How Restoke AI is helping restaurants survive margin chaos

You're listening to the Unicorns podcast. This is a business interview series where host Justin Kelly brings you insights and inspiration from some of our most innovative leaders. Discover strategies, stories and solutions from the front lines of business. Welcome to another episode of the Unicorns podcast. I'm your host Justin Kelly. Imagine running a restaurant in the United States right now. Sheriff's Change overnight. Ingredient prices swing so wildly you can't plan a menu. Let alone protect your margins. Beef, coffee, fresh produce, even basic kitchen supplies. Costs are climbing and some items are vanishing altogether. For operators already surviving on 3% to 5% profit margins, it's chaos. And right in the middle of the mayhem, an Australian startup emerges. And becomes a lifeline. Melbourne-based Ristoke AI launched in the US earlier this year just as tariff turmoil hit the hospitality industry. The timing couldn't have been better. In only eight months, more than 400 US venues have adopted its AI-driven platform. Global revenue quadrupled, and on average, US restaurants are seeing an extra $22,000 in monthly margin. Seathing room in a market where many were on the brink. Today I'm joined by Asaf Stitsky, co-founder and CEO of Ristoke AI, a former chef who built the product with co-founder Ken Brand after living through the same pain firsthand. Asaf, welcome to the program. Hey, JK. Thank you for having me. Okay. Let's take us back to the moment that you launched in the United States. Tariffs were rolling in, costs going up. What were the American operators telling you? Well, they were freaking out. They didn't know what was coming. They didn't know how it's going to actually hit them. And I don't think they were prepared to actually go back and re-evaluate what they were actually doing and how the customers are going to react to any change. So yeah, there were very cautious about initially raising prices or negotiating with their customers. So there was kind of one thing that happened for them. Secondly, I think naturally, and I don't want to get into politics now, but there was a lot of people moving from, hey, we're going to bring imported stuff to how about we source locally. Right? So beef is sourced a lot more locally and vegetables are more in season. So more farm to table kind of operations that are happening as a result of that. We can criticize it or say it's beautiful, I don't know. But the market finds this way. So for people outside of the hospitality sector, can you explain how tough these margins of 3% to 5% really are? The fact. Right? So let me give you a situation. It's a good situation where we have a restaurant who makes $2 million. Right? 3% is about $60,000 a year of margins. That means that a simple, small, wrong move, and you are out of whack completely. Right? And if we're taking those tariffs that came, some of them were like 8% to 10%. That is, you know, let's say the industry runs on 35% food cost, that's your $60,000. Right? You're gone. Right? That's devastating. If you're talking about single location restaurants with you, don't have the buying power. You're out. Exactly. And if you are a chain, suddenly you're not as attractive. And that will, you know, subsequently will drive price increases in a fear of the market reacting to it. And I think we're seeing it already. And what were some of the more extreme examples that you heard of or could shine a light on? And extreme examples as far as pricing or-- Yeah. And restaurants really feeling the pinch. We heard of restaurants that just shut down, like they were not willing to fight the fight anymore. You know, they came into the market for passion, for hospitality, for people, for their own food. They want to present it to the world. And they just shut down one after the other. So you're a chef before you were a founder. What were some of the real world problems that made you say when it comes to re-stock? Yeah. I need to build this. As an industry, I think we're walking in the dark most of the time. There's so many hats that we have to wear. Think about it. Marketing and menu design, which is a science of its own and pricing and negotiating and HR and, you know, PNLs and everything is happening at the same time. We have very limited bandwidth. We actually want to be with our customer and we have no bloody way of getting all of that information together in order to make a single decision of moving forward in how to operate and improve our businesses, moving forward, right? So my kind of trigger was I want to see everything. I want to be able to scale my businesses. I want to open more and more locations and be successful at it. Not just surviving. And then once we had a product there without the market could really use it. And we already saw the early days of AI and how that could add the intelligence layer to it. So we're actually getting the information ahead of time and it's already refined and synthesized. We can actually take real major actions to improve ourselves. So let's break it down. What is it that Restoke AI does and how do you best describe it to your friends when they're saying, "Saf, what are you working on now?" So think about it as the brain of the operation, right? We really want you to deal with this. The second, I've got to note here, the second brain. I think about it as the brain. I'm seeing things that we're already working on into the future and think about it as the brain of the operation. While things that are going in your business, way before you know it and giving you indications of, "Hey, here's an opportunity. It's worth $20,000 or here's a pitfall. You're going to fucking lose Justin if you're not going to replace that tomato and saying, "Here's $100,000 on the table by doing one, two, and three actions. You're helping those restaurants really get, you know, dial