Matt Newberg [00:00:00]:

We spend twice as much on healthcare as we do food. It used to not be like that. It used to be completely flipped. And so if we can align incentives better, if we can make people healthier and happier through their choices of what they decide to put into their body, we can create better outcomes. Because the way it's trending right now in the US, in the western world, is not so pretty.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:25]:

Welcome to Wisking It All with your host, Angelo Esposito, co-founder of WISK.ai, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome to another episode of Wisking It All. We are here today with Matt Newburgh, founder of Hngry. Matt, thank you for being here today.

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Matt Newberg [00:00:52]:

Thanks for having me.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:54]:

Of course, I mean, for our listeners, maybe you can give a brief introduction about yourself, but also what is HNGRY?

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Matt Newberg [00:01:02]:

Sure. So HNGRY is a media platform I started about four years ago is dedicated to the intersection of food and tech. It's part subscription media. So I have a blog and newsletter that comes out every week for industry insiders that covers trends like ghost kitchens, virtual brands, online grocery, personalized nutrition, alternative proteins, a lot of trends that are kind of pretty much at the intersection of food and tech, where technology is really upending our relationship with food. And things I think are going to be really impactful over the next few decades because we're at a very critical point, I believe, in our food system, where a lot of things are finally getting upgraded. And I also have a weekly podcast called the Feed. It's on YouTube and all major audio podcasting platforms and just started my first annual conference. We had it last the other week, and that aims to be kind of a multidisciplinary forum for kind of anyone working across the entire food ecosystem to kind of come together and brainstorm new ideas for the future.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:09]:

Really cool. And for those listening, just so you can check out Matt, check out HNGRY the podcast. It's HNGRY.tv, so that's the place to go to check this all out. Are there any other places they can go to check it out? Just before, before we jump into it?

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Matt Newberg [00:02:26]:

The site is the best place to start, and then you can obviously find it on Instagram, YouTube, major podcasting platforms. But if you know this is the best place to get involved with the newsletter, and that's the hub for everything. So thank you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:39]:

Amazing. Cool. Want to give that a shout out so people know where to find you. So I guess the first thing that comes to mind is what inspires you to kind of merge technology with the food sector, I guess, in the form of what is now HNGRY.

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Matt Newberg [00:02:54]:

It goes back, I think, many years. I think I've always been very passionate about food. Loved dining out. When I was younger, family was involved in some restaurants, and then I obviously had a tech background. Coming out of college, I started some my own tech startups and worked at some startups as a product manager. And so over the last, I'd say five, six years or even even further back, I was kind of helping restaurants with social media. That kind of expanded to helping restaurants, thinking about ticketing and reservations. And then, you know, I was trying to figure out what my role would in food would be.

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Matt Newberg [00:03:36]:

I wasn't like, culinary trained in the culinary side. I was a tech person and started to attend more of these kind of meetups in New York when I was where I was living at the time, around various subverticles within food, whether it's agriculture, alternative proteins, or food delivery, and trying to figure out what my role would be. And kind of, I stumbled into it kind of accidentally. I was making food food porn, kind of content munchies style content, and decided, you know, that was really a really crowded space. And, you know, I was covering things like Detroit style pizza and clam bars in Brooklyn. And this was like, you know, back in 2018, and I'd heard rumblings of ghost kitchens, and I was fascinated by that concept of, like, what would this new medium look like? Who are the players that are participating in this space? So that curiosity drove me to start, well, to basically line up a bunch of interviews to do an episode on kind of food technology in the context of ghost kitchens. And we put that documentary out in 2019. I had left my job at Vimeo as a product manager, and I decided it was getting a lot of people hitting me up after that came out and decided to kind of go all in on the future of food after that, and obviously expanded to outside of food delivery, to all these other interesting areas as well.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:07]:

Wow, that's super interesting. And, you know, on the topic of ghost kitchens, that is quite an interesting topic. What does the evolution of ghost kitchens look like, at least from your point of view? So when it start, you started hearing about this. I remember I started hearing about it, too. Like, what is this cloud kitchen or ghost kitchen and then to what it's become today? How have you seen that kind of evolve?

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Matt Newberg [00:05:25]:

Yeah, it started, I think, with like, kitchen United and cloud kitchens. Actually, if you go even further back, it started, you know, I think rebel Foods is really the pioneer and they're based in India, and, you know, it's really expensive in India to open up a brick and mortar restaurant. You know, I don't care what chain you are, the dollar per square footage in that country is some of the highest rents.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:49]:

Wow.

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Matt Newberg [00:05:50]:

I don't know that they were getting a lot of qsrs to cook out of these various dark kitchens and do food delivery there. Obviously, the unit economics are different in India. And I think these companies in the US saw that and decided to kind of copy that model here in the US and see this. They saw this rising trend of delivery on the consumer side. They kept growing. It was one of the fastest growing categories in food historically. Commercial rents going up for retail locations. The narrative was the setup was there six years ago going into this, that this might be a way to satisfy that growing demand.

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Matt Newberg [00:06:37]:

Gonna ten x over the next decade was what people were saying, and do it in a more profitable way where you didn't have to open up a brick and mortar location. What we saw with the pandemic was that every restaurant became a ghost kitchen overnight, if you think about it. Cause they just shuttered their dining room, right? So ghost kitchens for. I'm pretty sure everyone listening to this is familiar, but ghost kitchens just focus on a 200 square foot kitchen or could be slightly bigger. You don't have to worry about serving guests, but as a result, you don't get the foot traffic. So if every restaurant during the pandemic is a ghost kitchen, the value proposition of a pure kitchen is kind of not as valuable, in my opinion. And then you saw rise of this idea, like Mister Beast Burger tapped into what are known as host kitchens, right? So a host kitchen is a brick and mortar restaurant that is not only just fulfilling its own brand and working on its own menu, they also have secondary menus that are listed under other brands that they can fulfill using their same ingredients to do something like a Mister beast burger or some other concept, right? So they can add a secondary or tertiary concept to add incremental sales. We saw that kind of breakdown with ordermark getting acquired in a fire sale, which ordermark and Nextbite is another company doing this.

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Matt Newberg [00:07:58]:

MrBeast trying to now sue that company that he partnered with and everything kind of unraveled because the quality control was horrific at best. And you can't really scale food like you can. Software is the lesson. So now we're back to this original model of a pure ghost kitchen amidst people still going back to the restaurants and off premise is still for some chains, for fast casual chains, it's the majority of sales, right? It's pickup and delivery. People are not consuming food on premise. So the idea of a ghost kitchen can work if you can get enough sales through those two channels. And I think where we're netting out in this is that there needs to be a strong pickup component where consumers can experience a brand and sit down there at a restaurant in some cases, but for those other occasions where they want it to go or they want it delivered, that there's going to be a profitable way for restaurant brands to do that. And I think this is going to really be prominent for larger QSRs, fast food brands, not your mom and pop.

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Matt Newberg [00:09:10]:

And I think I always said that if you're not doing at least a million dollars in delivery sales, this is not for you. And you pretty much need that amount of revenue in delivery with all the third party fees to just break even. So, happy to dive into that. But, you know, essentially, I think there was this huge boom during the pandemic and I think a lot of these companies are struggling. I think cloud kitchens is finding it tough to find enough tenants for these locations that they've really expanded to. And I think, you know, kitchen unit has had a down round, massive down round, and everyone's gotten obliterated in between, so it's not so pretty. But I think longer term, we're going to see more Domino's pizza type of brands doing delivery, but there's just, you can't count them on more than two hands.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:02]:

That makes sense. That's super interesting. And I get, I guess, you know, when I, when I think about food tech and media platforms, like, what would you kind of highlight that sets, you know, HNGRY apart from maybe other. Yeah, food tech platforms?

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Matt Newberg [00:10:19]:

Well, first off, it's just me. And because second of all, I, I try to, being here in LA, I think I have the advantage of being boots on the ground, trying the latest concepts, chasing big guys like Doordash and Amazon and what they're doing out here. So everything I do, I try to root in some form of reality, at least through my own set of eyes. And so I dumpster dive. I've gone undercover as a instacart shopper, Doordash delivery driver, Amazon gig worker, delivering packages. And what I'm trying to do is I'm just trying to get to the root of what is actually happening. What do the unit economics look like on both sides? We can understand what the consumer is paying, but how is this all coming together from the labor side. How's this all coming together on the company side? Just putting together all these unit economics to understand the potential viability and how far off we might be.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:27]:

That makes sense. And I guess, like, how do you decide? Because obviously the hospitality space is quite vast and there's no shortage of topics, but how do you decide which topics or trends to kind of COVID In general?

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Matt Newberg [00:11:42]:

Yeah, I'd say it's more of an art than a science. I think I started this whole thing because of curiosity. I think I really just try to follow my curiosity, and it really just comes down to, like, okay, I read a press release, and then something gets triggered inside my brain where it's like I want to go behind the curtain. This needs more exploration. We need to test this assumption. We need to understand, is this just an isolated press release, or is this something that could be potentially widespread at some point? Does that, can it scale? Can. Is this even real to begin with? And I think that's kind of, I tried to vet things against, like, does this need more? Should I be pulling on this thread more? Is this something that could potentially be game changer? Cause ultimately, I just find myself trying to navigate this very uncertain future of our food system, and I'm trying to understand what might become really popular with consumers over the next decade or so. And it really just kind of stems from that.

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Matt Newberg [00:12:50]:

And it's not necessarily me trying to pick winners and losers or anything. It just really comes out of me trying to go down a rabbit hole to determine whether something is gonna be big. I think putting myself in a position where it's like trying to bet on the future is next to impossible. I think all I can do, really do, is shine a light on what that potential future might be. If these assumptions lined up, that makes sense.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:19]:

And it's funny, because you touched on, like, the idea of, like, curiosity. And I think a lot of people could lean more into it because it's one thing I learned is some not always, but sometimes things that, for whatever reason, you know, sometimes you can't even explain it, but you become curious about, there's a good chance, like, there will be other people that are also curious about that. And so I do think that there's a theme there. Not always, maybe even it's a one off and someone's curious about something. But in general, there's something, and it's something that I think on the content side, I chat. I chatted with this with some other guests, too. But in terms of, you know, telling your story and doing content creation and whatnot. One of the lessons that I think I learned was, like, sometimes lean into the curiosity, even if it's not super obvious why, but there's a good chance that there's something there.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:03]:

So I just wanted to kind of shine a light on that real quick because there's people listening that might sometimes be like, ah, this is. I'm. I'm interested in this, but no one else probably is, like, no, there's a good chance someone else is. So lean into it, you know? Yeah.

