Milwaukee has lots of great food trucks. But they often face barriers connecting with customers and finding the right technology to serve them.
Jesus Gonzalez is one of the owners of Zocalo Food Park. He partnered with data engineer and developer Jaden Brozynski to create Eventini. It’s an online platform to make vendors like food trucks more accessible to people planning events.
The pair also created a point of sale, or POS system with food trucks in mind. Those systems are what businesses use to make and track sales.
WUWM Eric Von Fellow Maria Peralta-Arellano spoke with Gonzalez and Brozynski to learn more.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Maria Peralta-Arellano: What did [app] development look like for you guys?
Jesus Gonzalez: We had to validate the need. And so we built a landing page on a website and we started to see some traffic where people were looking to book food trucks. And then on the back end, we were just manually making those connections. We were calling our buddies that own food trucks and saying, "Hey, someone is interested in having you cater their graduation party. Are you available?"
It got to the point where we started seeing some bottlenecks, and that's when we started to automate that process. And that's where we start to develop and use the software to automate that, and then that's how we ended up evolving into also including the POS system.
Jaden Brozynski: All of our internal development, from our admin dashboards to our analytics sites to our business suites to the marketplace to the POS platform to all of our third party integrations, they were all built in-house by me and Jesus, so no contractors, no overseas labor.
It was built all in-house leveraging AI to build out the software, and the thing that makes that really cool is because we were able to build it all in-house and reduce all those costs, we're able to give that back to the providers. So whenever a provider does want to use our system, we're able to give them the software for free. We're not having to pay a premium for it, and we're able to give them free hardware.
What are they seeing on the business side that's improving due to either the POS system or Eventini?
Gonzalez: The biggest thing that they're seeing is the cost savings. I mean, they're essentially using a POS system and with no monthly fees, and no transaction fees. In addition to that, our marketplace, we are marketing their businesses and we're driving new business to them. We have operators that are booking three to four times more a month through that marketplace.
The tools that we are developing, we can track the progress and the performance and we're seeing positive results, and so right now what we wanna do is continue to refine those tools and to continue to get more businesses to learn about these tools and how this these AI tools can definitely help run their businesses.
Brozynski: We're now enabling providers to have predictive models where they can predict revenue into the future. So they're able to see, "OK, how much revenue am I going to generate in the month of June so I can account for how much stock I need to have on hand?"
It's leveraging all the machine learning in the background, all of the provider data to give them better estimates on how they're going to perform in the future, just to kind of keep that margin as high as possible for them because it's already so razor thin.
