Running a restaurant is about more than just serving great food. It’s about fostering strong customer relationships and building a thriving in-house culture. But behind the scenes, the financial health of the business depends on a constant flow of data, from sales trends and inventory levels to customer preferences and operational costs. Without a clear understanding of how each data point influences the bigger picture, information overload can quickly turn into missed opportunities.
Ingest turns every click, swipe and scroll into actionable insights that provide businesses with the information they need to understand exactly what their business is doing right and wrong. Their daily mission is to increase the viability, sustainability, and profitability of businesses that will not only keep their doors open but help them grow beyond that.
Making Sense of Data
Knowing how a business is performing isn’t as simple as looking at the bank account and seeing whether the number is going up or down. Every business is made up of disparate tools and systems. From everything related to revenue, labor, inventory, reservation, accounting and purchasing tools, the list goes on and on.
Co-founder and CEO Daniel Meth, explains that all these factors serve as data entry points, but the problem many owners face is that none of them speak to each other.
“Ingest was developed to consolidate or aggregate all of that data, bring it into one centralized location, clean it up, enrich it, then transform and normalize it to provide all stakeholders within an organization the ability to understand what’s working and what’s not,” Meth said.
Ingest’s data analysis process is divided into three questions: What happened?, Why or how did it happen? and, What would happen if?
Initially, Ingest planned to focus on the third question, which involves predictive and prescriptive analysis. However, they soon realized that the industry lacked a solid understanding of the first two questions.
“It doesn’t matter how smart or sophisticated your algorithms or models may be if the quality of the input driving those is subpar,” Meth said. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
As a result, Ingest shifted its focus to becoming proficient at answering, “What happened” and “How or why it happened.” They recognized that even the smartest algorithms would produce unreliable results if the input data was poor.
“For the last several years, we’ve really become the best and bred at answering what, how and why it happened,” Meth said.
They answer the questions for business owners that would otherwise remain unknown. Now, Ingest is excited to dedicate more attention to the predictive and prescriptive aspects, aligning with New Orleans’ growing interest in AI initiatives.
The Motivation
Food brings communities together, especially in a city with such a strong food culture, like the rich Cajun flavors of New Orleans. Few things are more disheartening than seeing a beloved local business — one filled with family memories and community ties — suddenly close its doors. Ingest’s product serves to prevent this from happening.
Meth shared a story about his mother who had always talked about a restaurant that she and his father used to go to before he was born. It was a tiny little Italian restaurant in Jersey City called Laico’s. After searching for it and calling the restaurant, he found it was still open. 42 years later, for his mother’s 70th birthday, he was able to throw her a surprise party at the same Laico’s she used to tell him stories about and bring his own children to experience it as well.
It’s moments like these that allow small businesses to play a magical part in the lives of the people in their community. Ingest offers a product backed by numbers that can bring longevity to more local businesses in New Orleans.
“As believers in the democratization of data, one of our biggest motivators have been taking the competitive advantages that have otherwise been reserved for the most sophisticated, biggest capitalized brands and making them available and accessible to the backbone of the industry, which is your mom and pop, Italian red sauce joints,” Meth said.
Whether it’s a beloved hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant or another family-run business passed down through generations, these places mean just as much to the owners as they do to the customers who hold them close to their hearts.
Ingest is committed to playing an important role in giving back to the city, the people, and the community. By employing local lives and paying wages that have otherwise been reserved for tier one coastal markets, Meth says his company has, “The opportunity to play a small part in shaping the future of the city we live in, knowing full well that those dollars are then going to be injected directly into the local economy.”
“New Orleans it special, there’s a real magic to this place,” Meth said. He plans to keep it that way.