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Matt Newberg [00:14:17]:

And the other thing I'll say is, like, if I don't get out of my house and get. Get moving, whether it's like, drive. Like, you know, yesterday I convinced myself to drive 45 minutes to the other side of town to go check out this convenience store for the second time just because I was like, is this gonna be something that is an interesting model? Is there something here? See, I don't really, but I ended up on another random goose chase around something completely different, tangentially, and also stumbled into a new farmers market as a result. So it's like, I never know where I'm gonna end up. All I know, it's gonna be a fun ride. And what I set out to do will never necessarily lead to what I expect, and that's kind of the joy of it and why I think I can continue to wake up and figure out where I'm gonna. Where I'm gonna go next, what I'm gonna do next, what am I gonna write about next? Even though sometimes it's like, it's. It's not easy, right? It's not easy to have so much pressure to, like, come up with a great story every week.

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Matt Newberg [00:15:19]:

And the things that you think are gonna be great stories end up being, like, totally duds, or maybe they end up closing, shutting down, or running out of capital or whatever. And the real. The real, I think, key for me is just to stay interested in the space and be willing to just accept the process and enjoy the process of, like, in the fun of uncovering something new. And so, you know, I don't know exactly where I'm going, but I know, like, this is a starting point.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:49]:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And it's that theme. Like, I was having this conversation with someone about, like, sometimes you just need to take that next step. Like, you might not know where you're going, but you take one step, and now you see different options. You didn't see when you were one step behind. So it's like. And you kind of mentioned it, right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:02]:

You're going one place, then you saw the farmers market, saw this. It's like sometimes action is required and just take that action because you don't know what you don't know. And those things kind of get unlocked and you just start moving. So I'm a big fan of that, but I think, I think to your point, that curiosity, taking that action and another big piece, at least from what I've seen and conversations that I've had, is just that consistency piece. Right? Like you're producing content. It sounds like weekly, right. The newsletter side. But even beyond that, you're producing a ton of content.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:29]:

So just being consistent in its is really a skill and something that, yeah, I think is required if you want to. If you want to be in this game, you know, period. And then I guess one thing that comes to mind is how do you know, being so involved in, obviously, the restaurant scene and the technology scene, how do you see technology? And this might be a loaded question, but how do you see technology reshaping the food industry? And maybe you can give some examples of, you know, you mentioned ghost kitchens, but things you've been seeing over the years and where you think things are.

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Matt Newberg [00:17:01]:

Heading, that's a very big question. I think just looking at restaurants, there's a lot within the four walls of, well, I think turning restaurants into direct to consumer businesses, their brands. People love these brands. Technology can really help them drive more profitability within and outside of the four walls. I think chefs are the new rock stars. And the same enthusiasm people have for other things like music and other forms of entertainment very much apply to this space. And we're only starting to begin to see models break down those walls. You know, different types of memberships to this community, so to speak, or, you know, various merchandise.

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Matt Newberg [00:17:47]:

Right. Like fashion brands that are tied to restaurants. And, you know, I just. Blackbird Labs comes to mind because I just had Ben Leventhal speak at my conference last week, and he was talking about kind of these opportunities for, you know, new customer acquisition and retention that restaurants previously didn't have access to because they've been really, that's really been owned by third party gatekeepers. If you think about it, your reservations data of who coming into your four walls has really been kind of gatekeep by some open table or another reservation company. And then the third party delivery companies and the PoS companies and all these intermediaries we've seen come in between the restaurant and the customer over the years. It used to be that you walked into a restaurant, you paid cash. That was a direct transaction.

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Matt Newberg [00:18:40]:

But I think if you think about restaurants like actual, like modern businesses, they should know exactly the lifetime value of all of their customers and the habits and preferences of all of them and be able to target specific deals for them and incentivize them to come back. And there should be the same way we have coalition loyalty programs for airlines and hotels and the entire travel industry and how fungible those points are between these different ecosystems. You know, look at like various airlines and their alliances, right? We should have that. For the long tail of restaurants, you go to Sweetgreen, you go to Chipotle, you go to Starbucks, all those points just stay in those wallets, right? There's no unified currency that you can exchange these things for different points at different places. So they're trying to build, you know, as one example to your, I could sit here for hours and we could go into everything. But for the restaurant side, imagine having that unlocked for the long tail of restaurants. There's so many things being done in the back of house ingredients costing. The amount of inflation that restaurants have experienced on the cost side of their food is insane.

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Matt Newberg [00:19:59]:

And a lot of times they just can't keep up with the menu, on the menu side to increase those prices, understand where those gaps are and what the margins are of all these different items. And so I think some form of dynamic pricing and monitoring your inventory and the cost of that inventory and bringing more transparency to the wholesale industry, that's going to be a huge lever to unlock profitability for restaurants. Moving beyond restaurants, though, like, I'm very excited about personalized nutrition, which is the confluence of pretty much everything. It's restaurant grocery wearables, healthcare, and looking and saying, we spend twice as much on healthcare as we do food. It used to not be like that. It used to be completely flipped. And so if we can align incentives better, if we can make people healthier and happier through their choices of what they've decided to put into their body, we can create better outcomes. Because the way it's trending right now in the US, in the western world, is not so pretty.