it in and focus on what really matters to them without doing the heavy lifting. So basically, you know, if you're a chain or if you're a single location, you get the best data ever, right? So that's kind of, first layer of that. Second layer of that is, what is the world around you? How other people are pricing the pizza, right? What other ingredients are happening there like benchmarking? Am I walking the right way or am I competitive? Is somebody going to overtake me because I'm not doing the right thing? So there's plenty of layers and into the future we're looking to, you know, how to make it very, well, not very, a lot more actionable. So what is the restock sales pitch when you walk into a restaurant cold and you're meeting with whether it's the owner, the manager, even the team of chefs. How is the actual pitch and beep that we fuck shit up for us without it, right? Like that. Hey, man, we fuck you shit up. Like, do you want to be on that train that's what we actually did and I'm serious. The pitch is, hey, we know, we know you're struggling, right? On average, we bring any restaurant, at least 10% increase in their margins, right? The better restaurants in restock, even achieving 35% increase in their margins, right? Like, do you want to be on that train or you want to be left behind? It's very simple, right? And is there a, is there a FOMO factor from the restaurants where it's like, I'm not sure about this guy, you know, he's built this tech, where's he from? Yeah, the weird accent is talking about saving me potentially tens of thousands of dollars a year. That to me seems compelling. With all honesty, they've been burned with some legacy solutions out there, right? And when you come and say, that's like, hey, I've heard about these three other guys and we're not going to name names today, they promised me the world and I'm still stuck, right? The massive adventures that we have as a product in this new AI world is plug and play, right? Plug, start bringing the information automatically through integrations and within 10 minutes, you already have powerful insights about your business, right? That you have not seen before. So it's really, really easy to prove to them that you're the new thing, the new kit in the block that will fuck it up and really help them, help them achieve and, you know, as far as their effort is, it's pretty low effort. And so can you, you know, rattle off for us as if some of the things that your platform, your AI is, is picking up these otherwise hidden problems like overcharging waste, poor yield. Like, what is it that you're helping with? So I'll give you a couple of examples, right? I was sitting with one of my friends that is using restokes, so I was able to go into the details with them and we have what we called restoke business AI insights, right? The insights that he was given that day is, hey, Dean, you ordering 41 consecutive days from that same supplier, call him, you know, tell them that you're going to reduce it to three times a week because the supplier is only buying it three times a week. And negotiate the logistic price with him and reduce your prices, right? That takes, you know, one hell of a consultant to get to a conclusion like that. That's, that's a single, you know, simple way to, to save you thousands of dollars. On the other hand, you'll see insights that will tell you, hey, you're serving too much a sigh in that a side bowl, the market is serving 150 grams, you're at 220. Here is $12,000 and the perception of your value to the customer will not be hurt, right? So here's $20,000, here's $14,000 to go, and that's in one week, right? Could get really we should charge a lot more for this. And do you, do you find when you're having these meetings that there's that aha moment where they're thinking, but that's hang on, that's the way we've already done it, you're saying that if I can use these insights that I'm going to be saving all this money? Yeah, we call it oh shit, my man's rather than, yeah, what have I, what have I been doing until today? You know, you got this and you have, of course, the, the price creeps that we have and we catch up all the time, you know, like this, the oil is going to have the salt going out, the, the meat going out and suddenly that dish that you're selling quite a bit of is making you lose money, right, and it's competing for, for, for those dishes that are actually with great margins. So there's, there's a bunch, there's a bunch. Is there a way to try to quantify the average financial uplift that you're seeing in US, then use right now that are using Risto? On average, statistics, statistics only within six to eight months, you can get up to, you can get to a point where you have an uplift of $22,000 a month in your margins. That's incredible, right, when I saw those stats for the first time, I was like, can you run it again? I actually want to see what, what happened. So we have two main groups, the ones that had had sheet margins to begin with, right, and made a massive improvement. And the ones that had, you know, 25% food cost and managed to bring it to 90 and a half percent food cost. It's pure bottom line, same amount of effort, same amount of people coming through the door, but suddenly you go away with, with a substantial amount of money in your pocket, and you're able to go and say, hey, here's another location, you know, in Western Sydney, I wasn't there before, but I can start expanding. And with Risto, you have a backbone and a template of what the business actually looks like. So it's a duplicating off you go. You know, so if you think about it from a single location, really, really impactful. If you think about it from a group perspective, right, we can identify what a single venue that's doing really well is actually doing, right? What does that template look like? And what, how do they get to those places and then copy paste across to the network and you have a network that's growing, not just a single location? What are the elements of a hospitality business? And let's use an example, say, of a busy restaurant that Risto touches. Is it all of it, including labor? Because I can imagine that's obviously a very tricky thing to try to figure out as well. You've got shift workers, working different times of the day. How to best utilize staff, changing over tables, quickly split sessions in at 5.30 out by 7.30. To some extent, we do delegate the entire day of those employees of what to do, when to do, how much you need to do, how much you do you produce on a Monday versus a Saturday where it's really, really busy. We don't touch the rostring. It starts with that. There are some guns out there, especially Aussie companies doing an incredible job. But as far as, you know, the overview and the insights that we would give a restaurant definitely, it's a big part of it. And it comes as a genuine surprise to the proprietor, once your system is plugged in, that how smooth it's working and the actual intelligence that they are garnering from precisely. So how has the U.S. rollout progressed for Risto? I know you've, you've headed over this year, moved your family over there, new market for you, new lifestyle, new everything, what, what, what, what, what, living in Austin? What has the experience been like, SF? It's been, it's been, you know, it started slowly. I really wanted to understand the market and what the market understands of the problem. I think that we didn't want to come to the market with our egos, right? And I was really, really surprised to discover that the Australian market is super, super advanced, you know, as far as what do they expect to get out of technology and how quickly they are to adjust and adopt technology and the U.S. was a lot more cautious and a lot more implemented. Yes, and we still see like, you know, restaurant with no POS system, it's like, how do you go about your day, man? Like, I don't understand about, you know, slowly, slowly we discover them, but that is also the opportunity in the U.S. there's a massive gap in what's already in the market is pretty much legacy that nobody has the resources and funds to actually put somebody in the office and do the work. So yeah, we grew like four times within less than eight months in the U.S. it was pretty quick. I'm, what do you put that down to, apart from, hey, I work hard and we've got some cool tech, like, give us some of the secret sauce. I think people really want to see value really quickly today with low effort, right, right? And we are able to prove it within five to ten minutes, you know, you come to restoke, you put in your, your, your stuff in and you start seeing magic of your own restaurants and you can start guiding the sheep to, you know, in the right direction tomorrow morning. From there, it's a word of mouth, you know, that does the majority of the work for us. And we started to see, like, beautiful clusters around the main cities, you know, New York City and Miami and Austin, surprisingly, as well as California and that just keeps on growing. And have you found that you've developed your own local champions within the American hospitality network that is certainly do, that have then tell, tell us about that. Yeah, there's some, there's some early adopters that work constantly looking for those new things. As you, as you would expect somewhere like suspicious initially, but once we managed to prove to them the power of the, of the system across the networks, it was really, really easy. And then we started getting, getting those referrals. We want a massive contract with cheap city cookies, like 60 locations, rolled them out within a month. From that, we got, you know, a few more contracts with, with bigger chains. So yeah, it was pretty, that's got to be, that's got to be exciting when you start seeing those new sales, your new to the country. Yeah. You've made a big investment both, you know, personally, professionally to see, you know, the sales register taking our, our, and, and your clients coming on board. Yeah. You know what was exciting specifically? Tell me. Went to, to New York City, Manhattan for a couple of meetings with new customers, and I'm walking the streets of Manhattan and it's like, Hey, I know this name. It's a customer, right? In the most, in the, in the busiest place for, for the hospitality in the world, you start seeing familiar names because they are customers and, and you know of them and for me, it's, it's really, really exciting. You touched on it earlier about the sophistication of Australia and Australian tech. What is, what is the overall reputation as far as you can tell in your, in your sphere of influence, the reputation of Australian tech in across the United States? So we see, specifically in Austin, we see lots of Australian tech companies that are making the move into town. I think we have this great opportunity in Australia where the market is somewhat similar to the American market and we have a great financial system and an ecosystem, but it's like a nice greenhouse to grow great businesses and it's a great discipline. You know, even McDonald's are making trials over here and other big companies are coming to Australia to make trials over here to see how it's going to go for them. And then for the tech companies, I think the natural progression is, Hey, the market here is pretty nice, but it's relatively small. The next natural progression is into the US and once we're there, I think, I think the Americans are very appreciative of those beautiful tech companies that we bring over. I haven't seen any, you know, resistance or you know, say, Hey, we don't deal with those ozes. Bray is no issue like they love us. You mentioned a few key American cities before, can you shine a light on the size and scale of the operation, both within the United