Prognolite

For a Stable High Behind the Counter

More profit and less food waste: Simon Michel and Roman Lickel, both from Zurich Oberland, are developing a forecasting tool for restaurant owners.

The restaurant business is more dependent than almost any other industry on spontaneous decision-making. Year after year, the 30,000 restaurants in Switzerland throw away food worth around half a billion Swiss francs. There is no need for that, according to Simon Michel and Roman Lickel. They are convinced that long-term sales figures, calendar data – keyword “public holidays” – and current weather reports can be used to gain insight into the purchasing and personnel planning of a restaurant. The magic word is Big Data. In June 2016, Michel and Lickel began their programming. Since then, they have convinced SV Group, Switzerland’s largest operator of staff cafeterias to become a partner in their pilot project. “We assume that our app can cut food waste in half,” Michel, a business school graduate, states. If everything goes well, the cockpit app will be launched in autumn 2018. “We want to address large companies with several locations directly,” says the 27-year-old. For the segment of small businesses, he strives for partnerships with providers of point of sale systems.