time, but also about allowing you to have the ability to do more frequent inventory. And I know that counters this notion of labor savings, but the reason why the frequency piece is really important is because if you have more frequency, your data is going to be. So much better, right? And if your data,

Jeremy Julian: 24:34

a pain, if you make it, if you make it easy on them, they almost want to do it because they know it's right and they can truly calculate their theoretical and actual food costs on a daily basis almost because they're not having to spend 234 hours counting.

David Greschler: 24:47

Oh, yeah. And by the way, there's another part of our app, and you can only see us and go on the website. It's a lot of fun. it's right. It's augmented reality. And we put little Easter eggs in, that are fun that happened. And so that's another piece of it. Like we're trying to make it fun for the person on the front line. You know that you know that, let's turn this from the most hated job. To maybe not the most fun job, but one of the most fun jobs out there. I believe it's fast and they get it.

Jeremy Julian: 25:15

and David, you've talked a lot throughout our conversation. You've alluded to what it looks like. But now I'm an associate. Go walk me through what you know, we talked about what it used to look like. But now that I've implemented Nomad Go and we're painting a picture for them of the future and what it looks like if I'm going to now take my inventory on Tuesday morning at six a. m. or Tuesday night at 10 30 p. m. Talk me through what that looks like. With this augmented reality, iPad, iPhone, walk me through the steps, from we, again, we talked early on with the paper and, or these Google sheets to now what it looks like with Nomad go, because I do think it's a painting a picture for those that won't jump on the website right away, tell them what life would look like when they do that.

David Greschler: 25:57

Yeah, it's pretty simple, right? You've, to set up, all you really have to do is register all your storage devices. Now, why is that important? Because you actually, people want to know where things are stored. And One time, first time you just go around all your storage devices and you set them up. You say, here's my walk in freezer, here's my metro shelf with my, whatever, my, my ketchups and my sauces. Here's my buns, whatever it is, right? So now what happens is you fire up the app. And, you go anywhere you want. It's designed to be totally unstructured. I want to be really clear about this. You don't have to put anything in a specific spot. We don't care. We see it wherever it is, we count it, we register it. So if you have your ketchup in five places, that's fine because we'll add it all up, right? But what we are doing is so you go from shelf storage entity to storage entity. No matter what it is, and you go into the first one, you log in, just it recognizes that you're now in this storage entity and you literally and I'm gonna do this. you do this. It's this fast and you're just scanning and it sees it and sees the items. It sees the numbers and it just keeps adding up. And then when you're done there, you can either choose to go to the next one or you can log out of that. Storage entity and then you walk to the next one you log in and you just do that and do that. Now what's great about the sort of having this sort of unstructured approach but at least knowing all your storage entities is then you're done right and you hit the submit button. If you've missed a storage entity you it'll go hey you know you still have this one do you want to use it or not and like you're like nah we're not putting anything on there right now so you just keep going. And it's that simple. You submit and it goes up to whatever inventory system you have. we have integrations with all kinds of inventory solutions that are out there today. but it's really that easy.

Jeremy Julian: 27:44

and so so let's talk through that inventory management because you know what? So now I've gone and done the counts. You've done a fantastic job of making my 45 minute, walking through dry storage now to five minutes. Awesome. You've saved me 45 minutes. But now I get a variance. I get a variance that says what happened to the napkins? You should have, a case of napkins and you didn't count a case of napkins. Now what happens? Do I go back using Nomad? Go back into the dry storage. Do I go to my inventory management and go? Yeah, no, I go didn't pick that up. Talk to me a little bit about what that conflict resolution looks like because I do think it's a piece that quite frankly, I've watched people manipulate it to hit their bonus targets. Ironically, they've not counted things. So their food costs or their paper costs are down and they've hit their bonus. And then amazingly it shows back up without a purchase in the next cycle. Cause they, and it's terrible to say, but people do what you manage and what you measure. No different than Peter Drucker said, 50 years ago.

David Greschler: 28:35

yeah. I'm struck about how close to home this is to you, by the way, Jeremy.

Jeremy Julian: 28:40

I,

David Greschler: 28:41

no, it's great. I love

Jeremy Julian: 28:42

got on the phone, when I first got introduced to you, I started asking him questions. He's like, how about I get you on the phone with a co founder and you can go through all these questions with him on camera. And, and we can educate our audience rather than me telling you all about it. So I hope you don't mind that I'm asking you all these questions.

David Greschler: 28:56

I love them. I love these are like, ah, this is the heart of the problems that we're trying to solve every day with our customers, right? Because they bring these issues up. so it's a very interesting, let's bring the napkin example up, right? So what could have been the situation, right? One is you missed the napkins. Yeah. We're out of napkins, right? Three is the napkins were in the wrong place. So like I said, we really we've designed us to be highly unstructured because we believe the napkins are often in the wrong place. That's what we've or the napkins are in three places, not one place. Okay, so we're

Jeremy Julian: 29:33

in the front of the house when people were refilling the napkin holders and it got thrown under there because the guest walked in and now you didn't count that part because it's in the trash bin, but you haven't put a trash can back in there. That happens all the time.