States, where you've grown to and but also elsewhere globally? So we run pretty efficiently. Yes. I don't want to name the number of the low number of employees that we have that we have in Austin, but you know, we're in a in any world, everything is around AI and everything is around efficiency. So we have massive coverage around around the entire country, including Canada. We're starting to get kind of central America right now and pushes towards towards the UK and Southeast Asia. And we're doing all of that with a tiny team because we have, we are living in the greatest moment of the world has ever seen. You know, we can reach far with with not a lot of resources. So if I'm a new customer, we have a meeting and I say, okay, let's, let's trial it out. What is that onboarding process and the subsequent workflow for me as a, as a restaurant owner? How, how does that work? How do you do that? Yes. All right. So we developed pretty smart algorithms behind the scenes to bring all of your existing information, right? You have a POS system to your cells on top of that. You have your accounting systems, you have your HR systems and a bunch of other medical tools that we build at the back end to make sense out of that. So you basically go, hey, if I'm a light speed or a square or a toast, a user, I'm logging in with my credentials and everything flows in and we can start making sense out of that data. So essentially within 10, 15 minutes, we have the majority of the information within able to start profiling the restaurant, understand the greatest, the greatest, the, the word just escaped me, like the, the great context of, of the restaurant, right, and start giving you the insight. So we're talking about minutes in, in majority of cases because normally those things take all, we've got to go through a, you know, a quarter or a, you know, a side provided information. I'll give you a CSV. I don't have my things. I don't have this. You don't have that. No. We understand it. Give me five minutes and yeah, because it's, it's a very busy industry. We want to be where our customer is. Nobody wants to, if I can see their asses in the, in the back office and call it data. No, it will take you, it will take you months. And then we solve problems that, whenever seen before, like we understand the, your internal ecosystem of food and beverage, without having recipes at all, right? Like that's next level of insights from, from an AI perspective. Like can we correlate or can we understand what a burger is and what it does it actually mean for your, for your operation, right, as a, as a whole? So not a lot of effort, pretty, you know, great time to, to the first value, a customer, a customer would see. And I think, you know, we're being loved most of the time. And can your tech, I imagine there are specific examples of software. Your platform has led to a material change in a menu. And also, also the way a chef, you know, looks at food service based on the market intelligence that they're pulling from a, absolutely, absolutely. I'll give you an example from larger groups that we work with. They tend to stick to certain suppliers and certain items that they're, you know, confident with. One of our systems would, would say, hey, you know, you want to be creative. You want to remain creative and agile within, within your group. How about we let the chefs create new specials, right? So you go in and say, hey, I want to create a classic burger, right? From the greater context of the, the actual restaurant and the actual chain, we will start building that recipe with you very, very quickly, right? How does it actually have and what is available for you to have in that recipe and how much would you charge for it tomorrow morning to remain profitable and within the range that you actually want to be? So we get them too, too, you know, an impact within, within seconds, rather than a few days of approvals and reviews and tastings and all of that is done really, really quickly. And, you know, you can do it. I don't know how great of a chef you are. But you can probably say, I want a classic burger, right? To, to a recipe. Is it hard to take those in a venue on, on the journey of discovery if you, if you, let's use the burger example, but we've always done it this way. This is how we cook it. These are the ingredients. Yeah. But if you were to say, well, if you thought about it differently, we can actually make it, it better, I don't, I don't, I don't think we want them to think about their own creation differently. Okay. I think we want to enable their creations, right? And say, hey, this is the burger, a hundred percent. This is your playground. We respect that. But you should make a send amount of prep, but you should source it from a certain point. But you should price it correctly so you can, you can make margins or something happened without burger over time. And it's no longer turning profits, right? It's like, what, what are you going to do about it right now? You know, your, your creation in your restaurant is your IP. It's, it's the magic. Nobody can replace it. If you and I will make burger from, from the same ingredients, fucking love burgers I used to have. I like a show. Yeah. It's probably going to taste very, very different, right? So when you first came, you and your co-founder Ken, when you first came up with the concept of Restoke to where we are now, coming into 2026, the New Year's upon us, how has the platform evolved and improved? Funny you say that. We just looked at early decks of the company, just like yesterday. And the trip down memory lane, man, it was amazing to see that the vision was pretty much there from day one, we're talking years before LLM's joined our life and before it was, it was a buzz word. But in order to get to where we got today, we saw there's a very operational platform. We had to build all the different parts that make up Restoke