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We’re in the world of hospitality today, meeting a startup hoping to help food-related businesses (and beyond) improve their task management, legal compliance processes, and more.

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Aquaint wants boost productivity in the hospitality sector

With its hectic schedules and a workforce that often ebbs and flows with the seasons, hospitality is an attractive market to startup founders looking to help bring digital order to complex workflows.

Last year we covered Blend, which helps hospitality companies onboard staff in a modern way.

Today, let’s look at Aquaint. This Manchester-based startup looks to boost productivity in hospitality by providing the digital connectivity layer and task management most sectors take for granted these days through office-focused tools like Microsoft Teams or Atlassian’s Jira.

“Hospitality is the third largest employer in the UK, but has the lowest labour productivity rates in the whole economy,” observes Jayden Patel, co-founder and CEO at Aquaint.

Part of the reason for this low productivity, he argues, is a lack of fit-for purpose apps. Many companies in the sector will keep in touch with employees through WhatsApp groups. At best, that’s bad for work-life balance, and at worst it could soon be illegal under the new UK government’s planned ‘right to switch off’ legislation. It’s also not really fit for purpose.

Acquaint takes the form of a mobile and tablet app primarily used by employees, and a web app for managers to handle back-end and admin tasks such as exporting temperature records during an inspection.

The app combines team messaging with workflow management features to help workers keep track of things like checklists for regular tasks like opening up in the morning or conducting stock checks. 

There’s also support for important legal compliance tasks like temperature management; allergen management, and incident reporting. Staff can also leave handover notes for each other at the ends of shifts.

And Aquaint can make life easier for managers too. 

“The current procedure for ops directors who operate across a bunch of different sites is they'll be travelling around the country and getting managers to send pictures of the paper manuals to them to decipher and search for anomalies,” says Patel.

“Instead of doing that, they can flick between the different sites and isolate the anomalies on our app instead.

“Ultimately, what we're looking to achieve is reducing compliance risk and admin time for our customers.”

The story so far

Patel says he grew immersed in hospitality because his father ran a beer supply company

“I used to go out with him in the van, dropping off kegs of beer to pubs and restaurants in the North of England. So I was always in and amongst it, although I wasn't quite strong enough to carry the kegs then.”

Patel himself started his career in the financial world before moving into tech, working for Hewlett Packard and then a healthtech startup.

Looking to build his own startup in a space he knew, he teamed up with co-founder Sunil Patel (no relation) to build Acquaint. Sunil, the startup’s CTO, previously built a similar app for pharmacies, called Pharmsmart.

The pair began work on Aquaint three years ago, and Jayden says the app now has “some level of product-market fit,” as the company has gone live with its first customers. So what’s next?

“We want to bolster our communication aspect in the app. Right now we have announcements, which is a GDPR-friendly way of sending out what would normally be a broadcast on a WhatsApp chat, for example, and you still get the same benefits like seeing in which staff have read it. And I think there's a lot further we can go with that,” Jayden says.

Other features on the roadmap include support for internet-connected thermometers to automate temperature recording, as well as easy-to-access training guides for site-specific processes, with the ability to track staff members’ progress.

The startup is also looking to integrate project management features that would support collaborative workflows like the creation of a new menu, which might involve input from multiple members of staff. They also want to add the ability for staff to book maintenance jobs with approved suppliers.

“Customers who have replaced incumbents with us have described us as ‘hospitality’s most user-friendly app’,” Jayden claims. “So that's high praise, but we want to keep delivering on that and build out new features and product lines, which are in line with what we've built so far.”

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