Recipe First, People Always: Rethinking Food Safety from the Inside Out

Tracy Stuckrath [00:00:00]:
Foreign. Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Eating at a Meeting. I am back in the home office. As you can see from my wall here, I had a great trip to Minneapolis, and today I am. This is the second of the last conversation relating to Food Allergy and Celiac Disease Awareness Month. And I'm excited to bring to you this gentleman here, Benji Kolati, who is the co founder and CE of Galley, which is a technology platform to help kitchens manage food waste and food allergens. So that's the simplistic version of it, Benji. So welcome to the show.

Benji Koltai [00:00:45]:
Awesome. Thank you for having me, Tracy.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:00:47]:
You're welcome. Okay, so the title of this show that I made, it is Recipe First People always think Rethinking Food Safety from the Inside out. So I really want to talk first about what recipe first people always means. Can you explain that?

Benji Koltai [00:01:03]:
Yeah, sure. So I would say the recipe first part comes from our core belief that everything in the food system leads back to the recipe. So we see the food system as having three parts. There's the supply chain, there's kitchens, and there's a consumer of that food. And all three of those pieces, the supply chain, the kitchen, and the end consumer, ultimately revolve around recipes. So what we eat as consumers of the food system are prepared meals, usually. And those prepared meals are what we call a recipe. And those recipes drive what kitchens.

Benji Koltai [00:01:45]:
Whether it's your home kitchen or a restaurant or a hotel kitchen or whatever it might be, a caterer, those kitchens prepare and purchase from the supply chain based on those recipes. And so when we say recipe first, we have a belief that if you can digitize recipes and represent what is actually happening in the kitchen in the most accurate way, including trim yields and all the complexity that goes into a recipe, losing of, you know, goods because of evaporation, you can then create a digital platform that accurately represents the food system in its entirety. So by starting at the recipe, you can then move to menu planning and nutrition and costing and inventory and procurement and all the things that every kitchen does, no matter what the business model is. So that's the recipe first part of it, the people always part, is that ultimately the culinary world is about people, it's about serving people, and it's about the creativity of chefs. And so the goal of our software platform is not to take away control, but it is to empower the people involved in this value chain. So whether it's the consumer and showing accurate allergens and accurate nutrition information, because that all flows from the recipe or the culinary Worker who is sort of overwhelmed by all these tedious tasks of copy and pasting out of a spreadsheet into a label template, or manually calculating nutrition or trying to figure out what the allergens are. We want to automate all of that because ultimately the goal is to allow that person, that culinary professional who went into the culinary world, not to manage spreadsheets and do math calculations, but to create beautiful food that tastes amazing, that looks amazing. And so focusing on the people and building technology that really supports the people and takes on a lot of the tedium and the burden of running a culinary operation, that's a lot.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:03:39]:
And I love it all. I mean, because, you know, talking. There's an image that I have that I use a lot in my presentations is like the event food chain, and it's the people, right? And it's the attendee, it's the sales manager, it's the meeting planner, the sales manager at the hotel or the venue, then their event manager at that venue, and then the chef and then the sous chef and the Garman Jeff and the, you know, the line cooks, and then the CS or the banquet captain and the servers and the bartenders, and all of those people need to have that information at some. In some fashion, and that galley, you know, can give it to them in whatever fashion that they need. Is that correct?

Benji Koltai [00:04:21]:
Yeah, exactly. And the whole premise is it should be stored in one place and the salesperson who's talking with the event coordinator or the customer and pricing out what the banquet offering is, the way that they look at the recipe is what is the food cost, and what are the expected costs of this menu that I've just built, and therefore, what's the sales price that I need to be charging so that the business makes money? So that's, I would say, like the highest level, like most customer facing, you know, building the bto, having the recipe data flowing through to the salesperson so that they can properly price, hopefully a custom offering. You know, I want to kill this bronze, silver, gold, you know, packages that caterers have. That is the blunt instrument that they're forced to have. Because having a customized costing is not possible without a system like Galli that that does costing on the fly as you're building up the menu. And then all the way on the other end, you know, the procurement person who is in charge of making sure that all the product comes in house for this banquet that's been planned. What do they need to buy? Well, that ultimately is what are the recipes, how much of each recipe needs to be made. And a computer should be able to spit out.

Benji Koltai [00:05:37]:
You need X cases of tomatoes, Y cases of potatoes, and Z cases of chicken without anybody having to do any math or even hopefully talk to people. Like the. Right now, the executive chef has to talk to the salesperson, who then talks to their team and disseminates all that information. And through that game of telephone, you get buffer on top of buffer, which just ultimately equals food waste, money waste, labor waste. Just so much waste by those inefficiencies.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:06:04]:
Well, yeah, I mean, because even it reminds me of a convention center that I talked to years ago, and the executive chef ordered a specific product, let's just say tomato sauce, right. And it didn't have an allergen that one of the attendees was having, that attendee had an allergic to. But when they ordered it, the distributor was out of it, so they just replaced it. And that knowledge was not communicated down, was lost, and she was served her allergen because there was no checks and balances in that, because the people didn't. The procurement person didn't have that knowledge.

Benji Koltai [00:06:39]:
Exactly.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:06:40]:
That information.

Benji Koltai [00:06:41]:
And it has to. It's not only the procurement decision, but to your point, it's okay, I asked for this product, but what did I receive? And I received this product, but what did I actually use? Because maybe I received it in house, but I had leftover tomato sauce from another event, and I actually used that instead. So even if the one that you got complied with your allergen requirements is the one that was used during production, that one. So you need a system that has, from recipe and planning, all the things that we were talking about, through to what we call the operational workflows, procurement, inventory, and production. And if you don't have that full chain, you're not able to tell your end consumer. I can promise you that from this production run, these are the allergen profiles of the dishes that are being served to you because they might change when the vendor decides to make a substitution.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:07:29]:
Right, Exactly. Because the substitutions can be made. You never know. And so you want to make sure that those are updated. And so. Okay, before we get into those details, too, I really want to come back to is, why did you start this? How did this get started? And I know that your story, and people can read it online, too, is that you have Crohn's disease and gluten intolerance, but where did Galli come from? And it's like my dream product for me for what I do. Right. And trying to make sure we don't kill people.

Benji Koltai [00:08:00]:
Right? Yeah. I mean, it, you know, it wasn't as extreme as killing me, but it was a. It was. Yeah, I'm, I'm lucky, you know, celiac and there are plenty of other more severe allergen allergies that people can have. So. Yeah, my story is I got diagnosed with Crohn's disease, you know, sort of terribly. My, My gastroenterologist told me, it doesn't matter what you eat. This is a autoimmune disease.

Benji Koltai [00:08:22]:
We don't really know how it works. You're just going to have eight to 10 surgeries throughout your life, and unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about it. And so I was, you know, a sophomore in college when I got this diagnosis and I was like, all right, well, I guess that's my life now. And just continued on living. And sure enough, when I graduated with a computer science degree, I went out to Silicon Valley and started working. And all the stress of, like getting into the real world led to my first surgery. So I had 8 inches in my intestine removed and I was continuing to just eat whatever I wanted. And then I met my now wife, and she was gluten free.

Benji Koltai [00:08:54]:
And she said, hey, you probably should care what you eat. And so that's when I became gluten free and started getting really serious because I saw that had a positive impact on my quality of life. And so after making that change, I was approached by a now food text, or what was at the time the first delivery only restaurant. It was called Sprig. And, and the whole idea was that they wanted to provide delivery food that was high quality restaurant food with a daily rotating menu via. So all based on, you know, this was before Uber Eats existed. You can order from your phone and have it delivered. And in creating that customer app, they would label dishes and they would frequently label things as gluten free or vegan or vegetarian or whatever it was.

Benji Koltai [00:09:36]:
And so I joined that company, started using the product, and quickly learned that when you have analog systems, spreadsheets, manual processes, those allergen tags are going to be wrong, especially as you're constantly coming up with new dishes. So that was really my entry point into building out the system. And I built it internal for that business first and then spun it out into a standalone business.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:09:57]:
Well, thank you for that. And just saying the manual only, I mean, it just. I have pictures of banquet captains who are printing out the menus the morning of the event and putting them on, you know, buffets. And it Depends on what banquet captain is in charge that day and printing it out, because there's no standard. And that's, to me, that that's a risk. I mean, I need that. I want to proof those, you know, two weeks in advance. Right.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:10:27]:
But then again, if something changes, who's there to, you know, to fix that? And I don't see why. Why do people not think that is a risk? That's a bold question.

Benji Koltai [00:10:40]:
Yeah, I mean, look, I think ultimately I'm a believer that people are good and people want to do the best that they can. And so I think that people want to have a solution. But ultimately, if the technology isn't available, people are left to come up with their own solutions. And we see that people have a process of, hey, we're going to have a two week sign off. And once it's signed off, there are no changes allowed. And then the chef might say, well, I just got this substitution, I need to make a change. Well, there are no changes allowed because that's what the state of the art technology sort of has required of the process. And so my belief is that people want to be able to do this more efficiently.

Benji Koltai [00:11:20]:
They just haven't been equipped with a solution that helps them do that more efficiently. And so my hope is that because there's that desire when we give them a solution that does it, they would embrace it and make the appropriate changes needed to come on board onto a system like that.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:11:37]:
Well, yeah, and there's lots of. And we were talking about the show before the show, all the systems then. Because I deal a lot with catering or convention centers and hotels. I mean, the backend systems behind the scenes that go from a banquet, not even from the banquet server, but the event manager that's inputting that information and it's usually lacking that data. Right. And yeah, and then that's made from the. To the banquet captain that's passed on to the banquet captain. Okay, so it's Celiac disease awareness month and Food Allergy awareness Month.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:12:12]:
Can you talk about how Galley makes it safer for individuals with food allergies and other medical conditions like Crohn's? I mean, what. What kind of. How does it help the people who are making those labels? I guess I should say, you know, yeah, for sure.

Benji Koltai [00:12:29]:
Well, I'll actually use an example from one of our customers. We have a customer who provides food service at colleges and universities. And they were telling us a story of a mother who sent an email and said how much she realized she was taking for granted what her daughter had at her regular college, when her daughter went to a summer program at a different university that was not using a system like Gali. And when she's at her regular school, which is whose food service is using Galley, they have displays on the cafeteria, these digital displays that enumerate all of the allergens in all of the dishes. And even you can click in and see every single ingredient so that if you happen to be allergic to nightshades or you're on an AIP diet or whatever it is, you can tailor what you eat, knowing that the recipes that were used to cook the food in the kitchen are the ones that you're seeing tailored, displayed differently, stripped of all the recipe content, but the raw ingredients are there for you to read. And this mother was telling this executive chef, who's our customer, how grateful she is that her daughter can go to a school that has the level of transparency where she can eat safely because she has severe allergies. And when she went to this summer program that had a dining facility that didn't have a system like Galley, and they went to the dining facility and said, I need to know which food I can eat, they said, sorry, I can't tell you that information because I can't guarantee what's in our food. You know, too many changes.

Benji Koltai [00:14:01]:
So quite literally, this, you know, college student was not able to eat the food at the university because the food service program couldn't provide that level of information. And to me, that is the perfect summary of what using a system like Gali offers. It takes away the burden of providing a patron that kind of information, which can be life or death for patrons. So that when you have people who have severe allergies, they can go to the kitchen and they can get a printout of all of the ingredients in a recipe and understand whether the dish is safe for them.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:14:34]:
Well, and it reminds me of, I'm sure you've seen the lawsuit against the restaurant in Disney, Disney Springs of the doctor who passed away. And one of the latest things, and I need to go back and look at it, but the headline was that the restaurant is claiming that the their recipe because the husband of the woman of the doctor who died has asked for the recipes to see what was in the ingredients of the food that she ate. And they said they're telling her that them that it's proprietary and they won't give them that information.

Benji Koltai [00:15:08]:
Right.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:15:09]:
And that takes away that burden. I'm like, we don't want the actual recipe. We just want to know what the ingredients Are that information so that we can make. The doctor can make a, you know, the coroner can make an assessment.

Benji Koltai [00:15:23]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, It's. It's tragic that it's not just standard. And so that's our vision, is that more food service businesses that use any system, it doesn't have to be galley, just a system that automates this process can provide to the consumer, even if it's, hey, I'm not even going to give you the ingredient list. I'm going to tell you the allergens that are in it, or you tell me what you're allergic to, and I'll tell you yes or no, whether it, you know, so we can have both. The consumer can have the transparency they need, and the food service company can protect their sacred ip.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:15:54]:
Since you've designed this and when you first noticed that you, like, even with sprig that you said that we're designing this and it's still raw, the information is inaccurate on allergens and things, what were the gaps in that food safety and the communication that pushed you to make galley and to continue building out on what you're doing with it?

Benji Koltai [00:16:16]:
Yeah, I mean, ultimately it comes down to writing down the recipe and having the recipe as step one. But as we've been talking about, you need to have all the other pieces, because there can be a breakdown in every transition point from here's the recipe that gets handed to the line cook and that gets handed to the inventory person, and that gets handed to the procurement person. And each person in that chain has to make the right decision and be aware and communicate to everybody else. Hey, we got a substitution from the vendor. We put it here. Hey, we're pulling that. It now has soy when it didn't originally have soy. Okay, hey, salesperson or person who's working front of house, we need to update the signage so that that gets shown without a system that is incorporated in every single step of that process.

Benji Koltai [00:17:04]:
You need to be perfect in your game of telephone. And so that has been the motivator for continuing to build out Gali into more than just a recipe management platform. It's why we believe that in order to really solve this problem, you need what we call a culinary resource planning platform. And the idea of a CRP is that every culinary process is captured in a single source of truth so that we know what your inventory on hand is, because that's going to inform what your production is going to use, which is ultimately going to inform allergens and what's being served to the end user. So there's so much that you need to build. And we're still at it, we're still making it better. And then also layering on, you know, we haven't touched as much on the people always, but making that user friendly, making that automated in the appropriate way, having that be something that makes the culinary worker's life easier, rather than this burden of a system of, now you need to report all this information into the system. The ultimate vision for Galli is to leverage AI to watch what's happening and passively pull out all that information to say, hey, I just saw you pull off the, you know, Anna's or Annie's ketchup off the shelf.

Benji Koltai [00:18:19]:
And so, and I'm seeing, and I'm watching you make, you know, the meatloaf. And so I know that you're using the Annie's ketchup in this production run of the meatloaf. And you didn't have to tell me that, but it's keeping track of all that data.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:18:29]:
Mm. Well, and that also reminds me, too, of a. An event I was doing, and it was like, it was a pepido pepper stuffed with cheese on it, whatever. And it comes out, they say it's not gluten free. And I'm like, why is it not gluten free? They're like, because it's served on a crostini. Or it comes out served on a crostini. I'm like, this beo didn't say that. Well, it's always served on a crostini.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:18:52]:
I'm like, but nowhere on your printed menu did it say that. So those are the additional steps, too, that are missed. And because it's not even just the. And even because I. I want to jump into the food waste a little bit as well. My friend Aurora would love this. But it's. How do you not know how? It's also the serving method.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:19:13]:
Right. And that comes down to how that. That pepperdew pepper with cheese in it is going to be presented. You know, is there a toothpick in it or is there a crostini in it, or is there a platter? And that data needs to be collected.

Benji Koltai [00:19:27]:
Yep, yep. And. And ideally, it's done so that the pepper can be its own recipe. And then when you say the pepper on a. On a, you know, crostini, it's not an extra burden to, oh, now I have to rewrite the pepper recipe and then add the crostini. So having it be this really easy to use system that makes it super simple. And beneficial. Right.

Benji Koltai [00:19:49]:
Another core principle of ours is when you're asking a person to do something, you need to reward them for doing that. And the reward that they get is they get to save time, they get to save on error. And so creating a system that makes it not only easy, but also beneficial for the operator to make that change. Because it's not. They're not going to do it if it's the salesperson saying, hey, you need to do that. They're going to do it because they know that if they don't put it on the crostini, the purchaser is not going to get the crostini in house and they're going to be short and they're not going to be able to execute what they need. So you need to make it motivating for them to use it. And that requires having that same data flow in the operations piece as well as the front of house piece.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:20:34]:
Oh, there's so much that I love about this. Okay, so I want, I do want to jump into food waste. I know this is celiac and food. Food allergy awareness, but I think at the same time, one of my things that I've been saying for 15 years now is like, if you don't ask the question, Benji and Tracy, do you have any dietary restrictions, Right. That we, that you need. We need to be aware of when you come and eat our event? I'm like, if we don't ask the question, we're making food that's getting thrown away.

Benji Koltai [00:21:01]:
Yep.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:21:01]:
Right. But at the same time, you know, like I mentioned Aurora and, and she and I have been talking about this. I mean, I was in an event a couple months ago and they had four bowls of ketchup, like in, in bowls, big bowls, next to scrambled eggs. I'm like, do you really know that many people that put that much ketchup on their scrambled eggs? Right, right. And. And I tried to find out. I'm like, how much is that? Did you pay for that ketchup? Right. And then how much just got thrown away? Because you can't keep that ketchup.

Benji Koltai [00:21:35]:
Right.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:21:35]:
Put it in the freaking bottle. Right. But how does your. How does Galli combine that use of, you know, allergens and maybe it's two separate things, but to me, I think they're also still really combined of the allergens as well as managing that food waste.

Benji Koltai [00:21:50]:
Totally. Yeah. Ultimately, I would say one of the biggest sources of food waste, the first place that food waste happens is in planning. And so if you're building A breakfast buffet and you have six bottles of ketchup to go along with your four hotel pans of scrambled eggs. Maybe that's the wrong ratio. And so just surfacing that and saying, hey, you have $10 worth of ketchup on this menu when you have, you know, whatever $50 worth of eggs or whatever it might be. So giving the tools that make that information as apparent as many times as possible to, in my view, as early as possible, prevent the food waste. So maybe there's some agreed ratio of hey, when we're serving scrambled eggs, we're going to serve, you know, one ounce of ketchup for every three servings of scrambled eggs.

Benji Koltai [00:22:45]:
You can literally put that into the recipe of scrambled eggs with ketchup on the side and nobody can mess that up now. And so when you change the amount of scrambled eggs that you're serving from 15 to 200, the system will automatically adjust how much ketchup you need so that it's not a human making a decision of how much ketchup should I be serving. So the whole idea is create a system where you put this information in once and then allow the system to do the math. Because humans are really bad at math in general. And so when you do that, you know, that's one example. And then it comes down to purchasing. Okay, so today, when a food business doesn't have a system like Galley, how do they purchase? They just make sure that they have plenty and if they have too much, that's fine. I'd rather have too much than have too little and be short and not serve, you know, all of my patrons.

Benji Koltai [00:23:36]:
Well, with a system like Gali, you can actually get really specific about what you need to the, you know, ounce, because Gali does all the scaling, all the calculations for me. And sure, you can still have some buffer, but it turns this whole par based purchasing into what we call demand based purchasing. That gives you a much more specific targeted shopping list for then the purveyor and the inventory people to make sure they have in house. So the whole principle is create this single source of truth and allow the system to do all the decision making of how much you need, what do you need to buy, what do you already have in house. All of that is supported by the human to just minimize all the places where this food waste error comes in from planning all the way through to the actual procurement.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:24:23]:
Okay, so I want to, I want to say, I think there's a lot of AI in that, right? In doing that math computation. And I mean, we still need the human input of like, hey, I've got 10 bottles of ketchup in the, you know, in the refrigerator. Although Robert and I forgot his last name off the top of my head. But, you know, he's helping manage food waste on cruise ships through AI technology and things. But so how has galley? And I'm, and I'm. I know, I've read it. So Galli is using AI to support chefs and the kitchen teams. You know, how is that approach being taken by the chefs and being accepted by the chefs to understand that and different from other food service technologies that are out there?

Benji Koltai [00:25:09]:
Yeah, so we think of AI as the full spectrum. That is AI. I mean, for the last couple years, AI has meant generative AI. ChatGPT, you know, hey, you're talking to an AI system. Yeah, exactly. In a way, math is also AI. A calculator is artificial intelligence. It's really good at doing math.

Benji Koltai [00:25:33]:
It's not a human doing the math. And so I would say right now the majority of our AI is simple math. Although it's simple for a computer, it's way too complex for a human. So going from, you know, I need five red scoops to how many grams is that, to how many bottles is that, to how many cases is that? That's sort of a math equation that is programmed into galley as an algorithm. And we just run that on behalf of the chef. So there's no hurdle for a chef to say, oh, well, I don't want that, you know, AI to run. Well, it's just, it's the math that you would do anyways. We've just turned it into an algorithm and automated it.

Benji Koltai [00:26:13]:
And it's just going to spit out, here's how many cases you need to buy. That has been like the majority of our intelligence so far. And then there's definitely all the new stuff of generative AI, vision, voice, and we have some of that built already. So, for example, you can go into galley today and you can say, hey, I need a, you know, gluten free Mexican chicken dish. And it will generate for you a recipe for you to start with. And if you're an R and D chef, that can save you ton of time filling out, you know, the bare bones of a standard, whatever chicken mole or whatever it might be that you're making and you can do your tweaks and your, you can take it to your workbench and you can make it your own, but it gives you 80%, you know, it's very similar to what ChatGPT does. If you're trying to write a blog post or whatever it is, it helps you with that process. And so that's what we're going to continue to build out, is leveraging AI to make the processes and the workflows that are happening in Galli faster, more efficient, more natural language.

Benji Koltai [00:27:13]:
Hey, I want to build a banquet menu that has five entrees, and I need two of them to be gluten free. And it's a Mexican theme, and it can spit out from your recipe catalog. Here's your menu that has all the things that you've told me, all the constraints that you've needed, and I put it together for you.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:27:30]:
Oh, my gosh, that would be so great for just meeting planners to say, hey, chef, can you do this? You know, this is what I want. I mean, and I have an event coming up. I'm like, I'm going from New Orleans theme to Baltimore theme to a late night theme. How can I tie all of those together, you know, and to make a cohesive one night event with four different, you know, food functions.

Benji Koltai [00:27:52]:
Yep.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:27:53]:
Okay, so what have you seen? What results have you seen from your clients in the in, in numbers wise and in using Galley? How much of has it saved them? How, you know, can they. Do they have stories besides the chef that you talked like, this woman, it's like, clear. Like, my daughter's got food allergies and she's been, she, you know, she can eat safely. But what other kind of data can you share that Gali has proven to help them?

