The following interview is a conversation we had with Emmanuel Massenez, CEO of Kwali, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $2.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Food Production for QSRs

Emmanuel Massenez
Pretty good. Thank you. Red. Nice meeting you. 

Brett
Yeah. How do you say your last name?

Emmanuel Massenez
So it’s French. So it’s Emmanuel Massenez, or Massine, as you can say as well.

Brett
Got it. Okay, perfect. And let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, of course. So I am new to the US. I’m French, from a French family. I grew up in Chile, in South America. My family moved to Chile in the 90s. We were pioneers in the wine business when the Chilean wine started to conquer the world at that time. And then I went back to France to study university. I have a master’s degree in economics. At some point, I wanted to pursue a career in economics and do a PhD in economics. Thanks God I didn’t do it. And, yeah, I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last ten years, and I moved to San Francisco two years ago.

Brett
Nice. Wow. So you were really contrary, and then that was, what, right in the heart of the pandemic? 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, pretty much. I think it was when the vaccine rollout started, and for me, it was like, okay, if everybody’s leaving, it’s time for me to come. I’m probably going to have better rent. And also, I think it was, sure, it’s not going to be what it used to be, but it’s exactly what I was looking for something new.

Brett
I’m happy to find someone who, on paper, is crazier than me because I just moved here in July, and that’s the reaction I get from people. What are you thinking? How are you moving to SF? It’s dead. But I think the reality is when you’re actually here, you realize that’s not true at all. It’s far from dead. And I think that this is the absolute best place in the world to be a tech Founder. I think it’s really hard to make a case for anywhere else, even Miami or Austin, any of those up and coming places. They’re very much still up and coming, which is a risky place.

Emmanuel Massenez
No, I agree. I think maybe the city can have a little bit of a hard time regarding kind of like commercial rent and office lease and stuff like that, but I think as a place to live for housing, this city is just amazing. Not only it’s beautiful, but then you have so much talent altogether, so many people with so many diverse backgrounds and smart people and then the entrepreneurial spirit is just nuts. So yeah, I think it’s definitely a nice place to be. Yeah. 

Brett
My girlfriend, I always laugh when we go and walk the dog. Everyone’s talking about their stock options, what this Founder did. It’s like very much you’re in startup land here. Like everywhere you go you can’t escape overhearing startup talk. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, for sure. I’m very happy to be here. I think it’s also it depends on the stages on everybody’s life but I think for me it’s the right place at the right time.

Brett
Yeah, makes sense. And a couple of questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you pick as a CEO and as a Founder, what CEO do you admire most and what have you learned from studying them and paying attention to what they’re doing? 

Emmanuel Massenez
Right, well, this is a very good question. I am a great fan. So he’s not really tech but he’s very relevant. In California. It’s the Patagonia Founder, Ivan Truinar. I’m very much impressed by three things he’s done. First of all, he’s pursuing a business on what he’s actually passionate about. In that sense it was mountaineering and all the gear required for outdoor adventures and so on. So that’s number one then. I’m really impressed about his commitment to his passion, which in that sense is the environment and how to do good. Not only kind of like have a business, but also see the way you can participate to the good things in life and not only do it for money. And in my opinion, what happened at the beginning, or I think it was in June or July of this year, when he decided to put all his ownership of Patagonia in a trust to address his passion. 

Emmanuel Massenez
In that sense it’s climate change. I was blown out because usually we live in a world where money has a lot of power and not only it’s power itself, but it also kind of changes the way people behave. So in economics we would call that a moral hazard you change and I was so happy to see that didn’t happen to him or he managed to have his feet on the ground and kind of like this cool head approach and say, you know what, I’m going to die at some point. Having all this money, all this assets, kind of like for my own benefit or my family’s benefit is nice but it’s not good enough. And so putting this into a broader commitment is something that I really appreciate and I wish more people with power and money could do, which is letting go right at some point. 

Brett
So when quality goes public, here. In a couple of years, you become a multi billionaire. Can we expect for you to sign away your fortune as well?