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Matt Newberg [00:21:09]:

And that's obviously really tough. You have things like Ozempic that are looking to try to be quick fixes to that. But I think this is really going to start with each and every one of us taking the right actions to behaviorally to treat our bodies better and maybe gamify that in some way because we're able to see what foods are doing to our bodies in the same way that we can understand when our cars are broken down, what's going on inside their car. We have more visibility into our cars than we do our body. So I'll stop right there, but we can go into any of it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:44]:

This was. Yeah, that was great. I mean, there's so many thoughts going through my head. I mean. I mean, right away, one quick thought, but this is just on the wearable side. I used to use, for about a year, I used the WHOOP bands, and now I feel like I know my body, so I stopped wearing it, but it was for a full year. Like, I really got to understand, like, my sleep, to a certain extent, I definitely underestimated how much even just one drink would mess up my next day. You know, you figure one beer, what's the big deal? Like, and now it's almost like I really cut drinking unless I'm going to a wedding or something.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:16]:

But, like, really, like, I barely drink now just because. Not worth it, you know? That one beer ruins my sleep, my recovery, shit. Like, and it's kind of like this domino effect. So it's fun, it's funny. And to your point, the last, I'd say, two years, I started taking my health more seriously. And just tracking, I would say. So, like, taking the right supplements. I did, you know, some blood tests and DNA stuff to see, like, where am I lacking, what kind of.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:38]:

And it's crazy how much. When you start looking. I started looking at my body almost as I look at my company, right? Like, I look at WISK and it's measuring KPI's and how sales, performance and marketing and product development, and it's, you know, support tickets. And you look at all these things, CSAT scores, churn rates. Right, whatever it is. But then your body just like, meh, you know, and so I started looking at my body kind of like that. Like, why am I tired? What can I do? Let me try this. Let me try, you know, mouth tape.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:03]:

Let me try, like, just try experiments. And I'm a note the last. Yeah, it's. It's awesome, by the way. Yeah, that's. I'm a big fan as well. I had to combine it with, like, a nose strip because, like, just the mouth tape, I was like, I was still not breathing great with. With, you know, the air coming through my nose, but with the nose strip did the trick.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:22]:

But all of a sudden, you start kind of adding all these little things and they really do compound. So for me, that was a big thing. So I'd love to, you know, just touch on that on your end, what are some things, I think this could be interesting for people listening. What are some things that you maybe did in your personal life that have had some pretty positive effects?

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Matt Newberg [00:23:38]:

Some people think you're a biohacker or some sort of weirdo for doing it, but I'm very. I very much leaned into routine, especially living in LA, which is kind of like a hotbed of health and wellness, so.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:49]:

Right.

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Matt Newberg [00:23:50]:

Um, you know, on the food side, I've done a lot of gut tests and CGM tracking. So cgMs, for those who don't know, are continuous glucose monitors. They fairly invasive at this point, but apple is working to make them non invasive. But essentially, it's a small little wire that goes into your skin. You scan your phone against it every few hours, and you log kind of what foods you're eating, and it starts to drive kind of correlations between various foods and what that does to your blood sugar, and you start to understand what foods are going to cause that. Those spikes that give you those crashes that make you feel like you need a cup of coffee in the middle of the day and that lack of energy. So I think I've become more cognizant of that. And, look, I'm a pretty gluttonous person.

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Matt Newberg [00:24:41]:

I don't like to make a lot of sacrifices when it comes to what I eat. I think I've just. I haven't really been. I've. Instead of sacrificing the foods, I've kind of changed the sequencing of things, or just changed how when I eat them. So, like, during the. If I try not to eat carbs, or at least refined carbs in the middle of the day so that I don't crash, and if I am gonna have carbs, I try to at least have some fiber first, because if you actually consume fiber, like fibrous vegetables first, it'll temper the glucose response. Other things are like, going for a walk after your meal will help temper the response.

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Matt Newberg [00:25:26]:

Exercise has a big impact on it. So CGM is just one vector, and that's obviously tied to metabolic health. It's a very core pillar.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:37]:

Right.

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Matt Newberg [00:25:37]:

If we just continue shoveling, you know, foods that are into our bodies that are going to make our blood sugar continuously spike and we become insulin resistant, meaning, like, we can't create enough insulin to shuttle this glucose to the parts of our bodies that needs it, everything starts to break down. The other thing I've done is gut tests to look at the kind of the bacteria, and this is something that I think needs a lot more research and a lot more funding behind. So our gut microbiomes are tied to everything from our skin to our mood, and pretty much like every metabolic function. And we have more foreign bacteria cells in our body than we do ancestral DNA. Just so that basically means that you can actually change. We're not doomed. Based on our DNA, we can have control over our health through what we put into our bodies and how that expresses itself as far as our gut bacteria. So I have done some of these tests where you submit a stool sample, again, very invasive and not for everybody, and it comes back and basically tells you the composition of your gut, which is interesting.

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Matt Newberg [00:26:57]:

You know, you should be eating more foods with more omega three s, and you get on the phone with a microbiologist who tells you, you know, where you can be getting more sources of various, you know, various macronutrients through. Through your diet or supplement some, you know, you can also take custom probiotics. I'm not a fan of one size fits all probiotics, like seed health. I think they're doing a lot of harm to the industry, but I think changing it through diet and through custom probiotics, potentially, there's still not enough evidence on those, you know, can help.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:31]:

Interesting.

