This is one of a series of profiles of CFIN members that have successfully applied for and received funding through CFIN’s Innovation Booster program.
Montreal, QC-based Radish Cooperative develops software to help restaurants meet their technical needs and make delivery more efficient. The company offers delivery service in Montreal, as well as products such as inventory management software to help restaurants reduce food waste and save money, and an eco-optimal dispatching and routing engine that helps reduce delivery fleet emissions. The company received $98,549 in funding to establish a lightweight digital twin platform for restaurant inventory management.
We sat down with Radish’s executive director Mansib Rahman to talk about the company.
Q: What is your company’s mission?
A: Radish’s mission is to mutualize the technical needs of the restaurant industry. It is difficult for restaurants, workers, and consumers to effect change individually. A restaurant can’t afford their own data scientist, for example, and workers struggle to improve their working conditions without the collaboration of their peers. However, by pooling the resources, challenges, and innovations of the sector, the costs can be spread amongst the industry as a whole and the benefits can be reaped by everybody.
Q: Why did you apply for this funding and how will you use it?
A: The status quo for inventory management in small-and-medium restaurants is somewhere between paper and labels…and doing no tracking whatsoever. This is a major contributor to unprofitable unit costs. Ingredient prices can shift in the period of a week or two and catch an operator off-guard. Coming out of the pandemic and possibly into a recession, it’s clear that finding a way for restaurant operators to stay on top of their inventory will be paramount. The challenge with proper inventory tracking is that there are only so many hours in a day, and with a shrinking labour pool, owner-operators are finding it impossible to dedicate time to manage every single facet of their business. The current crop of SaaS-based inventory management software falls short of providing a true solution. Without detailed inputs, the systems simply don’t work. Our solution will be flexible and only require estimations, leveraging networked scales and sensors to track available stock and tie into aggregated sales data from our delivery network to give a more accurate view of inventory consumption trends and enhanced purchasing recommendations.
Q: What excites you most about working in this area of the food industry?
A: The small-and-medium restaurant is the last frontier for technology adoption in the agri-food sector. Most people who go into the field do so out of passion or out of necessity. Rarely do they possess strong technical backgrounds. From experience, having owned and operated several restaurant businesses myself, most small restaurateur owners use little to no digital technology, save for delivery tablets and a basic POS. For those who do, there are simply too many disconnected software systems in an establishment, to the point of encumbering business operations more than helping. I’m excited to be part of the generation of restaurateurs that is going to bring this shift in ideology, making operations leaner through technology, and all the while making the industry more equitable and greener in the process.
Q: Please comment on the importance of public funding to help companies clear innovation hurdles and access leveraged funds.
A: While venture capital and commercial lending are an important part of the startup funding landscape in Canada, they are not sufficient to help bridge the gap between R&D and commercialization. Other ecosystems have a significant lead on us – they are better capitalized and are also more risk tolerant. Public funding is absolutely critical for the vast wealth of Canadian R&D and intellectual property to be successfully commercialized on the world stage by Canadians instead of being expropriated by foreign acquirers.
Q: Looking ahead, what’s on the horizon for your company?
A: The sky’s the limit. The beauty of a cooperative is that our primary mission is to serve the needs of our members, rather than purely seeking profit. There are many other areas of the restaurant business that can benefit from technical innovations. Whatever they are, we’ll collaborate with the industry to deliver new software and services to the best interest of our members. We’ve also had several discussions with communities across the country that are interested in expanding the cooperative to their region. No decisions have been confirmed, but we’re carefully evaluating each opportunity.
Q: What are your passions or hobbies outside of work?
A: Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone having grown up in a restaurant, cooking and baking are big ones. I also enjoy running, especially during the winter (with the Yaktrax on ice, feels grippier than pavement even!).
Q: If you had to pick one person to make you a meal, who would you choose?
- A) Guy Fieri
- B) Martha Stewart
- C) Gordon Ramsey
- D) Dana McCauley
- E) Your Mom
- F) Other (if it’s other, tell us who it is!)
A: I would have liked to have chosen my mom, but she’s already done enough for me (I should probably make her something). Instead I’ll go with Jacques Pépin. Very few people have done so much to make cooking so accessible for everybody and done so with so much humility and elegance. It would truly be an honour to enjoy even the simplest meal from someone who has practically been a mentor. It doesn’t hurt that he was good enough to be Charles de Gaulle’s personal chef (and turn down JFK!).
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