Emmanuel Massenez
I want to say yes, but again, there is moral hazard. So I might change myself. I hope I won’t. I hope I can stay true to this belief of just doing the things that needs to be done the right way. 

Brett
All right, I’ll check in on IPO day and see how you’re yeah, well. 

Emmanuel Massenez
I’m on record, so you can always. 

Brett
Come back to me for you. Exactly. Don’t worry, it’s not legally binding here. One thing I like about the Patagonia brand and Founder in general is it doesn’t feel like bullshit. Everything that he preaches and what the brand stands for, it seems like they built around that belief and around their kind of vision of the world. It doesn’t seem like some fluffy, ESG stuff that they’re doing just look good, which I really admire. It’s very authentic and very real, which is hard to find, I think today. A lot of brands are just kind of abusing it. 

Emmanuel Massenez
That’s exactly it. He stayed real. He stayed true to his belief, and he never bragged about it either. That’s the thing. It’s less show off, less bragging, and just do the correct thing. And I think we need more of this kind of authenticity and maybe less marketing. 

Brett
That’s some of the talk I’ve been seeing about Sam Bankman Freed and all of the drama around FTX, and they were saying he was shouting from the rooftops about how he was a good guy going to donate his fortune. And that should have been the red flag for people. Typically, the person who’s making all of that noise about how they’re such a great person is not the best person behind the scenes or at least trying to compensate for something.

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, well, crypto, I don’t understand it, so I don’t have a particular judgment on it, but I think it definitely went way too high, way too fast. And I don’t know, let’s see how it goes from there. But usually I like more steady stuff. I like more practical products. And I think there is usually in the industry, we talk a lot between two concepts. One is the brave new world, and I think crypto kind of, like, falls into that category. And then you have the better, faster, cheaper, which is usually the productivity tools. And I think we, or at least me as a person, I’m more in tune with the second. Nice. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And one other question just to better understand you. What book has had the greatest impact on you as a Founder? And this could be a business book, or it could also just be a personal book that’s really influenced how you think. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, well, I love this question because I think, first of all, I love reading, and I’ve been reading forever. And I think it’s very French what I’m going to say. So if people have familiarity with the French, they’re going to laugh. But I read philosophy and I’ve been reading since I was 15, so that’s been 20 years of philosophy reading. And I think probably the author more than a book, but the author that has the biggest impact in me has been Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, and I’ve pretty much read all his books. He is, I would say, the ultimate game changer, the ultimate kind of like revolutionary in the sense that he changes your vision of what seems to be so one way, suddenly it’s in the other way. So it has this capacity of opening your eyes to new stuff that were always there, always in your sight, but you just couldn’t see it. 

Emmanuel Massenez
And so that for me has been amazing, this approach of giving a different flavor to the same old things, pretty much.

Brett
And any tips for how to get through those types of books? Personally, on my end, I’ve been obsessed with stoicism now for a couple of years, but what I study is more, I guess, the modern stoicism from people like Ryan Holiday, where they’re breaking it down in simple terms. But when I go and try to read stuff from like Marcus Aurelius, my brain can’t comprehend it because it’s just written in such a strange language. So any tips for people like me who may struggle to read these more old school books? 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, and I’m happy you mentioned stoicism because I am myself also very or try to be very stoic. And I think Marcus Aurelius, for instance, is a fascinating book. I think the best way to do it is probably practice. So the more you read, the more you get it. And at the same time, I think we need to let go the fear of not understanding, because it’s only fear and I think it’s only but natural to understand what we can. So if you were to open the hardest book in philosophy and try to get it, I think it’s going to be kind of like disenchanting, but maybe start with easy ones. I think old Greeks usually are very easy because they used to do philosophy in terms of dialogue, and dialogue is easier than anything else, so that’s a good one. And the Greeks, they invented pretty much everything.

