The owners of Tossgreen restaurant in Downtown Jacksonville are using two artificial intelligence apps to help run their business more efficiently and create a cost-effective way to deliver food to office settings.
Satyen and Manali Patel are husband-and-wife co-founders of the fast-casual restaurant, which focuses on salads and other healthy food, at 76 S. Laura St. in the VyStar Credit Union building.
Satyen is a software engineer and architect, and his wife, Manali, is a restaurateur who had owned Subway franchises but now operates Tossgreen.
She wanted a better way to track inventory, schedule staff, assign daily duties and ensure the tasks had been completed, all in one app.
Using artificial intelligence, Satyen began creating an app he named Flipnumbers in 2017.
Since then, Flipnumbers has been used to create more than 3,000 employee schedules at Tossgreen and other restaurants, he said.
The app assigns shifts based on employees’ availability, which staff members input themselves. It also keeps track of inventory and sends reminders to order products that may take a few days to arrive.
Restaurateurs can enter specific tasks for which the app assigns staff and monitors progress.
When the task is complete, employees register it as such in the app.
Flipnumbers is especially useful for operators who have more than one location and may have staff working different days at different places, he said.
Many restaurant employees are college students or are working more than one job, which can create some scheduling conflicts.
Satyen Patel said he started Flipnumbers with the scheduling component, then added task management and more.
“I thought it would be helpful to give her something which will work for her, like for the business she is in primarily,” he said, referring to his wife. “We had issues with the operational efficiency, labor management and related issues.”
The software also offers cost savings by properly staffing the restaurants, Manali Patel said. Some shifts require more employees than others, and a manager or assistant manager may be needed for opening and closing shifts.
Tossgreen also uses Flipcater, an AI-powered delivery app Satyen developed. It was released in September.
It is designed to eliminate costs of delivery services like Uber Eats and Grubhub, which charge fees to customers and restaurateurs alike.
Each order through the app requires at least 10 customers per delivery location.
Restaurants deliver the orders themselves, cutting out the delivery services and thereby saving customers from delivery fees.
By encouraging group orders, the app also makes it more efficient and cost-effective for restaurants to make deliveries.
Flipcater is not designed for special occasions or meetings, but rather for everyday use.
An example would be office workers ordering lunch on hot, rainy or especially busy days when leaving the workplace would be uncomfortable or inconvenient.
The Patels are taking meetings with restaurants seeking to purchase licenses for the apps.