Red Book Connect Is Pairing Mobile Apps With the Restaurant Industry And Feasting On A Market Niche

It seems like shock-value cooking shows are all the rage these days but what one group found truly appalling was the lack of technology in the food service industry. Take a tour of your local chain or independent food service store and you’re likely to see old printers stored in flour dusted kitchens, time card electronics still on the wall next to steamy dishwashers and schedules written on scraps of paper. How can an industry with such strict food handling regulations have such lax technology?

Well the folks at Red Book Connect saw an untapped market that was wide open for a huge technological revolution.

“We wanted to take a mobile-based, cloud approach to the food service industry,” CEO Larry Abramson explained to me in a recent interview. “You’ve got this huge, worldwide market niche that is still doing things on old PC terminals and notebook binders, it’s just crazy!”

So they came up with mobile solutions to deliver efficient, effective answers addressing the restaurant industries antiquated technology and discovered their mission: serving those who serve others.

Red Book Connect CEO, Larry Abramson, was a former SVP at Oracle before spearheading the efforts at Red Book Connect. He came to join the group because he saw the potential for really making a difference in an industry that services hundred of millions of people annually across the world.

“We wanted to make it easier for the workers and the management to simplify their process,” Abramson explains. “They’ve got an industry with 150% employee turnover but they’re having to store all that legal and HR documentation in folders in back rooms, collecting dust and wasting lots of time trying to track it down when regulatory agencies come in. We knew we could provide a better way.”

The better way has come in a variety of backend software and mobile based solutions, one of which is the incredibly popular Hot Schedules, which allows employees to check schedules, swap shifts and otherwise manage the back end scheduling aspects of working in the food service industry. With one in give workers using their software and over 120,000 restaurants signed up for at least one of their service offerings, it seems like Red Book Connect is making big inroads in the market.

Coming from a background at Oracle and moving into the CEO position of a tech start-up company, I asked Larry what advice he’d have for other entrepreneurs, or would-be entrepreneurs?

“Three things,” he said, “first, have faith in your vision — you’ll need it. Second, partner with passion — people who inspire you and love what they do will keep you passionate. And finally, build products that matter.”