Tipping the scales in favour of restaurants

Hi, friends 👋

Foodtech is perhaps the topic we’ve covered more than any other. We’ve previously discussed Talabat, Kitopi, and the rise of cloud kitchens, but until now, we’ve overlooked the tech powering restaurants themselves.

Thankfully, this week, we’re correcting that oversight with one of the most insightful and wide-ranging conversations we’ve had on FWDstart to date, featuring one of the region’s most exciting companies.

Supy is a Dubai-based comprehensive back-of-house platform focused on procurement, inventory management, reporting, and business intelligence. Founded in 2021 by Dani El-Zein, Ibrahim Bou Ncoula, and Yazeed Bin Busayis, Supy raised $8 million in a Seed round led by BECO Capital, with participation from Valia Ventures, COTU Ventures, Global Ventures, and AMK Investment Office in 2022.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Dani, CEO and co-founder of Supy, for a deep dive into all things restaurant tech, cost management, and market expansion.

In our interview, we cover:

• 🔙 Why the biggest cost drivers are in the back-of-house

• 🧩 Tackling GTM in a highly fragmented industry

• 💰 Pricing strategies in cost-sensitive markets

• 🌍 Lessons learned from entering different markets – and the importance of localisation

• 🤖 Why Supy doesn’t heavily promote AI

• 💳 Why Supy is steering clear of embedded finance

• 🗺️ How to assess whether a new market is worth entering

• 📈 The one metric that Dani obsesses over above all others

Actionable insights 🧠 🛠️

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here's what investors, operators, and founders should know about Supy and scaling restaurant tech.

Premium members get the full version of this article, plus a TLDR summary right here.

Okay, let’s dig into it 👇

What inspired you to start Supy? What key pain points in the hospitality industry were you aiming to solve?

Back in 2017, a few friends and I opened a restaurant—an upper casual fine dining spot. None of us had any real experience in hospitality; we were just a bunch of mid-20s kids who thought it would be cool to own a restaurant. So, we pooled our savings and jumped in.

In our first year, we did really well in terms of top-line revenue. We attracted a lot of customers, won some Time Out awards, and even managed to convince the franchisor in Canada to let us open a franchise—despite having no prior experience. I guess we were good at sales.

But at the end of that first year, when we went to distribute profits, we realised there were none. And that was a wake-up call.

The second year came and went, then the third, and we still weren’t making a profit. It became a real concern for me. At the time, I wasn’t working in the restaurant full-time—I had a full-time job in tech—so I wasn’t deeply involved in the day-to-day operations early on. But when I finally took a closer look at the business, I realised that our highest cost on the P&L was food costs, and they were rising year after year. We had initially planned for food costs to be around 25%, but they had climbed to 40%, and we had no real understanding of why.

That’s when I started digging deeper. My first instinct was to create purchasing controls, thinking that restricting orders and managing purchase approvals would help bring costs down. So, leveraging my tech background, I built a basic app with a team of freelancers. The idea was simple: my kitchen team would submit every order through the app for my approval before sending it to suppliers.

But while this helped a little, it didn’t make a significant difference. That’s when I started exploring existing systems and realised that food cost management was about much more than just purchasing. I discovered the importance of menu engineering—not every dish is worth selling, even if it’s popular. I learned that controlling food costs required a much deeper, more strategic approach.

Supy initially focused on procurement but has since expanded into multiple verticals. What drove this evolution, and how would you describe what Supy is today?

We went from building a single feature to building a full platform. Today, our software has hundreds—if not thousands—of features, and we position ourselves as a back-of-house platform.

For those unfamiliar with the distinction, front-of-house refers to all the software related to revenue generation—point-of-sale systems, CRM tools, reservation systems, and anything else that drives sales. Back-of-house, on the other hand, is everything that drives cost. Supy is a comprehensive back-of-house platform that focuses on procurement, inventory management, reporting, and business intelligence. We fully integrate with point-of-sale systems to capture sales data and with accounting and ERP systems to push cost-related data into the P&L. That’s where we sit within the restaurant tech stack.

Not every restaurant needs Supy. The value we bring is most significant for multi-branch restaurants, fine dining establishments, and operations with complex inventory management. It’s also incredibly useful for businesses dealing with volatile food costs. Excuse my banking language—but I did spend seven years at Deutsche Bank!

For restaurants with fluctuating food costs, Supy offers three core values.

1. The first benefit is streamlining operations—yes, that phrase gets thrown around, but it fits here. With our mobile app, restaurant staff record every stock movement in real time, place purchase orders with just a few clicks, and instantly scan supplier deliveries. Invoices are captured using our in-house, AI-powered OCR, while wastage tracking and mobile stock counts ensure that monthly records closely match actual inventory levels.

2. The second is financial visibility and reporting. At the end of the day, every restaurant needs to know its true food cost. Supy consolidates all recorded invoices and transactions, making it easy to push this data directly into the P&L. We provide open APIs and call ourselves a headless system, meaning every feature in Supy can integrate with other tools—particularly ERP and accounting systems, which are heavily used in this region.

3. The third major value is business intelligence. Supy provides insights that help restaurants optimise costs, adjust menu pricing and offerings, and negotiate better supplier deals. Some restaurants use Supy for all three of these benefits, while others focus on just one or two—but ultimately, our goal is to help them run smarter, more profitable operations.

The hospitality industry is highly fragmented. From a GTM perspective, how have you tackled this challenge?

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