Executive Summary

Restaurants and food operators — from single-unit independents to multi-unit chains — face persistent shrink and spoilage driven by unpredictable demand, manual counting, and staff turnover; with roughly 20 million restaurants globally and industry estimates commonly citing food waste in the low single-digit to low double-digit percentage range of purchases, this is both a margin and compliance problem for operators. The product would be a cloud-native B2B SaaS service that ingests point-of-sale and supplier data, combines lightweight IoT counts or mobile-assisted scans for real-time stock, and applies machine learning forecasting to auto-generate purchase orders and waste alerts; it would be sold as a subscription with optional hardware and supplier-integration fees. The market feels timely: cloud POS penetration makes integrations feasible, labor shortages increase appetite for automation, and ESG/cost pressures raise willingness to pay — together these underpin an $18.0B addressable market (20M restaurants × $900 average annual spend) with the supplied market score of 92/100 and revenue-potential score of 88/100. To win you must deliver materially better forecasting and a low-friction installation experience, secure supplier and POS partnerships, and prove ROI (a realistic pilot target might be a 5–15% reduction in waste); the main challenges are integration complexity, hardware logistics, and competing offerings in a medium-competitive landscape, so an initial focus on multi-unit operators willing to pilot and co-market is the most pragmatic path forward.

Market Opportunity

Cut food waste with real-time inventory, forecasting & automated ordering targets a $18.0B = 20M restaurants globally x $900 avg annual software/hardware spend total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 12% CAGR in restaurant tech and cloud POS adoption.

Key trends driving demand: Cloud POS adoption -- more restaurants are replacing legacy on-prem systems, enabling integrations for inventory and AI forecasting.; Labor shortages -- operators seek automation to reduce manual counts and reordering work, increasing demand for inventory tools.; ESG & cost pressure -- food-waste reduction is both a cost and compliance/branding driver, raising willingness to pay for tooling.; API-first payments and suppliers -- digital supplier catalogs and e-invoicing make automated ordering feasible across chains and independents..

Key competitors include Toast, Square (Square for Restaurants), Lightspeed (including Upserve integrations), MarketMan, Spreadsheets & manual processes (adjacent workaround).

Sign in to access

Cut food waste with real-time inventory, forecasting & automated ordering

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

More in B2B Software

Small-business grant discovery — centralized database + automated alerts

Streamline dealership ops — centralize inventory, leads, docs & payments

Early-traction trap: convert one-off signups into repeat video-contract users

Manual quoting & installs — AI visual quoting + field workflow automation

Outdated workflows: autonomous AI agents orchestrating ops & data (pain → AI OS)

Map processes first — prevent automating broken manual workflows