Benji Koltai [00:28:20]:
Yeah. So one really great data point that we have from some of our customers. Anecdotally, you know, food waste. We've heard 30 to 40% reduction in food waste from our customers.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:28:33]:
Wow. And that's how much money. That's how much food waste we have.

Benji Koltai [00:28:37]:
Well, it would be a, it would be a 30 to 40% reduction. So.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:28:41]:
Right.

Benji Koltai [00:28:42]:
It's not taking it to zero.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:28:43]:
Right. Okay.

Benji Koltai [00:28:44]:
Like, if they were wasting. Yeah, if they were wasting 30%, now they're wasting 20%. Something like that.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:28:49]:
That math.

Benji Koltai [00:28:50]:
Yes, exactly. So, you know, that's one huge thing. And then ultimately that that translates into, I would say, on average, 2 to 3% saved on food costs. So that's total points. Right. So, like, if your food cost percentage is 33%, going down to 30% or 31%, and these are, you know, in our view, that's like the core. That's one of our core, like, ROI metrics is how can we decrease the food cost percentage, the spend on food relative to revenue, because that's ultimately like the margin definition of a food service business. Yes, there's other costs, there's labor, there's other fixed costs on top of that.

Benji Koltai [00:29:29]:
But ultimately the food waste prevention, dialing in the needs, minimizing the waste, ultimately leads to bottom line real economics for these businesses. And then on top of that, we've had many of our customers have top line impact from adopting galley, whether it's just like quality perception and an increase in value. So that same customer that I was talking to you about had students come up to them and say, what changed in the kitchen? Why is the food so much better between before galley and onboarding? With galley, what happened is that the chef spent less time behind a computer and a calculator and more time making food. And so there is a real, although it's hard to quantify a real increase in the quality of the food. You know, it's seasoned better, it tastes better, and then that ultimately leads to revenue. Right? So they can go to a, another, you know, university that they're trying to win as an account and they can say, look, I can give you full transparency of our menu. We have the highest quality and we're going to meet the, you know, we can match the cost because we're able to provide a higher quality product at the same cost as some of our competitors who have, you know, more food waste and more operational issues that they then need to throw labor at and can't spend as much on the food. So, you know, from top line to bottom line, we've had our customers report significant impacts on their business and it ultimately unlocks more profit and more top line revenue because they're able to scale their operations, they're able to do more events, they're able to open new locations because doing that is as simple as just clicking a few buttons in galley.

Benji Koltai [00:31:06]:
They don't have to copy and paste the spreadsheet and all the manual processes that they're using to run this one kitchen. Now they need to duplicate those manual processes for another kitchen that they're trying to spin up.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:31:17]:
That's, you know, that's mind boggling amazing because it does come down to revenue, right? And I've always said, you know, the stat that I use from gluten free passport is that 91 of your customers will come back when they're treated with respect and, you know, and fed well and safe and. And then Shandy from Certistar is like, hey, if your food, if your menu, people with celiac disease or allergens. Their bill is this percentage less than the other person's bill. But you've got these attent, these students and customers saying, hey, what got better? It's technology that helped them do that. Like, that impact of revenue is huge.

Benji Koltai [00:32:02]:
Yeah, yeah, it's really amazing. And, and ultimately, sorry, the last thing I'll say is quality of life. I mean, we would send out a stress survey and I think it was like 38% improvement in like team stress of our customers. Right. So they were super stressed out before Galley. They adopted Galley. It started doing all these things for them. And happy employees lead to happy customers.

Benji Koltai [00:32:29]:
It leads to retention. It leads to all these challenges in the labor area. We haven't touched on labor really yet, but a system like this helps with the labor challenges. You can do more with less. And you can also keep your employees happy and doing what they love rather than forcing them to do all these tedious things.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:32:46]:
Right. Because I mean, like a server or a banquet captain. I mean the fact that I have pictures of them sitting there shoving labels into things and printing things out the morning of. Or this is incorrect. And running back and doing that 20 minutes before stuff is done. And even last week, Jessica Jimenez mentioned that she opened up the chafing dish 15 minutes before it opens and she's looking at the buffet label and they don't match. Right. That.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:33:14]:
That can help alleviate, alleviate that error there. Okay, so I do want to talk about staff. So let's talk about staff real quick. But I also want to throw a random hitch in there, like servers and banquet teams, kitchen, front of the house, back of the house that don't speak English.

Benji Koltai [00:33:34]:
Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:33:34]:
How do we help? I mean, because to me, ultimately, you want to help them do their jobs better. Right. And your guests don't want to need to pull out Google Translate to talk to them.

Benji Koltai [00:33:45]:
Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:33:46]:
Does Galley how. Talk about staffing and that?

Benji Koltai [00:33:49]:
Yeah, I mean, our app is a web app, so it's web based. Most modern browsers today have a translate function. So we have essentially native, you know, multi language support where any of your, you know, if you have Hispanic, you know, workers who only speak Spanish, you can write all your recipes in English and Galley can translate their version of it when they pull it up on their phone or their device into Spanish and they can just operate off of that. So it solves that problem entirely because we benefit from technology.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:34:20]:
Right. So what other benefits have you seen? Staff wise customers or. Yeah. Your customers seen staff wise with it?

Benji Koltai [00:34:28]:
Yeah. So one example, you know, continuing on the sort of dietitian, you know, nutrition analysis piece, we have customers who previously needed dietitians at every single location, because every location would have their own menu and their own recipes. And you needed an RD to do the menu analysis and tell here's the approved nutritional analysis. With a system like Gali, you can centralize that role and you can have one or a smaller team of RDs who are reviewing the root of the nutrition, which in our system is the supplier item or the vendor item. And all they have to do is make sure that all of those items are correct in the galley system. And then all the chefs are free to use those items, trusting that galley is going to do the right math to compute what does everything have to be. So when a chef wants to change the amount of salt in their dish because it doesn't taste right, or they want to add this other ingredient, they don't then have to go all the way back and get reapproval from the rd. Hey, I need you to approve the allergens and the nutrit nutrition analysis and all the analysis that you've done for my menu, because the RDs have already done that for the system and for the individual items that are in that system.