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Matt Newberg [00:27:33]:

But, yeah, I can talk about more things I've done. Right now. I'm wearing this ultra human band. This is a sleep tracker, but it's also gonna. It's starting to work with glucose monitors and kind of being a hub and tracking everything from your heart rate variability during exercise and telling you when to stop drinking caffeine based on various adenosine windows and, you know, kind of nudging you to take specific actions throughout the day. It's not, you know, so much about food per se, but it's also. It's very behavioral.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:10]:

Interesting. And what's it called again? Because I'm a sucker for gadgets. I used to have the WHOOP. I was looking at the aura ring. That's. What's that one called?

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Matt Newberg [00:28:17]:

I'm gonna do a little ultra human. I like it more than the other ones you mentioned because it's a one time thing. You don't have to pay monthly for it, and they are going to continue making it better. And it's incredibly lightweight, so I kind of forget about it most of the time.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:33]:

That's awesome. That's super cool to hear. And it's funny if I would kind of rate my, I guess, top three things that have worked for me. I am not giving health advice. I'm just saying, look, I'm a red, average dude running tech company, just doing my thing. I tried a few things. I do many things, but the few that have had a pretty big impact. One is mouth tape.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:55]:

So big fan of that. So tape in my mouth at night, and for me, it was bad. I used to wake up with, like, my tongue was like sandpaper, basically, you know? So that was a big one for me. So that one I can't recommend enough, again, from personal experience. So try it. Maybe it won't work for you. Another one that worked a lot. It's so simple.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:14]:

But just walking every morning, and I don't know if it's more for the walking or more for the sunlight, but, like, just definitely get your morning sunlight. A 20 minutes walk. Yeah, that was. That one was, like, a big one. And that was one of the ones going back to what we said about, like, taking that first step, it's like, that morning walk unlocks so many things. It was like, after doing that for, like, 30 days, it's like, I started going to the gym again. I started. So that's one that I think will lead to what I call an upward spiral.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:39]:

Like, you know, you do that and then you start doing other good habits. So that was probably a second one. Yeah, that one was a really neat one. And the third one, that was pretty good. But it was so. It was so simple was like, I just mineralized my coffee, so I drink coffee in the morning. So just, like, I use. All right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:56]:

I don't actually. I just buy coffee that is mineralized by. By one of the biohackers, Dave Asprey, there. I think it's called danger coffee, and it's been pretty good. So those are, like, three that, like, stand out to me. There's a million and one things. Like, I. You know, I'm lucky.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:08]:

At our gym, we have an ice bath, so I do that every morning. I won't lie. That's a great way to wake up and feel good. But so that one. That one has been actually great just for mentally. I'm sure there's a bunch of physical. Like, you see so many Instagram posts about it, but that one, I'm lucky. If I didn't have it, I probably wouldn't do it every day.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:24]:

But because it's at our kind of, you know, complex gym, it's a. It's something I've been able to take advantage of. But anyways, I just want to share those for people listening. I know, but I. Yeah, it's been huge. It's been, it's been really interesting to see how it can kind of set the pace for the day and really just. Yeah. A ton of other benefits.

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Matt Newberg [00:30:44]:

But you have a sauna there too.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:46]:

Yeah. So I do that too. I do the sauna too, which has been great. Yeah. Actually question for you, because I feel like you might know this. Is it better to do sauna and then ice bath or ice bath then sauna or does it matter? I was trying to figure out, you.

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Matt Newberg [00:30:59]:

Need to ask other experts about this. I'm certainly not one. And now we're, we're going beyond my pay grade. But the ones I've done start with this. I mean, I think naturally, like heating yourself up, then getting in there, I guess you could work out and then do the ice bath and then finish there. The only papers that I've really like or studies I've seen, I've really been around sauna. It's not so much about the cold, cold ice plunge, but there's a lot of evidence around frequent use of the sauna above a certain temperature for a certain extent, amount of time per week that can really unlock, you know, incremental health spans. So in western society, we've been able to unlock a lot of great medical advances around extending our lifespan.

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Matt Newberg [00:31:55]:

But it's not increasing the, you know, healthy years. It's prolonged. We can like, we can push back our, you know, death, but we're not necessarily good at like, having better quality, a longer quality of life. And so Peter Attia, I'm reading his book on longevity. It's very dense, but he's really talking about improving health span. And a lot of other people, Doctor Mark Hyman, are really advocating for like this idea of 100 really high quality years and working backwards, seeing where you are right now to make sure that you're on track to maintain enough muscle mass so you can do the types of activities with your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, God willing, you know, those sort of things. So that when you are in those, in those, you know, older, when you're at that age where, yeah, you know, you're not just sitting down and you can't do anything, you could carry some groceries, walk upstairs, maybe hold a baby, that sort of thing. I love that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:03]:

I love that. That was a great tangent, by the way. So for people listening, I think ton of fun health, I don't want to say advice because none of us are health experts, but definitely, definitely some at least tips that have potentially worked for us individually, you know, getting back to the kind of the restaurant tech side real quick. I always joke around that, like, the coolest thing that happened on the tech side 20 years ago was, like, opentable. And that's not a knock, like, in a positive way. You know, it's like, cool. You can now reserve online. And then after reserving online, it was maybe, like, cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:32]:

Now your pos can be on a tablet, right. And after that, you know, I feel like those, you know, it was very. Hospitality was always, like, the last one to the party kind of thing for when it came to adopting technology. I feel like the last probably five years, maybe more, but really the last kind of five years, like, things have really accelerated, right? Whether it's third party ordering, pickup stuff, just kind of predictive stuff back a house, like WISK, you know, inventory management, whatever, it's been kind of accelerating. What do you. What do you think the reason is? Like, why is, why do you think the restaurants are becoming more, I think, open to technology when historically they're all, they've always been kind of like the last ones to the party.

