Zitti sucks up some financing sauce so restaurants can manage their own food supply chain • TechCrunch

Owners face many challenges when it comes to managing food costs in independent restaurants. There are many startups that can help. MarginEdgeAnd OneOrderAnd Touch BistroAnd PrestestAnd right NowAnd VoodooAnd Owner.comWhich solutions were found.

The Zitti app provides food price insights. Credits for the image:Oil

oilDante DiCicco, co-founder, approaches the problem from a unique perspective: as a restaurateur. After watching his parents’ Italian restaurants close down during the 2007-2008 economic downturn, he now sees the global pandemic taking a similar toll on restaurants.

DiCicco discovered that technology was essential in order to open a new restaurant for his family and acquire all the food suppliers.

He was astonished to learn so little. Snap’s international revenue growth was driven by a Snap executive. ErekBenz, co-founder and CEO of CREXi, helped to create Zitti. Zitti will put independent restaurants on the same level as the big chains in terms of technology.

The result is a payment platform that facilitates transactions between restaurants, food suppliers, and vendors through payment tools, price comparison and vendor discovery.

TechCrunch was told by he that improving food prices is the future for the restaurant industry. “Much of the emerging technology has focused on ordering and inventory management, but what’s sorely lacking is actual business intelligence to help restaurants make smarter purchasing decisions. That’s a big part of our mission.”

Zitti was launched March 2022 after it received $4 million in seed capital in late 2021. The first beta customers were DiCicco and his family’s restaurant.

In the past two months, the company has started charging for its product — $150 per month, per restaurant location — and is seeing “really good sales traction as we double down on our sales efforts,” DiCicco said.

He said, “Our goal to save money on their food costs exceeds that amount, ideally many, many times over.” “We’ve had quite a few conversions from our testing group becoming customers.”

The company has returned $3.5 million to its pre-investor Crossbeam in a seed round led jointly by Oceans Ventures. The company has raised $7.5million since DiCicco Benz started working on it in 2019.

Technology development will be funded with additional AI and automation soon to be added to the platform. DiCicco has set a goal to be able display price changes in realtime and then use AI to predict how a product’s price will change over the next year.

Zitti is currently focusing his attention on the Chicago and Southern California markets, while DiCicco stated that Zitti also considers Austin an emerging market.

“The company’s next step is to expand into new markets, but it’s taking a city-by–city approach,” he said. “It’s going a lot because we’re building density on both restaurant and supplier side so that we can get more market data and therefore more pricing information.”