The names behind the event are awfully impressive: Jose Andres, Daniel Boulud, Wylie Dufresne, Marcus Samuelsson and even the legendary Jean-Georges Vongerichten, just to name a few. These celebrity chefs are household names. They’re also part of a major movement in the advancement of restaurants, known as StarChefs.

Each year StarChefs holds its annual International Chefs Congress in New York City. Now in its 12th year, the event is bigger and better than ever before, featuring more than 1,500 of the world’s best chefs and restauranteurs who packed into the Brooklyn Expo Center at the end of October to demonstrate their latest creations and techniques and learn more about the most advanced new products on the market. We are proud to say that MarketMan was one of the only technology vendors asked to participate in this year’s event!

This year’s theme, Cook Your Culture, aimed to help those in the industry identify their brand and vision and culminate a positive reputation by learning new techniques through hands-on classes, friendly competitions and tastings. While front of house operations were a focus for many of the main stage demonstrations, back-of-house advancements were a hot topic on the vendor and supplier floor.

As one of the only tech brands among the more than 150 exhibitors on the vendor floor, we already had people talking. But, once we launched an interactive demo of our new Restaurant Invoice Scanning App, the lines outside the MarketMan booth quickly grew! We hosted an interactive competition where attendees raced against the clock, scanning as many inventory items as they could. In the process, we got to introduce chefs and restaurant owners and operators from around the world to back-of-house technology that is revolutionizing the industry.

Through the simple process of snapping smartphone photos of various products and compiling mock invoices, MarketMan was able to demonstrate just how quickly our advanced ordering and replenishment process works at some of the world’s most influential restaurants. This innovative approach can help restaurants and chains, big and small, to streamline their operations, reducing food waste and fraud, ultimately, saving money. By providing a simple, step-by-step tutorial and scanning mock invoices into the MarketMan app, we showed the StarChefs crowd just how easy it is to bring back-of-house into the 21stCentury.  

Guests quickly saw how impactful MarketMan can be to a restaurant’s bottom line. Restaurants save, on average, 2-5% on their food costs within the first year of use. Even more impressive is the amount of time the platform saves on orders. On average, restaurants we work with report cutting the time they spend on inventory management with vendors and supplier by more than half.

In this case, time truly is money.

Being asked to partner with events like StarChefs continues to validate MarketMan’s standing as a platform poised to shift the industry’s thinking about back-of-house inventory management. With more than 2,000 customers now utilizing our platform worldwide, and a new global headquarters in New York City, MarketMan is focused on establishing even more impactful partnerships that showcase the true power that technology can play in the restaurants of the future.

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