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Matt Newberg [00:34:12]:

I think it was really the pandemic woke everyone up to this idea that your customers are, you know, everywhere, right? They're not just coming, coming into the store, they're looking for you online. When you had, you know, open table and the ability to book tables online, you have to, like, marry that with some content. Restaurants have to be able to tell their story directly to consumers. That really was unlocked by social media. Blogs like eater, kind of away from, like, the old guard of waiting for a Pete Wells review. Like, how many, how long are you going to sit on your hands and wait for Michelin to come into your restaurant and put you on their guide? And then they might crap all over your restaurant. And so really it's like putting, giving restaurants the tools to manage their reviews, their presences on Google places, their Google Maps, and, you know, all these different platforms are now in the palm of the consumer right through our mobile phones and with us every second.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:11]:

Right.

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Matt Newberg [00:35:12]:

You know, people are gonna research restaurants before they go. So brand, you know, restaurants as, you know, the most, some of the most popular brands in the world right now need to have a responsibility to own that story and control how they show up on all these platforms. Right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:31]:

Yeah, we're just talking about kind of like, the future of tech in the restaurant space or the hospitality space and how it's kind of been, like, very slow, right? Like ten years you can reserve online, and now it's led to, like, everything.

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Matt Newberg [00:35:46]:

So now that restaurants have control over how they show up in all these places, I think what was even like, a bigger wake up call was the pandemic. When you had people now, instead of, like, discovering you online and then coming into your restaurant, they couldn't come to your restaurant, so you had to, like, offer curbside pickup or delivery. And so I think that caught a lot of restaurants. You know, they had their guard down and it caught them off guard. And so now the pandemic woke them up to delivery. And then you had the subsequent inflation of labor that gives you, makes you start to think about automation, or not just replacing staff, but augmenting staff with various processes and other technologies. It's not so cut and dry. And then you start to think about other opportunities on the cost side, the stuff you're doing with inventory and just understanding how your invoices are going out and tracking the cost of all your ingredients and how you're pricing things.

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Matt Newberg [00:36:51]:

And, you know, I don't know. I think there's going to be a threshold of how much the consumer will bear, but I think the real magic is really understanding how to create that magical experience that the consumer is always used to, but deliver in a more profitable way. And I think, you know, if technology is not doing that, it doesn't deserve to be in the four walls. So I think now we're at the point where, you know, there was a lot of hype, a lot of capital, low interest rates. Now it's like, back to reality, what is actually going to move the needle here? And that's. That's kind of why I'm so, I'm excited about the space, is just try to find what is going to be, what should people be paying attention to when it comes to, you know, the myriad of things that they could be implementing, what are going to be the most impactful things?

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:41]:

Yeah, that makes sense. And what we've seen is, or what I'm at least observing in this space is just a lot more consolidation because there's so many tools out there, and a lot of them, to your point, are here to help restaurants, whether it's back house, front of house marketing, you know, robotics, like, we met with reservations, you name it, loyalty, there's a lot, but at the same time, you can understand that a restaurant or bar or hotel, whatever, doesn't want to have 22 apps, right? So it's kind of like this. We're seeing more and more consolidation, but ultimately, you know, at risk. Our mission was always, how do we give restaurateurs their time back? So as much as we're like we focus on inventory and invoice management and costing and all that kind of, you know, granular, boring stuff that the operator needs to do. The goal or the mission was like, how do we just give them their time back to do what they want? And I think that's like, what a lot of companies are trying to do with different angles, whether it might be on the labor side, on the cost of goods side, on the loyalty side. And I think the future will be interesting to see where these kind of come together. And then even just thinking about, like the, like you said, the kind of more advanced automation side. And people always think just pure robots.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:47]:

But I think there's a lot of in between and a lot of nuance between, you know, full on robots and just what can we automate? Because there's so much staff shortage and we can maybe, like, leverage less people with the help of robotics, right?

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Matt Newberg [00:39:00]:

Yeah, I mean, I think automation can apply. You know, Starbucks is looking at ways of just more efficiently brewing coffee with like less man hours. Or, you know, they're looking at or even just like a way, the way you cook your proteins in a particular convection oven is a form of automation, right? It's not so black and white. It doesn't need to be sweet green level investment of an entire automated line that's going to produce your staff from your kitchen staff to two people or something like that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:34]:

Right?

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Matt Newberg [00:39:36]:

There's a gradient of things you can do, and automation has been happening slowly. It's just technology. Pen and paper is a technology, just not great technology. But, you know, we can do better now. So paying attention to all the things, you know, in between, that's awesome.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:57]:

And just to shift gear, I'd love to, you know, one of the things I like to always shed light on this episode on the show, I should say, is the kind of founder story behind it. So we interview, you know, hospitality specialists or people in the space, or even just restaurant tech companies and just understanding their story. So, like, you know, real quick, I love to hear kind of like, how you went about building is not easy what you're doing. You're building kind of a niche subscription media platform. What are some challenges that you face in the early days that you might maybe be able to share with our guests?

