How do you even gauge what’s appropriate when partying is part of the culture of your business?

published by Thor Wood – Founder/CEO

I recently dove into an excellent article from Bon Appétit that highlights 5 acclaimed chefs that chose sobriety and purposefully continue on that path. Shining light on a chaotic lifestyle, that is unavoidable in many respects… at some point, whilst working in the industry, you will encounter (or perhaps become shrouded by) the dark side of the food & beverage industry. Working in the F&B world is a high pressure environment. It’s a system where each respective position relies on it’s counterparts, and being short staffed is certainly a major contributor. Many factors go into the creation of the high pressure, and quite possibly the relief.

“A lot of young cooks look up to chefs in the press, and the common stigma is, ‘I need to be a badass, I need to be able to drink and hold my liquor and then work through the hangover.”

“This industry can tear you down if you let it,”

Kudos to Andrew Zimmern, Sean Brock, Gregory Gourdet, Michael Solomonov, and Gabriel Rucker. I highly recommend reading the full article.

“I want [sobriety] to be something people are proud of rather than shameful of. The simple fact that you have made the decision to take better care of yourself? That should be the proudest moment of your day.”

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the highest rates of illicit drug use are found in the accommodations and food services industry, and workers in that industry have the highest rates of substance use disorder: 16.9 percent compared to 9.5 percent on average across other industries. The highest rates of heavy alcohol use are in the mining and construction industries, with accommodations and food services coming in third.

SnapShyft: Giving 14.7M+ People Better Opportunities to Make Money

by Jeremy Miller

11 Month Old SnapShyft Already Has 6,200 workers & 150 venues.

I like restaurants. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy chowing down on some good sustenance blended with a happy, ready to serve you staff providing a positive experience. There’s few things I NEED in life and that’s good food, good people to eat the food with, and good memories to share. Restaurants are a perfect place for that…well sometimes.

The reality is sometimes you don’t find that blissful experience at a restaurant. It’s not the restaurants’ fault, necessarily, but it’s easy for us (consumers) to judge the restaurant every time. In fact 97% of US consumers rank the “perceived customer experience” as THE deciding factor on whether or not they patronize a venue. If it’s not the restaurant’s fault then who’s fault is it? Instead of pointing fingers we must look at the facts.

Turnover for the industry is well above 70% and 36% of operators state hiring and staff retention is the biggest problem they face DAILY.

This is the way the industry is (for now). Technology has left large pockets of the hospitality industry unserved. Before my first job as a cook, when I would go to restaurants with my friends or family and we experienced bad customer experience we simply just accepted it because it happens so often.

I didn’t start to notice how bad staff retention and the customer experience was until I worked as a cook at a restaurant for my first job. I knew then, that someone needed to do something about this serious problem. It wasn’t until I started working for SnapShyft when I realized people are working day and night to build the technology needed to fix this major issue in the food and beverage industry. Now, restaurants are able to keep their venues fully staffed to provide a great customer experience.

Our Shyfters are some of the coolest people.

Thor Wood and Stephanie Corliss launched SnapShyft in October of 2017. SnapShyft is an app for food and beverage operations to instantly post uncovered shifts, allowing those operations to connect with experienced hospitality workers. Based on a workers industry experience, they can claim open shifts on the calendar and on-demand. There are shifts for all front of house and back of house positions.

The Market is Huge and is Pleading For Disruption

The restaurant industry is a mammoth. Annually, the industry does over $799B in sales across 1M+ locations. The industry employs 14.7M professionals in the US alone and will add another 1.6M jobs by 2027. Not only is the industry large but the problem is large too.

Each year $146B is spent or lost due to managing turnover and being understaffed.

Yep. That is “billion” with a “B”. The average venue loses $146k/year due to turnover and being understaffed. On SnapShyfts’ website there is a calculator that can calculate the EXACT costs associated with being understaffed. A venue manager or owner can input a few data points like number of employees they have, average turnover as a percentage, and how many times a week they’re short-staffed. After inputting that data a full breakdown of all the costs will be shown. It’s pretty crazy. I encourage you to play around with it.

The hospitality professionals are having struggles as well. It has become difficult to pay bills with the current wages in the industry. As a result, workers are supplementing their income by working other jobs or leveraging the existing gig economy opportunities like Uber, Lyft, and SnapShyft.

We really care about our users. We are consistently watching our analytics and executing iterations so that we can continue to improve the experience for our them.

“The seven-member SnapShyft team is keenly aware of its usage analytics and quickly iterates to meet preferences and solve for cultural or even gender disparities that have shown up in the data. For example, early-on they discovered that about 80 percent of their users were male and surveys revealed that women were less likely to use the app due to perceived safety concerns. Through targeted videos, social media and other communications and testimonials, SnapShyft was able to build confidence in their venue vetting and ratings system and today female users (54%) have surpassed male users.”
— TechPoint on SnapShyft

Ultimately, Thor and Stephanie’s goals are to make this industry better. They want to empower the workers. They want to make the venue’s lives less stressful. Combined, they have decades of experience in the food and beverage industry. They personally understand and relate to the problems both from a worker’s perspective and from a venue’s perspective. And I am both proud and enthusiastic to have the privilege to be SnapShyft’s Director of Marketing.

Category: Blog