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One of the other benefits that we have working here at Bloomberg is a ton of food. If you've been to our food court up on the sixth floor, you know that we have as many snacks as you could possibly eat.
There is fruit tossed in there though, to be a lot of.
Fresh fruit, delicious yogurts, and food. Workplace food is becoming no longer a nice to have, But I must have to bring in the kind of workforce that you need, and our next guest is in charge of doing that.
On a B to B level.
Nihat Raman joins, a CEO of Easy cater Great to have you in here, also a fellow Westchester resident.
Talk to us about your business.
I mean, how many businesses, how many universities, how many organizations are you bringing food to every day a lunch?
Yeah? At the highest level, Matt, we help organizations feed their people at their workplaces. And workplaces can be office buildings, warehouses, distribution centers, universities, labs, even sports teams when they're on the road and food. You said it so well. Food is so central to the workday, to the workplace culture. You know, I'm often reminded what our customers often remind us. They say, food is the highest ROI investment that they
can make for their employees. It boosts morale, productivity, it helps you build culture, bring people together. And so, by the way, food at the workplace is deceptively complex. I mean, imagine if you were standing at a factory floor having to feed three hundred workers in a twenty minute lunch break. Food has to show up on time as ordered, every minute counts at or under budget. Sort of a logistically
complex operation. And our customers often remind us the cafeteria was built for a different era, and people love restaurant food, and people and businesses want to actually help the local restaurants, and so at Easy cater that's what we do. We embed directly with our customers, like those universities, like those large employers across the nation. We connect them with one hundred and twenty five thousand restaurants across the US and we build meal programs for them.
Okay, so ah, I didn't realize this.
So you're not.
You don't run the kitchens close to your clients and you're making the food yourselves. You are contracting with restaurants in the area to supply the food.
That's right.
So we're we are a technology platform. We're connecting the employers who want to bring food in for their employees with these restaurants, and we're really making it easy for them. So we're embedding with their procurement systems, We're embedding with their expensing systems. We're allowing them to bring in food in a controlled, structured way. I mean, if you think about it, food at the workplace can get pretty chaotic, right, multiple vendors, how do you expense? Who wants to eat
wat everybody has a point of view on food. So a structured way to do this is essential. That's what our customers say. You know, there's no chief food officer, right, but there's a way you want to do it. And so that's where we bring structure. That's where we bring our technology. And turns out that when you've done it for over fifteen years, you've learned how to do it really well.
It also can be a productivity tool, right because I don't know why we have so much food at Bloomberg, but it has been suggested to me that the boss didn't want everybody leaving the office for an hour every day at lunch. Better if you just go up to the link, grab your lunch, and come back to your desk, then you can get straight back to work, right, I mean cafeterias. We're really a different generation. That's not something that financial institutions in New York really have so much
of anymore. So having a business like yours that can deliver to me what five guys I can get, like pizza Hut I can get whatever, even local restaurants that are only downstairs, really solves two problems With one stone, you're helping the local economy and you're helping increase productivity at the business.
And for another thing, I would say, mad is I think people are looking for a technology asset like way to do this versus a heavy, acid intensive, you know, logistically challenging way where variety is not really there. You're not helping the local economy. So yeah, you said it, well said it better than I did.
Do you have proprietary technology that's helping you do this and give us a feel for what that tech is.
Like, proprietary data, proprietary technology that has been perfected over fifteen years now or more than fifteen years. We were founded in two thousand and seven. And you know, I think one of the things that lexis is everyone does food differently. What's most important for FedEx is different from
Johns Hopkins. And we have built a set of tools that enable these organizations to pick the things that's most important for them, whether it be technology, access, governance, guardrails, budgets and create the program around it and then switch it on. And then they trust us to really do this at scale across the nation.
So give us your origin story or the easy cater origin story. And did you.
Bootstrap this business? It's grown to an institutional size now and how do you finance?
How do you fund this business? And what's the growth look like to you?
Our co founders Stefan Mlt and Brisco Rodgers really saw this well before a lot of us, you know, a lot of us saw it, and they really started from a place of sales representatives would bring in food to prospects and clients, but they wanted to sell the product, wanted to talk about what it is you know that they were selling, not deal with food. And so that was the original use case through which this started, and it was growing spectacularly well. COVID did a number on us.
And you know, it turns out that business catering was one of those classic businesses that would should die during a COVID situation. But we survived and now we're thriving now.
But let me ask this, Fewer people are going into the office post COVID. It just it's a fact. How has that impacted your business.
In the offices? Potentially? Yes, you're right, some of the return to work mandates have really I think subsided. But in Alexis there's seven out of ten Americans. Six out of ten Americans hold positions that required them to be at their workplace. Think about the distribution center workers, think about transportation, retail, media, universities.
We're here. We're here all the time. I want a number one train in food catering right now for business is number one trend.
Individualized packaged food delivered a scale at a price point that matters.
Individualized.
Very cool.
You want a roast beef sandwich?
I take I'm so hungry.
I know you are?
You know me?
And how are going to go out for something? We're gonna go grab some food at Haiku. We're gonna go to Westchester. Yeah, we'll go to the to the east Chester Haiku. It's two packed, it's too full at all times.
And haiku is delicious if you've never had before.
Thanks so much for joining us. He had Ramen there from Easy cater