Emmanuel Massenez
So there is a lot to do there. And so the more you read that, the more your comprehension can grow, right? And then when you revisit other things, more modern authors, suddenly everything has a different backtaste, the references, associations, the meaning of different words. And you realize that current philosophers and everything we’ve done during the 21st and 20th century is bathed. And it’s kind of funny, we always tend to think, even on products, even on tech, we tend to think that, oh, this is new. And I’m pretty much of the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. There is just new ways to approach it. And I think it’s the same with philosophy. Right? So I think the more you put at it, the better. 

Brett
Nice. That’s good advice. And it’s very refreshing to hear different books. I would say most founders I have on, they tell me the hard thing about Hard Thing by Ben Horowitz or Zero to One. So I like hearing something that’s new and something that’s different. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Oh, absolutely. If you’re looking for references, I got plenty. 

Brett
Nice. I may have to pick you up on that. Now let’s talk about what you’re building there. Can you give us the origin story behind the company and what problem and pain point are customers paying you to solve?

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been an entrepreneur with my Co-Founder Juan Pablo. We’ve been together for the last ten years. So we started a first company ten years ago. We bootstrapped everything. It’s not a very big company, but it’s enough to generate dividends and have a little bit of money on the side. But at some point were thinking, okay, we want to have a broader impact and hopefully not only a bigger impact but also like a good impact. Right? A little bit with what I said about Patagonia. And we knew we had a lot of talent and expertise in terms of computer vision and AI in general, but mostly computer vision. And computer vision was already being developed very strongly for everything manufacturing related. And were thinking, okay, manufacturing is nice, it’s already a crowded space, where do we think this technology could have a huge impact and an impact for good and where things are still very green and early?

Emmanuel Massenez
And we thought that the food industry and the food service in general is massive, was underrepresented in terms of new tech at the day we started it. And that computer vision could really have a strong impact in terms of waste, in terms of circular economy, in terms of productivity, in terms of making the whole industry hopefully more transparent and cleaner. And this is where we’ve decided to kind of focus as a strong vision. But then of course the vision is not enough to build a company, you need to narrow it down to an entry market, to a product. And we started doing our homework. We spent pretty much 18 months checking hypothesis that we had on the product, on the market and we ended up focusing on a very specific use case for a very specific sub industry of the food industry. And right now we are doing a productivity tool for franchise pizza. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Franchise pizza is very specific but it has the benefit that pizza is flat. So for computer vision it’s great. One pizza from one brand is kind of similar to another pizza from another brand, still round, still flat, still has cheese and pepperonis, most of it. So the use case in terms of tech was great. If you can fine tune it for a couple of big brands and then the tech works for all the franchisees. So that’s great too. You don’t need to be fine tuning all the time, which can happen in AI. And the idea here is that there is a network effect, is that if we are capable of scaling a little bit in that market of pizza, then it’s very easy for us to move towards other concepts like sandwich, like burgers, like coffee. And then we have the food service in general, which is just like serving food. 

Emmanuel Massenez
And then you also have food production, which is like food production facilities. And all this productivity also applies for them.

Brett
And if you’re looking at like square pizza, does it just totally break down and not work? Or can it also work for square pizza?

Emmanuel Massenez
Good one. Right now we’re focusing on circular pizza. And yeah, it’s kind of funny. Computer vision is very specific in terms of images. So currently we don’t deal with square pizzas, but it shouldn’t be that hard if we had a good customer, like doing Chicago style pizza. 

Brett
I’m guessing low adoption there in Chicago. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Chicago is a good place of pizza. You get Lidl Caesars group, you get Domino’s. So yeah, I mean, Chicago is definitely the pizza capital, I would say.

Brett
Yeah, nice. Have you seen the show Silicon Valley?

Emmanuel Massenez
Oh, yeah. 

Brett
I’m guessing you’ve gotten the question about what is it, hot dog? No? Hot dog.