Benji Koltai [00:35:45]:
So you can just imagine the hours of work that get eliminated by centralizing that effort and also creating, you know, it's kind of like the cloud workspace for the kitchen. You no longer have these localized binders that have all the recipes in them. If everybody's putting their recipes in a system like Galley, you can access it from across the world and have a distributed team that is supporting each other in the modern 2025 way of doing things, of, hey, I'm going to work remotely and digitally to support you. And so it creates a more streamlined, a more specialized and eventually a more scalable labor force, because you can create these more efficient sort of teams of folks who are doing work. Last thing I'll say is we have customers who have a corporate R and D team and their sole job is to create the recipes. And nobody else in the. There might be 800 people who have access to their galley system.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:36:41]:
Right?

Benji Koltai [00:36:42]:
Only five people have access to change recipes. And so, wow, okay, so we're a full enterprise grade platform. So there's permissioning that says, hey, these people have access to changing these recipes. Everybody else has read access. They can consume that data, but they can't change it. And so you are able to lock down your system and create again these specializations of roles of we have this team that creates the recipes and all the local chefs maybe can build their own local recipes if they want to that nobody else can use or they can just pull from the corporate catalog of recipes and build their menus that way.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:37:19]:
Well, and it reminds me of this Excel spreadsheet that I'm going to and Microsoft Word merge template to make labels. I'm like, I'm going to give it to a hotel that I just worked with and I told them I'm like chef and event or food and beverage director. You're the only ones that have the ability to change the Excel spreadsheet. And then they can mail merge, then the banquet captains can go do the mail merge before their event so that the errors are not there. Right. So yeah, that exact kind of thing. And because you do have to have that different level of, you know, who has access to this to make these changes.

Benji Koltai [00:38:02]:
Exactly.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:38:03]:
Especially since that dude from that used to work at Disney went in and kept, they kept his access and he went in and changed all the allergen information.

Benji Koltai [00:38:11]:
Yep.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:38:11]:
He just being sent to prison. Yeah.

Benji Koltai [00:38:14]:
And it's, it's not uncommon to have to have, you know, disgruntled employees in, in, you know, in your. And so being able to turn off access instantly and say, okay, you no longer have access to anything on our system, it creates a level of security and when somebody goes in and causes all those problems, that's hours of work to unwind and figure out and you have to stop everything. And so there's so many places where this kind of labor saving can happen when you have a enterprise grade system that can support you well.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:38:42]:
And I'm sure that those, the staff at those venue, you know, your clients, venues really appreciate it because they also don't know. I mean it's even like me recently I've. Last couple of years I've taken the one of. Oh, here it is one of these like it's just a 3 by 5, 3 by 4 label with the menu card on it. Right. But I'm giving it to servers who are passing appetizers, you know, to put on their shirt to walk around.

Benji Koltai [00:39:09]:
That's great.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:39:10]:
And they are fighting over it. They're like, oh, I want to be the ahi tuna or I want to be the tater tots. But it helps them do their job better.

Benji Koltai [00:39:17]:
Yep.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:39:18]:
Right. So simple things like that, you know, really, really helps. Okay. Safe. We've kind of touched on this a little bit. But safety goes beyond of allergen avoidance and, and let's just say there's the cucumber recall. Right. That just came out.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:39:33]:
Right. Or the. For salmonella. It's about transparency and integrity with what you're serving, because these chefs want to provide something that's really delicious and healthy and whatever. What's the cost of not having that? Right.

Benji Koltai [00:39:48]:
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, it could be your business. Right. Like, we've seen it many times over of companies that have these recalls that they don't properly propagate through to there and, you know, consumer. And they don't pull the. The lots off the line. And so food safety, food traceability. Right.

Benji Koltai [00:40:06]:
I think in 2026, there's some new government regulations around traceability requirements. And as a food service, you know, business, you need to be able to prove that when there's a recall of a certain manufactured lot, you can go and trace that through and talk about what production runs, included that lot, and. And very quickly pull that off your shelf. And so having a system of record that has that ability, that feature where you can enter in a lot number and say, show me all of the recipes downstream. Right. Because if. If you have cucumbers, you might have 15 different recipes that use that lot of cucumbers over multiple days of production. And if you don't have a system of record, record for your production, it's going to be very hard for you to execute on that.

Benji Koltai [00:40:51]:
And ultimately, depending on what the, you know, issue is, it could be, you know, a question of life or death for end consumers. And I think that especially as climate change continues and just all the new things that we have to deal with, new pathogens, new, you know, superbug sort of stuff, we need to do everything we can to leverage technology to make our food system as safe as possible.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:41:14]:
Well, and those QR codes, I mean, and I'm glad that level of, you know, traceability is coming about because it's really kind of hard. I mean, I remember going to a. I think it was the Longhorn Steakhouse with my mom and my grandmother. And it was during the romaine lettuce recall. And I asked the. And all the salads were all romaine. And I asked the server, she's like, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Benji Koltai [00:41:34]:
Right.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:41:35]:
And I'm like, the general manager came over and talked to me. He's like, no, all of ours are checked. And, you know, but you need to make sure that there's a statement about that. Right?

Benji Koltai [00:41:43]:
Yep. Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:41:44]:
Yeah.

Benji Koltai [00:41:45]:
And, you know, speaking to food waste, that's probably another place where there's a huge amount of food waste. Because if you don't know, you probably err on the side of just throwing it out. And so if you had something that gave you that certainty, you could make a more fine grained, you know, change that. That's required, right?