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Matt Newberg [00:40:28]:

I mean, I've started things in the past and I think my advice to any founder is always like, build a company in spite of itself. So it was always like a happy accident. I think are always the better, can lead to better outcomes than trying to force something. So I don't know. I kind of just started testing the waters by publishing on medium because I, which was kind of a mistake, and I'll explain why, but I think I was just basically publishing, letting them handle the audience side and just trying to sharpen my writing skills by doing that and getting into that weekly cadence and building those habits. And eventually I was able to transition from medium to my own platform and then launch a subscription, which I was able to do. But if I'd done it again, I think I would have just started a free blog, forget about the network, maybe copy and paste it over to medium. But really, it's the same problem that restaurants face with third party delivery.

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Matt Newberg [00:41:33]:

Third party delivery can be great because it gives you incremental sales, but if you're not careful to drive people back to your own ordering channel, you're going to continue paying a tax every time that they order on those platforms. Same thing goes with media. You're relying on someone else's audience to read your content, and you're not owning that email address of that person. They're not signing up to your newsletter. Whatever you're driving them to, it's, it's tough. So I was lucky that I had a mailchimp audience that I built from the medium. But then, like, turning off a medium and saying, hey, go, you can only read it on this paywall site, was not easy, but I was able to do it. And my timing was, I think, pretty good because it was right during, in the height of the pandemic in the fall of 2020.

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Matt Newberg [00:42:20]:

So everybody was into restaurant tech. But as we've seen, you know, the cycles apply to restaurant tech as much as they apply to anything, crypto, any high flying kind of tech vertical. So there's definitely like a mass influx and then definitely an exodus of people either running out of capital or just disinterested in the space who, you know, write it off. And so now we're left with, like, the ogs. And so, you know, it just, to me, it's, thinking about growth is really challenging. I haven't spent a dollar on marketing. I think that's an opportunity. I think, you know, trying to tap into corporates to maybe offer them other services beyond.

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Matt Newberg [00:43:06]:

Just like my core offering for everyday subscribers is a huge opportunity. It's definitely a challenge. But figure out, okay, what, what is the most impactful thing I should be focusing on and what do I really want to do? I know that I don't want to let my foot off the gas and start consulting. I know that I want to productize as much, as many things as I can possibly do. I know I want to get as much leverage out of my time so that when I do find the right opportunities of things to be covering, then I'm, like, 100% focused. I'm not scatterbrained. So how can I tap into these other audiences but also have it all pulled in the same direction, where it's all feeling off the same amount of work and I can get the most leverage? And I think that that's, like, the biggest challenge. How do you get the most leverage for what you do? It doesn't matter if a thousand people or ten people read what I write, it's the same amount of work.

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Matt Newberg [00:44:03]:

So how do I get those incremental people to pay money to read those things and share it?

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:10]:

That makes sense. And so where do you see kind of the future for you when it comes to HNGRY? Right? So it's like you brought fit in house. You went from medium to everything in house, consistency, growing the brand, starting, you know, obviously building community. What's. What's kind of next for you? Or are you still kind of in the experiment, experimentation phase? Like what? Where would you like to see HNGRY? I guess. And then next year or two years, and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention, and you started a conference. That's pretty, that's pretty cool. So we could probably chat about that, too.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:39]:

But where do you want to see HNGRY heading?

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Matt Newberg [00:44:43]:

Yeah. Again, I don't know exactly what it's going to look like, but I know my role, and I think my role as a facilitator, I think I get the most, I see the most value being created by kind of getting out of the way. So it's really around the community online and also offline through this conference, creating content that hopefully, like, sparks something from people to apply to their business or invest into something, or just remain curious and keep an eye on it. So I just want to be a facilitator of that through the various products I offer. So, through the newsletter, it's really about exposing the people who have the power to make these big decisions, to explore new topics and new ideas. Building an online community of people who are multidisciplinary, who can help each other, you know, expose each other to different opinions and different, not necessarily opinions, but just perspectives, really different angles of food, because I think we realize we can't just build the tech without understanding how it actually applies in the real world. I think that's been the kind of a fatal mistake of technologists across any vertical. And then, you know, the conference really being kind of like the most rich offline experience that obviously not everyone is going to be able to experience.

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Matt Newberg [00:46:06]:

Right. It's a very much smaller funnel, but it's probably for me the most rewarding because to see people go into breakout sessions and talk about a gnarly topic like food is medicine, or, you know, look at food waste or what is the future of automation and food service. These are topics that we could spend like, you know, long, long periods of time on, and we have like an hour to sit down and, and bring different people to the table. So I really enjoy doing that. I think that's probably my, the thing I can offer people in the industry the most, like my offering is that to be a facilitator by kind of spanning all these different verticals and really tapping into, like, what is the cutting edge, what is the innovation there?

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:50]:

I love that. And, and then can you just quickly touch on the, the cut, the details around the conference? Because, you know, I know this was the first one was here, but to our listeners, we have like over 20,000, you know, subscribers and most of them are in the hospitality space. So, like, sounds quite interesting. I'd love for you to maybe just plug, do a little plug on what the conference is about, how they can attend. When's the next one? Next year, and just any details you can share.

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Matt Newberg [00:47:14]:

Thank you. Yeah, so I can tell you what happened and still trying to figure out what's going to happen next year, but, yeah, so we had, you know, a small but very influential group of, you know, about 70 food industry innovators joined me last two Fridays ago here in LA. We had a bunch of fireside chats with some leaders in the food, food space across various categories that I was interested in. So we had Ben Leventhal, who is the founder of Resi and Eater, who's now doing web three loyalty with Blackbird Labs, talking about kind of what we were talking about earlier around, understanding who's actually in your dining room, incentivizing them with this new currency, turning brands into restaurants, into these omnichannel brands that are beloved by everybody. We had Sam Polk, the founder of everytable, come and talk about food access, a lot of government policy around snap and EBT and how that kind of shakes out in grocery and prepared foods, and kind of how you can bring the cost down on food, on like, fresh, wholesome food, nutritious food, to make it more accessible to people who need it the most. It's really interesting conversation kind of around like undoing a lot of the industrialized harm. I think that we inadvertently, like basically created by making our products last longer on shelves and making them cheaper, just using a lot of those centralized kind of frameworks, but doing it more with perishable food. We had co founder of Anytime Spritz, which is a new farm to can, regeneratively sourced, low abv ready to drink cocktail brand.

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Matt Newberg [00:49:03]:

That's a mouthful. But we were talking a lot about incentives at the agricultural level, how to get farmers growing, you know, basically putting more back into the soil and the health of the soil than they are taking away from it, and the kind of economic incentives of the farm bill from the USDA and kind of that whole mess. And then the last speaker we had was one of the partners of Dom Food Group, which is a incubator behind Goop Kitchen, Chrissy Teigen, CPG line called cravings, cash, pistachio, milk, and a few other things. They also invest in the space. So we're talking about like a winning model for ghost kitchens and virtual brands in this time where a lot of fail. They've actually created an insane business out of that, talking about other opportunities and groceries. So definitely very restaurant heavy, but trying to be cover the entire food ecosystem. We also had five different breakout sessions, cocktail hour, lunch, breakfast.

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Matt Newberg [00:50:07]:

So plenty of tried to make it more networking and collaborative than, you know, didactic or just like listening to some two people talking heads speak on stage.

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Angelo Esposito [00:50:18]:

Right, right.

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Matt Newberg [00:50:19]:

So next year we're gonna definitely do it. I think it'll probably be in the fall, probably around when I did it this year in October, kind of the sweet spot between Labor Day and Thanksgiving when everyone gets very busy. So trying to squeeze that in. And I think we'll try to, you know, have more operators and like price the tickets lower for. For operators of CPG brands and restaurant brands that want to tap into this innovation, have more corporates there who want to understand where the future is. And then obviously I have a very core loyal group of startup founders and entrepreneurs and people working at these various companies that are already making these changes. So just trying to grow that as well. But I think we need people on those other ends of the spectrum to also attend as well.

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Matt Newberg [00:51:09]:

So just double down on that and yeah, hope to see you next year. If you want to stay in touch, definitely sign. If you want to hear about the next one, definitely sign up for the free weekly newsletter. It's on my website, HNGRY.tv.

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Angelo Esposito [00:51:25]:

Perfect. So HNGRY.tv sign up to the newsletter. You can count me on that. And honestly, I was actually gonna ask. I'd definitely be interested in attending next year, so we'll definitely keep in touch and hopefully make that happen. Cause it sounds like a great conference and I guess maybe just to wrap up so people can subscribe on HNGRY.tv newsletter. I know you got tons of content there. Blog, articles, videos, you name it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:51:51]:

Wealth of knowledge. Also, really, I encourage our listeners to check it out and we'll also do a shout out in our RX newsletters and link it up so they can find it. But any last thoughts or messages that you'd want to share with our audience today, you know, the floor is yours. Anything you want to share before we wrap?

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Matt Newberg [00:52:09]:

Wrap up everything that you're seeing and try to. Try to do some work to validate it and have an opinion. I think a lot of things get overhyped and then a lot of things get discredited that warrant more investigation. I think we're seeing alt protein get bashed a lot. I think a lot of it is warranted. But there's also an interesting story there, and obviously there's going to be continued investment. But I look for things where people, you know, things are getting written off and people might be underlooking certain things. And I think that's where a lot of big opportunities are.

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Matt Newberg [00:52:48]:

So I just urge everyone to keep, to maintain your own unique point of view. And if you're an operator, pilot something, test it out, start small. And if you're a tech company working in this space, you know, try to understand your customer. Don't think that you have it all figured out. I just think it's about everyone coming together to figure out what's gonna work for all these different constituents and to kind of forge a path that's gonna be better for everyone. And I think it's very possible for us to create new innovations, new products that are gonna be better for our, our health, of our planet and ourselves. And, and I think they're going to be great businesses as well. So I think it's entirely possible.

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Matt Newberg [00:53:36]:

And I hope that the companies that are innovating the most get rewarded for that and that consumers really vote with their dollar. So if you're just a consumer, you know, pay attention to where your dollar is going when you're making that weekly stock up, make sure you're supporting the right brands that, putting the right things on the labels, that have the right practices, that are aligned with your values. And I think it just, it just, it's on everyone to kind of play their role there.

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Angelo Esposito [00:54:06]:

Beautifully said. Thank you for that. So once again, we have Matt Newburgh, founder of HNGRY. So you can go to that website, check it out. Check out his newsletter. Matt, thank you so much for being on the Wisking It All episode. We really appreciate you being here today.

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Matt Newberg [00:54:24]:

No, thank you. Appreciate the time.

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Angelo Esposito [00:54:26]:

Amazing. Feel free to check out WISK.ai for more resources and schedule a demo with one of our product specialists to see if it's a fit for.

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