🤖 🌮 OfOne - Automating order taking at fast food drive-thrus

TL;DR: OfOne is building software to automate order taking at fast-food drive-thrus. Using LLMs, we can save the typical restaurant owner $60,000 in labor costs per store annually.

Hi YC community - Adam Proschek (right) and Will Edwards (center) here - founders of OfOne.

The Problem:

Quick-service restaurants are a $300B industry in the United States, comprising roughly 300,000 individual restaurant units. These businesses are low-margin with food & labor costs making up ~70% of OPEX. In recent years, operators (many of whom are immigrants and small business owners) have been getting squeezed as inflation and wages rise and labor becomes more scarce.

The Solution:

OfOne is helping fast food operators make more money by automating their largest ordering channel: the drive-thru.

There are 200,000 drive-thrus in the United States and in many cases they contribute 70%+ of order volume. They are also expensive, costing on average $14.00 per hour to staff and operating for 12 hours per day - representing $12B in aggregate labor costs.

We’re offsetting these labor costs by automating the end-to-end ordering process - from greeting customers to answering questions to processing orders through the point-of-sale. Plus, it works with existing drive-thru audio systems.

Additionally, OfOne can intelligently upsell - like suggesting ice cream on a hot day - and always says please and thank you, raising average order size and improving customer experience.

We currently have signed & deployed pilots at major national chain stores.

Why we’re building OfOne:

We both know the quick-service industry well from building Crew (acq. by Square in 2021), which sold employee communication software to QSR brands, like Taco Bell.

Through this experience, we built valuable industry relationships and more importantly gained an in-depth understanding of how critical controlling labor costs is for restaurant success. Frankly, it can be the difference between a growing business and defaulting on interest payments for a personally guaranteed loan.

Our Ask:

If you have any connections with franchisees, multi-unit restaurant operators, or leaders at corporate brands (e.g., Taco Bell Corporate), we’d love to speak with them and share how we can help!

Here’s a quick blurb you can copy and paste: A team of restaurant tech entrepreneurs recently launched an AI-powered order taker for quick-service restaurant drive-thrus. They are helping operators boost margins by reducing labor costs and increasing order sizes. You can contact will@of.one for more information.

If easier, I can also craft an easily forwardable email for you. Just reach out and let me know 😊.