Tracy Stuckrath [00:42:01]:
Yeah. Okay, so what is your in. In all that you've done? How long, how old is galley now?

Benji Koltai [00:42:08]:
We've been around for eight years.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:42:11]:
Okay. And I think I met you like five years ago at cater source and I saw the McGinnic cater source this year. Your team, what, you know, in all of the, in all of the work you've done in this eight years, what is the most underrated or overlooked fix that could be. Make a big impact on food safety and inclusion at events and hospitality?

Benji Koltai [00:42:35]:
It's going to come back to recipes. I mean, we talk to so many businesses that say, oh, we don't, we don't use recipes. We don't need recipes. We don't have recipes. Right. We're talking to kitchens and they say, we don't have recipes. Well, that just means you don't write it down. And in your chef's head.

Benji Koltai [00:42:49]:
And then we asked them, okay, can you just explain it to us and we'll have the AI generate it. And you know, sometimes it is economic. You know, we had somebody on a sales demo tell us their recipe, and they, we, we asked them, okay, how many, how, how profitable do you think this dish is? Well, we probably make like $2 every dish, every time we sell it. And we imported it and updated the most recent prices for their ingredients, and they were losing like 80 cents every time they sold it. And so it's that sort of stuff that's like, so basic and so underappreciated that not only has an impact on the financials, but then also can have an impact on the safety and the allergens of, like, hey, you, you didn't know that farro was, that was my big trigger at Sprig was like, they had a farro salad and they marked it as gluten free because it's a salad. And whoever was clicking the checkbox for gluten free didn't know that farro is a glutinous grain. And so it's just that level of, like, awareness and responsibility that's put on people to do the labeling. When a human is labeling your allergens, you have a big problem, you have a big risk from a safety and liability perspective.

Benji Koltai [00:44:00]:
And you should delegate that to a system where, sure, maybe the human is labeling the ingredients and hopefully they're a certified human, and hopefully there's a system that's supporting them and validating that. And we see an ingredient called faro, and it's not labeled as gluten. We're going to recommend that you label it as gluten, because even though you might not know that it's gluten, we know that it's gluten. And we have this ever growing database of these examples. So, you know, maybe unsurprising that my answer to your question is recipes, but I think that that is the most underrated and most impactful thing that. That a lot of food service businesses overlook.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:44:38]:
Well, and. No, I appreciate that. And I'm gonna. I'm just thinking. And I haven't watched it, but that show, Nona with Vince Vaughn, that's all these grandmothers, like, passing down their recipe, but we don't know what their recipes are because it's in their brain. And we want, like, we always complain about not knowing how my grandmother made her succotash, because she never wrote it down, and we all want it, and she's no longer with us, you know?

Benji Koltai [00:44:58]:
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, luckily, now you can take a video. You know, it could be a complete, you know, without any words, without any. Or you could just have a conversation. You could record a phone call and say, hey, can you just explain to me how you make that succotash? And there you go. You've written down the recipe, because you send that into our AI system, it turns it into a recipe, and now you at least have a starting point. So, yeah, getting that unstructured data into a system has, I would say, historically been a big burden. Oh, well, it's.

Benji Koltai [00:45:26]:
Takes me a lot of time to write down the recipe and so on and so forth, but now, with the benefit of generative AI, we can really support that process and make it much easier to do.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:45:35]:
Yeah. Oh, my gosh. That. And then. And scaling it and. And saying, okay, I have 10 people, but now I'm going to have 50 people. And.

Benji Koltai [00:45:41]:
Exactly.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:45:42]:
And going back to that guy that you showed him that he was losing 80%. Did his chin just hit the floor?

Benji Koltai [00:45:48]:
Yeah. I mean, they were. They were. They were like, all right, we're taking it off the menu until we figure this out. You know, it's. It's those instantaneous decisions that you can make when you actually cost out your dish, which most, you know, chefs don't do ever. And if they do, it's, like, once every three years, because it's just so hard to crunch all those numbers for every single item in every single dish.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:46:09]:
Right.

Benji Koltai [00:46:10]:
Allie does it instantaneously. You put in the recipe, you get your cost.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:46:13]:
Well, in. In just jumping, it just reminds me now of why Boston Simon, who's director of operations for there and there, it's a venue in the UK because they had to start putting all the nutrition information on there because the UK requires that. And they took menu items, they took items off the menu. When they looked at how caloric or bad they were, because they had never done that analysis before, they're like, holy crap. And so just having that knowledge, nutrition wise, allergy wise, food safe, you know, food waste wise.

Benji Koltai [00:46:44]:
Yep.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:46:45]:
It's huge.

Benji Koltai [00:46:46]:
And then also having the tools to make the change. So, like, if you put in the nutrition and you see, oh, wow, the fat is way off the charts. Here, let me substitute out this ingredient that's not critical for the taste profile for another ingredient that has whatever lowered macronutrient that you're trying to target. So it's not just the discovery of the problem, but it's also the resolution and the tweaking and the real time feedback that a system like Gali is giving you. So that as you change the formulation, you can see the impact on whatever you're looking for. Allergens costing nutrition.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:47:16]:
Okay, cool. All right, some rapid fire questions for you. Ready?

Benji Koltai [00:47:21]:
Sure. Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:47:21]:
Okay. What's one kitchen phrase you secretly love me Simplify. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Nobody knows, like, what that means. Is everything in its place?

Benji Koltai [00:47:32]:
Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:47:32]:
Line cook or software engineer, you have to choose for a week. What are you?

Benji Koltai [00:47:36]:
Software engineer.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:47:38]:
Every day, all day long.

Benji Koltai [00:47:40]:
Every day, all day long. I love it. Can't get enough of it.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:47:43]:
I mean, I love how the fact that you paired that love of what you do with a medical challenge that you had.