today. Then we moved to the next layer of of intelligence, right? And what that means and guidance and smarts, right? And today we're already working on the next generation of what that looks like. It's a bit futuristic and I should probably not speak too much about those stages. Yeah. So today we're at a restaurant intelligence stage, right? Really really impactful. Plenty that you can do with it. We see it across the globe. The next stage would probably replace a lot of functions and a lot of friction in the ecosystem as a whole, not just your burger or your pricing. We're talking much bigger impact than that. I think it's fair to say that the hospitality sector has taken more than its fair share of punches. Oh, yes. More so than any other industry in recent times, do you still think that is the case or do you think perhaps the industry is at a crossroads, a turning point? I think we're still bogged down in a lot of trouble. I think the global economy is still making it hard to predict what tomorrow is going to bring. I think there's still a lot of legacy thinking within the industry and legacy systems within the industry. And some sections or segments of the market don't necessarily want to turn the corner properly. So I think we're still seeing a bit of hardship ahead of us, but I'm also seeing emerging groups that coming from a business perspective that are killing it, like they're smart about it. They know that they need to look at the numbers. They know that they need to implement systems within their businesses and their growth is amazing, right? So it's early days, majority of the industry is still not out of the woods. Can your platform be bolted on to a legacy system and then be incrementally sort of rolled out over time and slowly replace legacy systems or it doesn't quite work like that? It's a complicated question and answer like depends on the system, right? And sometimes the legacy is just the procedure of how we work and how we stick to our guns and not wanting to move. And sometimes we use this text system in the U.S. you have accounting systems that are on a floppy disk, right? And there's an old guy that doesn't want to change, he's afraid for his job and doesn't want to change. You've got a problem there, but it's temporary. I don't think that we're looking at more than three to five years until these guys would probably change or be out and the newcomers will kill it because they're really good. So what in your view does a fully intelligent, restaurant operation look like in 2026? In 2026, you need to adopt to older technologies around you, and I know it's crazy, right? But you want to predictability and when you talk about bookings, right? Of course. Yes. You want to enable your team to do better ordering, table ordering, like, can we upgrade? Can we, what's the word, sell more wine to this table because we have the intelligence. We know that it's possible there, running the back of house, running your books, all of these systems, if you run them correctly, now shifting you from the engine room of, you know, softening shit, excuse my French, to the captain seat where you are the decision maker stirring the sheep into profitability, right? But if you're not doing that, you basically work for the business and you're bogged down and you can't move forward, you know, especially in Australia, labor costs are skyrocketing. It's impossible to hire more people than you actually need in order to excuse yourself from the operation. So I don't think it's a smart move to avoid it. Random question, and this focuses on the United States, we've seen it here, cafes, restaurant chains, not fancy restaurants, QR codes on the table, you can even fucking hate them. Hubs and clubs are doing that, certainly doing that here. What's the experience like in the United States? It's a mix of experience, I think, you know, if we look at it as a whole, there's the restaurant and there is hospitality, right? If you want to win, you need to do hospitality. I want to see a smile, I want to be welcomed, I want to have experiences, I want to invite my friends. And if you're providing that environment for me, you're winning, right? I'm happy and I think generally people are happy to pay $2 more, $5 more per dish to have that experience. But if you're not going towards that and you're detaching yourself from the customer, I think the customer is not loyal to you, right? And now you're fighting a different fight and you're going to have to fight harder on social media and you're going to have to, you know, pull more rabbits out of your hat to make an impact and continuously be profitable. So I think it's a bit of a mix, I think the better operators understand that hospitality is still hospitality, I call it the church of our days, where we actually connect with our community, it is the actual. So yeah, final question to you, let's look ahead. What is your vision for Restoke, say over the next four to five years? I really want Restoke to be the center of action when it comes to your restaurant. I want it to be where you make decisions and where you implement your decisions across networks or across single sites, right? We want to be in a place where you wouldn't think about opening a restaurant without having that operation system that will guide you towards a good operation, a winning operation. If you want to have that, it's like, you know, not having a cash register, oh, some people still don't have, but, you know, especially in America. But it's crazy, it's crazy to me, you know, and the return on the dollar because it's so scalable is just crazy, you know, it's like, you put a dollar, you get 40 on the other end of it. So it's a no brainer. Saf, we wish you well in the years ahead. Thank you for joining us today on the unicorns, always great to catch up with you and we'll track your progress of Restoke with these great interests. Thank you. Thank you.