In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Trevor Shimizu, co-founder and chief revenue officer of Brizo FoodMetrics. It is a data and analytics provider for the foodservice industry, analyzing 1.3 million eating and drinking establishments in Canada and the United States.

Shimizu played professional ball for a few years before getting into technology. Frischling repeats one of his favorite podcast topics and says, “That operators did not get into the restaurant industry to become data analysts and funny enough Brizo didn't start off in the data industry to be restaurant data miners. So you know we're all kind of in this together now.” He adds that the first two pilots were actually foodservice businesses that led Shimizu to become Brizo FoodMetrics specializing in food metrics and the foodservice space.

“We were taking some time, it took about a year to be quite honest with you. Doing a lot of research to understand where we might be able to bring our expertise, we just happened to come across two foodservice companies, technology companies within Québec City that asked us to do some projects with them on a pilot.” Shimizu shares about how Brizo started. He adds, “You know our expertise would be huge and so that's where the collection of the online data, organizing it and then presenting it through our all in one dashboard became extremely helpful and that's why we decided to put our focus right into the food service industry.”

Shimizu talks about capturing visibility and reputation scoring. He explains, “the more sources that we find you online the higher your visibility score is going to be and we're also comparing you to your peers within that particular area. As an example, if you've only got a Facebook page at this time in the industry then you know you're going to get an extremely low score because most people are on five to six 6 sources whereas if you're on Facebook, you're on Instagram, you've got a profile on DoorDash and Uber Eats and your website and all these other places obviously your visibility scoring is going to be higher.” Reputation scoring is where they capture ratings and reviews from different sources and analyze a restaurant compared to their peers to see if your reputation is higher or lower than businesses in your area.

To hear why technology companies are embarrassing Brizo, Tuesday Trivia, true or false answers and more about the NextBite partnership check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout.