On the one hand, restaurants have gone far more digital since the start of the pandemic. Mobile ordering has gone from the purview of early adopters to the mainstream, and digital technologies are being built into restaurants online and in the physical world. However, for all the on-table QR codes and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled drive-thrus, the B2B side of the industry has remained largely stuck in the past.

“The problem on the buyer side is that procurement is offline,” Jordan Huck, chief executive officer of restaurant supply chain technology company Notch, told PYMNTS in a recent interview. “The problem on the distributor side is, their order desk is offline — they receive orders via email, text, phone, fax machines, carrier pigeons. Their order desks are completely offline, and so they have to have two, three people a week who just manually enter orders into their systems.”

Notch, formerly known as ChefHero, recently launched its all-in-one supply chain solution, which offers restaurants and distributors a one-stop integrated digital ecosystem for each step of the process.