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, we laugh about it sometimes when I go to social gatherings and have a beer with people and they ask me, what do I do? I think this joke always comes up and we all laugh, me included, because I do think it’s funny. And not only it’s funny itself, but it’s also so close to the truth, to what reality does, to how tech actually works, that I found it’s a great thing. Sometimes we look in the media and they tell, now it’s not that fashionable anymore. But I think, like maybe a year ago, a lot of media and press used to say, like, okay, we’re almost there with human robots and robots that can do absolutely everything, like a human. And people were talking about giving legal rights to robots and I was thinking to myself, wow, this has gone a little bit too far. 

Emmanuel Massenez
I don’t think it’s real. The AI is not there. And so now you see some reckoning that autonomous driving is not going to be ready for the next few years and probably the next decade. And then you end up unraveling the whole story and you realize that AI is powerful, but it’s not almighty.

Brett
Yeah, it’s funny reading these headlines about how AI is going to take over the world and then meanwhile, I’m like, siri, set my alarm for  A.m.. And then it starts playing Taylor Swift stuff actually working, I think, and taking over the world. If they can’t even figure out how to set an alarm. So it seems like it’s still very much early days with a lot of this technology. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Absolutely. And then a little note on the thing about a lot of people fear about job replacements and robotics. I think robotics is a very fascinating field, but I think it’s a very complicated field as well. So I think we’re still far away from robots taking over. And then I am a great believer of progress in technology in general. I think if we look at history and I think history is always a very good indicator of presence. Just to give an example, if you look at the last kind of flu pandemics that we had in the century ago, they lasted two to three years or three to four years just like this one. So you realize it’s history repeating itself. And if you look at the first industrial machines, when went from 1850 to 19 219, seven workers were afraid of those machines and they would sabotage a machine.

Emmanuel Massenez
And guess what? Well, if you adopt the machine, you have better works, you have better conditions. You focus on more creative works, on works that are less repetitive. And overall, it ended up being a blessing. Nowadays, we have a better quality of life than we used to have 150 years ago. So we need to believe that’s the thing, not fear. 

Brett
Yeah, totally agree with that. And this was a while ago. I had read some really good article and it basically went through like 200 years of history and it pulled out headlines, and they were the exact same headlines. This technology is going to take away all of these jobs and civilization is basically screwed. And as you insert any technology you want here, but that story has been told over and over and over again, and people seem to forget that there’s also a lot of job creation and just society as a whole always adapts and it always ends up being like a net positive in the end. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, absolutely. And you can see it with trends nowadays. It’s the same with how many hours is the optimum workload? Over a week. Right? And you see these papers nowadays about the four day week and working 40 hours only. And I think these discussions are amazing because I think it’s not something that has been solved. We don’t know. It’s a human question like what is the best amount of time that needs to be worked, that needs to be rested, that needs to be kind of recreational? How much sports should I do? What’s the best diet? These questions right now don’t have a specific answer. They all depend on everybody. And so I’m very happy that we can reopen this in light of new technologies that allow you to work remotely. Maybe sometimes you actually want to have a social presence and a physical presence. And I don’t know, I think it’s a great time to open these questions again and hopefully we can find a new balance because what we used to do pre pandemic wasn’t very balanced either. 

Emmanuel Massenez
People commuting 2 hours a day, three 4 hours a day. That didn’t make sense.

Brett
We’re just opening the eyes, asking these deep questions. You’re speaking like a true philosopher. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Thank you. 

Brett
And going back to the product a bit here. So you see on the website, plus 200% employee retention, 15% food cost reduction, 10% faster food production. All right, I’m hooked. That sounds interesting. How does that happen? 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, absolutely. So basically were talking about new category or just improvements. As I said very deeply, nothing is new under the sun. But I do think that we’ve been kind of the pioneers about putting tech inside the kitchen, in the restaurant. Usually technology companies focus on the front of the restaurant sort of very much focus on the POS on delivery integrations and so and marketing integrations and so on. But were wondering, okay, what’s going to be the next wave of tech? And the next wave of tech is going to be about food production itself within the restaurant, which means the kitchen. And the kitchen is a fast paced environment. It’s an environment where in franchises usually you need to follow a set of rules and you need to keep up with a brand promise, right? When somebody sees an ad on television and then you crave for this kind of food and then you pick up the phone and you call your local franchisee, well, you expect to get what you just saw on TV, right? 

Emmanuel Massenez
So there is this kind of brand promise experience that needs to be achieved. So the way we do it is that we set a camera on top of the cut table of pizza companies. So basically it’s like a final product assessment. That camera doesn’t disturb any of the operations. So the operator doesn’t have to slow down, they don’t have to push a button, they just operate. Like if we didn’t exist and we record all this, there is no privacy issue, no personal data. We just look at the pizza and as soon as we identify a pizza with a tracker, we send the images to the cloud and we start doing all our processing. And so we identify the pizza. We score that pizza with objective criteria like is it burned, is it round, is it the size it’s supposed to be? Does it have like bubbles or are the ingredients well distributed or not? 

Emmanuel Massenez
So we do all this and we score the production and then with that scoring, well, you realize that first of all, a lot of the items are below the internal threshold, right? And so you have quality issues and then you have customer satisfaction issues. So this is pretty much what we’re tackling. So we’re bringing visibility to the food industry and to the restaurant industry where you can highlight and reward top performers and you can also retrain and target train people that require more training in an industry that usually has been very much about gut feeling, right? If you’re a multi unit franchisee and you have, I don’t know, 50 or 100 stores under management, you have no clue who are your best employees. You do not know. You trust your managers, but these managers trust their store managers and some store managers trust some shift leaders. 

Emmanuel Massenez
It’s like a chain of command, but it’s all gut feeling based. It’s really hard to keep up with the production, to actually reward top talent and so on. So this is what we’re doing in terms of employee, in terms of food costs and food waste, we actually count ingredients. So the AI is automated, right? So it does it very fast, but basically we count ingredients and we compare this to the recipe. So this is very important because there is a lot of food waste, not too much in the fast food industry, but in general. And so this is something we think we can take to the food service and to food production as well. But the idea is to just make sure that it’s exactly how it’s supposed to be and that the quality is where it’s supposed to be. So you don’t throw the pizzas away or the food item away. 

Emmanuel Massenez
And yeah, overall I think it’s like a productivity tool where you can operate your company like never before. Like you have a dashboard, you can monitor this remotely from the palm of your hand. And we’ve had amazing results so far. 

Brett
And are those insights delivered then in real time? Let’s say I’m working in a pizza shop and I’m making my pizza. When it’s done, does it have a score that alerts me to say, hey, that was a nine out of ten, great work, or is that going to management? And then every week management reviews that data and then takes actions from there. What does that look like? How do they use those insights? 

Emmanuel Massenez
Well, that’s a great question because it’s a question I get all the time from different people, right? So most of the people asking me about real time are investors and most of people that don’t care too much about real time are actually food operators. So what does that mean? The thing with real time, it’s very powerful, just like you said, right? So you can really kind of rework intervene a food item and kind of make it better. The thing is that to do this, you require time, you require a team, you need to be on it. Right? And what happens in the kitchen is that it goes very fast, especially in a rush hour for a game night on a Saturday or Friday night, I don’t know. Like one kitchen in one shift can make up to 150 to 300 pizzas. So they need to be running. 

Emmanuel Massenez
They don’t have time to rework, they don’t have time to do anything because otherwise it creates a backlog, right? And the backlog is even worse than a bad pizza because everything gets lost, right? The timing is not correct anymore. The delivery person is waiting, people get angry, there is no tip. You know what I mean? So it’s like a chain of events that unravels and it’s not necessarily better. And at the same time, in terms of technology, it’s also more right. You need to have faster computing, more computing, and so it’s more expensive. So when we talk to operators, we realize that what they actually want is something that can help them manage, better managers rather than actually rework and do it real time. So right now we’re focusing on this kind of like non real time. The tech allows to go towards real time in the future. 

Emmanuel Massenez
But I think the operations need to adapt first. 

Brett
Makes sense because I guess it doesn’t really matter, right? Like one individual pizza being made doesn’t matter as much as that person’s pizza that they make over the course of a month. I’m guessing that’s the relevant score to focus on because then you can really compare that data across everyone else’s, right? So it’s almost like the individual item doesn’t make or it doesn’t really matter. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Is that accurate? Yeah, I think you’re totally right. If you look at the biggest pains of quick service restaurants and the food service industry in general, it’s employee turnover. Just to give you an example. Like that industry has between 70 and 120% employee turnover every year. So they need to rehire the whole team, retrain everybody and then pray that everybody understood and can do the job as it should be, right? Then you have a very sharp drop in customer satisfaction over the last year. Expectations of customers have increased during the pandemic. Delivery companies are not necessarily top notch depending on the food concept. Like if you are delivering a grilled steak is not the same as delivering a pizza, right? So you can have issues in terms of customer satisfaction linked to this. And then you have food inflation. Right now food inflation is 16%. 

Emmanuel Massenez
So all this is biting the industry at different places and kind of narrowing the already very small margins that they have. So our idea here, our goal with quality, is to help them manage, understand where the margins are, understand how to make their employees more loyal and happy and so they can work better. And just like we said, in terms of workload weekly, if you have a happy employee, your customers are going to be happier too. Because the employee is going to work better, right? And so he’s not going to leave. He’s going to be happier, less training, less money spent on training. And all this for a more satisfied customer. So this is pretty much what we’re addressing.

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And this wasn’t in the. Interview Doc, and it’s a big question, so I’m going to put you on the spot. What’s your favorite pizza in the entire world?

Emmanuel Massenez
I got to say, I’m a big fan of the pepperoni pizza in general. I think there is a magic between the pepperoni flavor and cheese, so I’m going to stick to that one. 

Brett
Go on. We got to go a specific pizza place, though. 

Emmanuel Massenez
We sure do. Yeah. I mean, there’s lots of good pizzas around. 

Brett
Perfect. So let’s talk about category a bit more there. So I know it’s a food production platform. When you say that, do people know what that means? Does that resonate or does it require a lot of explanation to say, okay, here’s what we mean by a food production platform? 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, people need a little bit of explanation, and I think it’s a new concept, a new category. As you said, it’s about bringing the latest technologies for the kitchen. Usually within a kitchen right now, you have something like an inventory management and maybe like a task management, where if you have to clean, you need to upload a picture of the cleaning. Right. Like these kind of task managers and inventory management is you have an iPad in your hand, you go to the warehouse and you start counting how much cheese and how much pepperoni you have left. This is pretty much the state of the technology as of today. What we’re trying to do here is to bring a more holistic approach about the production. Who works when, who works well? Where do people need training? Is that shift outperforming or underperforming? Can you actually compare performance? 

Emmanuel Massenez
Like, this is something so new. I mean, for any other industry, this is something that seems kind of, like, obvious, but for the food industry, it’s something that is very new. If you have two stores or ten stores or 50 stores, can you actually compare production? And I’m not comparing sales, I’m comparing production. Like, who is actually doing the best quality items? Who’s working well? Who’s showing up on time? Who’s somebody that consistently delivers a nice hard job? So this is something we want not only to identify, but to highlight and promote. And as we said at the beginning of this interview, sometimes there is some misbelief about the technology and that technology can be used to sanction. And I think or at least that’s truly not the way we want to put it. I think technology has to be an enhancer of work. Technology has to be here to make life more easy. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Right. So if you’re an employee, you want to kind of, like, leverage the technology so you can do a better work, so you can take a note, satisfying day, and so you can go home happier. That’s the whole goal here. So the idea in our technology is to make it accessible for all the levels of employees. So if you’re a store manager, you have access to it. Of course, if you’re a regional manager, you have access to it. If you are management, like the sea level and everything, you have access to it. So everybody knows what’s going on, who can improve. And we go from the basis also that when mistakes happen, it’s not out of bad faith. If mistakes happen, it’s because somebody’s unaware of it. And so we promote a lot of education and I think it’s all for the better.

