Taking Care of the People in a Cloud Kitchen Startup (Fred Ming of WeBox (fka. Saltalk))
Fred shared his experiences and insights from the cloud kitchen industry and his start-up journey.
About
Welcome to the 27th installment of Foothill Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every week, we publish an in-depth founder interview, ranging from early-stage entrepreneurs to successful businesses. Our conversations cover their personal journeys, the lessons that shaped them, their visions for the future, and their failures. We also learn more about their companies and about the challenges they try to solve. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future.
Saltalk is a leading food-tech platform for corporate catering. They have built a central kitchen infrastructure and software powered end-2-end solution from produce to kitchen to delivery.
Fred Ming, CEO of Saltalk, graduated from Fudan University in computer science. Before founding Saltalk, Fred was a senior engineer at Telenav; however, he always had a passion for food, and felt that great software and operational excellence can be combined to make life better for chefs and eaters.
Why we invested in Salktalk: The market for prepared foods is massive and it is going through a once-in-a-generation transformation due to delivery services and tech-enabled platforms. We like Saltalk’s fully integrated solution to connect its virtual kitchen clubs and enterprise delivery platform. It is able to achieve high efficiency and zero error rate with an all-in-one tablet management system. Saltalk can improve food variety at no extra charge by optimizing the combination of cuisines and cooking teams in cloud kitchens. This is a benefit that is hard to achieve by its competitors. We were also impressed by Fred’s engineering chops, and his passion for the food industry. We have co-invested with Zoom’s Eric Yuan and Telenav’s HP Jin.
What does Saltalk do? What is unique about it?
Saltalk is a virtual kitchen and food delivery platform. We have the chefs to satisfy customers’ demand, and we take care of everything else, which basically means the chefs can focus solely on cooking. Our unique advantage is a highly integrated set of software tools: One is called the ‘thousand face with thousand people recommendation’ system. The other one is a ranking system for our dishes.
The most important part of your job as a founder
Hiring. Although we are small, we have a full-time in-house recruiting team.
What do you look for from investor and board member
Help us interview and search for talent. Most of the time, for startup companies, we always have to make pivotal decisions for our future. So I think it would be really helpful to get suggestions from our board members regarding which path we should navigate towards.
How do you stay engaged with your investors
We have quarterly meetings where we discuss our next quarter’s plans with the investors.
Best decision you have made so far
The best decision I’ve made is to provide an ecosystem for the chefs. With that said we not only provide a space for them to cook, but also help them to generate demand. So it forms a symbiotic system where we both depend on each other to succeed.
How does Saltalk ensure quality customer service
First of all, we interview the chefs before they are onboard. Secondly, we give lots of suggestions regarding their dishes, business model, and the company in general.
How does Saltalk distinguish itself from competitors
Compared with other cloud kitchens, the main differentiator is that we focus on our chefs while they focus on the property.
To get the full version of the interview: https://youtu.be/WKT3ScOkQws
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Foothill Ventures is a $150M seed-stage technology firm. We back technical founders across software, life sciences, and frontier technologies.
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