Benji Koltai [00:47:52]:
Yeah. I mean, it's dumb luck. I mean, there's. I am so blessed to be in this position, to have had the life experience, to have the diagnosis. If I wasn't diagnosed with Crohn's, I don't know that Gali would be here today. And I had nothing to do with that. And I probably wouldn't have chosen that. But it just goes to show you that you, you know, you never know what blessings are hidden in some of the things that impact you in maybe negative ways at the moment.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:48:16]:
Well, that's very true. Worst kitchen mishap you've ever seen.

Benji Koltai [00:48:21]:
So as not so much a cook. When I was at Sprig, our label printer that we relied on for printing these information on all of our packaged meals ran out of ink. And so I would sit in the kitchen and re roll the thermal ink roller so that the label printer could continue to print out labels. And I did that multiple times just because whatever. We couldn't get the new roll of ink. And so I just had, honestly, I have a picture of me with the hairnet on in the kitchen just manually re rolling this ink roll.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:48:53]:
My God, that's crazy. Okay, I just missed this. Or Nancy just popped in here. Here. Not only do we have my mother in law's Mandel bread recipe, but a video of her making it with Noah grandson who's 15. So that's going back to your conversation, you know, talking about that. So that's very cool.

Benji Koltai [00:49:09]:
And actually just if I can add on to that, we had, when we were launching our recipe AI system, we had a employee who had their grandmother's recipe book and it was all written in grandma's cursive and nearly impossible to decipher. And so they upload it to our AI system and it can parse it perfectly because AI happens to be better at reading grandma's cursive than we are. And so finally this sort of deciphering of this cherished family recipe is unlocked by leveraging generative AI to translate that recipe.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:49:41]:
Wow, that's amazing. Okay. And then somebody. Oh, from. I think it's. I don't detect. To support allergen awareness. Food safety and integrity is a fascinating topic.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:49:51]:
Thank you for sharing. I love the name badge approach for pass hors d'. Oeuvre. So simple, but extremely impactful. Thank you so much. And then actually over here it says Benji's. That was from Corinne. Hello, my friend.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:50:03]:
I haven't talked to you in forever. Nice to see you. And then legendary western events that hasn't come up over here said Benji's personal experience combined with innovative tech sounds like a game changer for the industry. I agree.

Benji Koltai [00:50:17]:
It's been really incredible.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:50:19]:
That's good. That's very good. Okay, two more questions. If you could wave a wand and fix one thing in the food system today, what would it be?

Benji Koltai [00:50:27]:
I would say the resistance to change. I mean, things are done the way that they've always been done and that needs to change. It's very hard, but we're not going to make the progress we need to if people are stuck in their ways and not willing to adopt new processes and systems to get the work done.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:50:45]:
Oh, as meeting planner, I 100% agree with you because we're still using Excel spreadsheets and Word documents and, you know, to manage our menus and, and pass them on. And yeah, 100%. Because even I'm like, I, as, I, I think I told you this before the show. I'm like, I just sent my menus to a hotel and she can't open them because it's on Google Drive and she's not allowed to open that.

Benji Koltai [00:51:06]:
Yep.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:51:07]:
Yeah. All right. One final question. One piece of tech every food service operator thinks they need, but actually don't.

Benji Koltai [00:51:14]:
Hmm. I have this thing of like, everybody thinks that the front of house technology is their core technology to build from, whether that's a point of sale system or a beo system or process. And while it definitely makes the revenue generation part of the business efficient and effective, there's far more benefit from digitizing the back of house, maybe even first and building from that digitization rather than trying to build backwards. You know, as I call it, building from the roof down. You know, you have to build from the foundation up and having that mindset of like, oh, well, it needs to plug in with my point of sale or it needs to plug in with my, you know, front of house system, whatever it might be. And if it doesn't, I'm not going to talk about it or explore it. There is so much opportunity for improvement in the back of house that will actually unlock value for front of house.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:52:09]:
That's awesome. Well, because it also, that reminds me of just designing an event, Event registration system, like collecting that information. You need to know what you need at the back end or, you know, in the end run. Right. But you have to design it from the front end way back here to get those reports. Reports. So you need to understand the data that you want. Like, hey, I need to print a label.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:52:32]:
Hey, I need to costing or I need to, like, I want to do, you know, reduce the amount of waste, et cetera. So you. That's really. I love that. Yeah. Thank you.

Benji Koltai [00:52:43]:
Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:52:43]:
Okay. All right. Is there any. I'm going to put your LinkedIn profile up here. Everybody you can reach out to. Benji, on LinkedIn. I, I so appreciate you being here and I, and I so appreciate you designing this software because it is a dream in my mind to be able to. Even as a meeting planner, to be able to access it.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:53:01]:
But is there anything you want to leave telling anybody about?

Benji Koltai [00:53:05]:
I'm just so grateful for the time and for you having me on and sharing this message and. Yeah. And to everybody listening and tuning in, just really appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to learn more and please do feel feel free to reach out to me or go to our website as well. Galleysolutions.com and you can learn more about Gali.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:53:25]:
All right, awesome. Well everybody thank you for tuning in. Benji. Again, thank you for being here. I will be back next Wednesday talking to Claire from the UK about her neurodivergent and gluten free eating lifestyle, let's call it that, and what we can do to help her. So until then, stay safe and eat well. Thanks. Thanks for listening to the Eating at a Meeting podcast where every meal matters.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:53:51]:
I'm Tracy Stuckrath, your food and beverage inclusion expert. Call me and let's get started right now on creating safe and inclusive food and beverage experiences for your customers, your employees and your communities. Share the podcast with your friends and colleagues at our Eating at a Meeting Facebook page and on all podcast platforms. To learn more about me and receive valuable information, go to tracystuckrath.com and if you'd like more information on how to feed engagement, nourish inclusion and bolster your bottom line, then visit eating@ameeting.com Sam.