David Greschler: 29:45

All the time, right? So there's a couple approaches, and it really depends on our customers because, they have different approaches to this, but and we've built it so that it can work either way. One is, hey, by the way, right? We know what we're looking for. for each customer and even each store, we have a list of here are the SKUs that we're reporting on, because we're reporting on known SKUs. so what some customers want at the end of the, I hit the submit button, go, Hey, you're reporting zero on these five SKUs. You want to keep going, or do you want to? Yeah, I did not see napkins, right? So that's one way that people have solved, right? Other people have said, No, I think if we structure it by storage entity, then if they're literally went through all the storage entities, they didn't see it. That's great. And that's also where the augmented piece can play a role.'cause it's oh yeah, I know. Oh yeah, I did leave those that, those napkins in that garbage area. I don't wanna go out there and scan it. I'm just gonna augment it and put that in. So there's a couple different approaches and it really ends up being like the philosophy of our, the customer we're dealing with. different customers have different sort of philosophies about those kind of issues, and so we just try to accommodate them, and see what's.

Jeremy Julian: 31:02

I love that.

David Greschler: 31:02

all of them are paper and pencil, something that migrated to the little, Google form concept, but basically it's the same idea. So that's consistent, not once have we seen any kind of you're up against another technology. There is there is no other technology. if you tried RFID, but like that, they realized, you're not going to put antennas on a chicken breast. I think the, the other thing that we're hearing from these larger companies is we need this data. We need more frequent pulses of this data because in the end of the day, we need those signals to be able to then make sure that we can replenish faster than we are doing today. It's, you gave that Jack in the Box example. that story is universal across all artists, right? And that's the worst thing that can happen, right? It dents your brand, it dents your revenue, right? And there's a real desire out there. Bigger term to have a much more signal rich supply chain where the last mile that your store is telling you on a more frequent basis, what's my inventory? And where are the red flags? and then, of course, the supply chain could respond to that because a lot of people previously had a top down view. They were like, Oh, we'll do all this predictive stuff. And some of that has worked in retail. But with food, because it's so variable, and there's so much velocity, you actually really want the signals coming from the store, not top down and jammed into the supply chain. it's a It's a strategy we see across the board of people really wanting to, update their whole supply chain and distribution methodology. And the key to it is having current and highly accurate data coming from that store.

Jeremy Julian: 32:48

All right, I'm going to ask you one last question and then we got to wrap because I know that our retention gets it. You talked about the future. You talked about the future world where everything is paperless. Talk to me a little bit about with the future. No bad go. And where do you see this vision going for the product and how it's going to just. enhance the lives of restaurant operators and the people that are doing this, this job.

David Greschler: 33:07

I think we're going to be the Google accounting. that's what I tell people, right? We are the future of inventory. like I said, we're not competing against some other technology. We're competing against paper and pencil. And, this product is so easy to use, so fun to use. All you need is an iPhone or an iPad. come on, it just, and it doesn't show up your network because all the works being on done on the device. what we see is we're just, we just keep extending. The areas that we can count. we started with Metro shelves. Then we got into refrigerators. Then we got to walk in freezers. Now we're doing make lines. it just is gonna we're gonna we're gonna cover every part of that restaurant, right? And, eventually, I think, we're gonna go beyond food service. There's no doubt about that, right? but food service is It's the perfect place to really build this technology because of all the pain that you talk about,

Jeremy Julian: 33:58

Yep.

David Greschler: 33:58

costs associated with, and the margins are thin. So it's boy, if I can save you one, two, 3%, Oh my God, if your food costs would be awesome. And, so it's a great, sort of place to build a really robust technology that eventually can get used by anybody, grocery stores, retail, health care, you name it. But,

Jeremy Julian: 34:19

Yeah.

David Greschler: 34:20

is, the other beautiful, I think there's no higher velocity of items than in food service. And you have the whole perishability issues. So there's,

Jeremy Julian: 34:28

the complexity of making stuff and having it all be built and, you're not just taking a chicken breast off the shelf and handing it to somebody. You gotta take, you gotta marinate it, you gotta grill it, you gotta prepare it. there's just so many different parts and pieces to it that I think you guys starting with some of the most complex stuff, Nothing, they said it would be easy, right? when you started this thing and you didn't realize how painful it was, I'm sure that, I'm sure you didn't realize how complex this world and the amount of scars that people like myself and others have had, living with us for years.

David Greschler: 34:53

oh yeah, it is really, it's amazing. But it's also just a lot of fun to try to walk in and solve those problems. that's what's great.

Jeremy Julian: 35:01

David, how do people get, you already talked about the eye candy of such a fantastic website, which I would agree. I think you guys have done a great job of telling your story. Thank you for that. how do they get connected with you? How do they get connected with your team? How do they learn more about what you guys are doing? If they want to engage and see if this is the right solution for them.

David Greschler: 35:15

really, I can think of two things. One is go to our website, nomadgo. com, a lot there. There's also contact information. But if you want to email me, I'm davidg at nomad hyphen go dot com and happy to have you reach out and start the conversation. And, what we do often is, we'll sit down and we'll talk to people, try to hear what kind of pain they're dealing with, what kind of scale that pain is at. Yeah. And then we come up with a plan of action to, get you a first, taste of it, so that you can see it and, see it for yourself that it works in your stores. yeah, really pretty straightforward actually.

Jeremy Julian: 35:50

Love what you guys are doing. I, again, when I got introduced to you guys as product, I'm like, I've got to have this guy on the show because this is awesome what you guys are doing. And clearly there's lots of, lots of scars as, as you alluded to. and, I guarantee you some of our listeners that are longtime restauranteurs are going to go. Yes, please. How do I figure out how to get Nomad Go into my store? So David, thank you for educating our listeners, guys. we say it all the time. I know you guys have got lots of choices. So while you guys are online, checking out Nomad Go, go subscribe to the newsletter once a month, we send you an email with all of the episodes for that month, David, thank you to, thank you for your time and to our listeners. Make it a great day.

36:28

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