Brett
Makes sense. Love that. Next question for you. Let’s talk a little bit just about adoption, because looking through the website as it scrolls, you have Papa Murphy’s, Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Little Caesars, Sparrow, basically everyone, right? All the big pizza brands you can think of. How were you able to land those logos with an emerging technology like this? Because I think that’s one of the big challenges a lot of founders face is how do I get enterprises to actually adopt this thing when I’m a relatively new startup with a few million in the bank? 

Emmanuel Massenez
How do you do it? 

Brett
How do you convince them to trust that your technology can deliver? 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, absolutely. So just to make sure it’s not that we’re working at the corporate level with all of those, is that our technology is fine tuned to them. So what does that mean is that we have a camera in a friendly franchisee that saw value in what we’re doing and said, you know what, it would be great if this could work for my franchise as well, for my brand. So for us, it only required setting like a pilot or like a couple of cameras in a couple of stores of each brand and then fine tuning the AI to their specific menu. So all this is public information, the menu is on the website. And then you need to find this person that is willing to play the game, that is willing to trust the technology, and that is wanting to improve what they’re currently doing. 

Emmanuel Massenez
So this is pretty much how we’ve been doing it. We’ve been knocking at people’s door and some of them are tech enthusiasts, some of them are not. So usually we move on and we’ve been working with early adopters. Pretty much got it. 

Brett
That makes sense. And I have to call out Domino’s there specifically. I think they’ve really embraced this mindset of everyone’s a technology company. They really seem to think and act and operate like a technology more and more. It seems like they’re always on the cutting edge of the stuff. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Oh, yeah, I think Domino, I mean, overall, the biggest four brands in pizza, including Domino’s, PJ, Pizza Hut, and Little Caesars, I think they all kind of understand Domino’s even more. But to a broader extent, they all understand that pizza is a good business. But pizza is also an operation based business. And operating pizza stores can be very challenging for the reasons I mentioned right so employee turnover, customer satisfaction, and food inflation. And so they know that if they want to be a more attractive franchise and grow their franchisee base and kind of like make everybody happy, they need to have the best tools in the market. And with today’s latest technologies being available, like computer vision, I think we are just starting to scratch the surface of what can be done. We have a lot of projects on top of what we’re doing. To give you an example, right now we are thinking about as soon as we reach critical mass, we would like to integrate with delivery company and provide them the exact timing of when an order is actually ready. 

Emmanuel Massenez
Right now you have a lot of bottlenecks of delivery people showing up at the restaurant and creating a bottleneck and then the poor person that is at the front of the restaurant is like, oh, your order is not ready yet. So what if we can automate this and just let the person know exactly when the order is ready so they don’t show up before. So that’s very easy because we already have the picture of the final product, right? So we know exactly. So it’s just an integration away. Another thing that we’ve been thinking about is about customer retention. Sometimes bad pizzas leave the kitchen and go to the customer. It happens. It’s something you can’t fight because of the backlog. So what do you do? Why don’t you automate like a coupon to that customer and tell them, hey, I kind of know you’re going to get not the best pizzas we ever made, but next time you’ll get a free ice cream, right? 

Emmanuel Massenez
So you can automate all this. And currently it’s not done and it’s not reality based. It’s not based on the actual quality of the product. So these are growth projects that we have. I also like the idea of a scorecard so you can provide franchisees with a dashboard where you can check order by order and kind of have an idea of which product did that customer get? How long did it take to produce it? How long did it take to deliver it and have this Holistic 360 approach. And then food service and then food operations. I think as I said at the beginning, it’s an industry that is craving for technology and not only technology generically, but also from the latest in computer vision, specifically. Amazing. 

Brett
Love it. Unfortunately, we’re up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Emmanuel Massenez
Yeah, I think our website www dot quali AI quali is Kwali and on LinkedIn as well.

Brett
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat, share your vision and really explain what you’re doing. This is awesome technology and really love what you’re building and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.

Emmanuel Massenez
Thank you, Brett. 

Brett
All right. Keep in touch.