Why we are building Kimchi: A founder's perspective on the restaurant industry

Written by a human. No AI-generated thought leadership.

Born and married into the industry, and after working 15 years in restaurant operations of different sizes, from individual locations to international chains, I keep seeing the same problem come up again. And it's one of the reasons I'm so focused on processes and business intelligence in my job today, and exactly why we're building Kimchi.

Let me give you an example.

Solved once, lost again

Imagine one restaurant regularly struggles to open on time. The manager decides to reorganise the morning preparation routine, clearly assigns responsibilities and introduces a simple paper checklist. Within a week, everything is ready before the first customer arrives. Problem solved!

Some months later, that manager quits her job, and with her, the knowledge disappears because it never really spread throughout the company.

Meanwhile, other restaurants in the same chain face exactly the same problem. Another manager is trying to figure it out too, reinventing the wheel. Multiply that by 100 restaurants. Every single day.

I've seen different versions of this throughout my career, and it still frustrates me.

We spend so much time identifying problems. But how much time do we spend making sure they stay solved? Working ON your company instead of only working IN your company.

A data problem, or an execution problem?

Over the past 15 years, I've seen our industry evolve and invest heavily in technology. Better POS systems, business intelligence, labour scheduling, inventory management, audit tools and increasingly sophisticated dashboards and don't get me wrong, we need those tools!

Today, we can see almost immediately when a restaurant is overspending on labour, when food costs are increasing or when a particular location is underperforming. We know WHAT is happening.

But what happens next is what frustrates me every time!

Someone creates a report. An operations manager schedules a meeting. The restaurant manager gets a phone call. They agree on an action plan. Maybe the problem gets fixed. Three weeks later, the exact same issue appears somewhere else, and we start all over again.

Sometimes I wonder how much money our industry loses because we keep solving problems we've already solved. I don't think our industry has a data problem. I think we have an execution problem.

Organisational amnesia

The knowledge is there, but where does it live?

In someone's head! In a WhatsApp conversation! Or in an Excel file nobody opens! Maybe in version V7-final.pdf of that process we wrote? That PDF we saved somewhere on our personal laptop drive! But what if that person leaves?!

People who know me know I'm obsessed with BPMN processes.

But what's the point of having a beautifully documented process if nobody follows it, nobody updates it and nobody checks whether it actually works?

I've met some incredibly bright people throughout my career. Restaurant managers who find practical solutions to problems that headquarters didn't even know existed. Frontline employees who come up with simple improvements that save hours of work every week.

The problem is not a lack of good people or good ideas. It's that we have no reliable way to capture what works, turn it into a better way of working and make that knowledge available to everyone. Organisational amnesia, I like to call it.

Where Kimchi started

Imagine how differently a restaurant chain could operate if every location could benefit from what its best managers have already figured out and this is exactly where our thinking about Kimchi started.

Now, as a co-founder of Kimchi, I might be a little biased and cliché for writing this article, but we're building Kimchi because I've been dealing with these frustrations for years.

We didn't want to build another dashboard telling restaurant managers that their labour costs are too high. They already know!

We wanted to connect what actually happens in restaurants with what the people working there know and what the business needs to improve.

What if we could capture those operational signals, turn them into opportunities and actually make sure something happens with them? And when an improvement works in one restaurant, why shouldn't the other 99 benefit from it?

That's what we're trying to build with Kimchi.

The other part of the challenge

Of course, building the technology is only part of the challenge. Getting people to actually use it is another story. I've seen enough technology implementations to know that buying software doesn't automatically change how people work. (I actually researched this topic for my MBA)

If this problem resonates with you, whether you're running restaurants yourself or interested in what we're building, I would love to have a conversation.

Because identifying a problem is easy.
Making sure it gets fixed, everywhere, is where the real value lies.