Foodics Provides a Feast of Insights to Help 39,000 Restaurants Succeed and Grow

As well as reliability, Snowflake offers a range of features that make life simpler for Foodics data engineers. 

“The flows Snowflake provides makes it very easy for our engineers to work quickly,” says Radwan. “The logic that you’d normally implement in your code can be implemented within Snowflake, so you don’t have to compromise things. It’s one-of-a-kind from my perspective; it’s like programming through the database, not just reading and writing data.” 

One example of Snowflake’s inherent simplicity is the way Foodics uses the AI Data Cloud’s custom ODBC driver, a pre-built integration that seamlessly connects its applications with live Snowflake data. This enables the company to serve insights to its customers at speed and scale, and it could have required a significant amount of integration work. 

“The custom ODBC driver is embedded directly into our system, which means we don’t have to change a lot of code,” says Radwan. “We were worried at first that we might have to spend a lot of time making significant changes, but when Snowflake showed us how it worked, we realized there was a big benefit in the time we’d save that could be redirected to adding value in other areas.”

This architecture enables Foodics to deliver insights that provide huge benefits to its customers. With a near real-time view of operations, they can flag anomalies in day-to-day activities and act immediately, while longer-term trends can inform more strategic decisions. Detailed information into customer habits can help to customize loyalty rewards to save money and improve satisfaction. More importantly, Foodics can apply AI to the data in Snowflake and give its customers predictive insights that deliver an entirely new dimension of value. 

“Analysis and insights are crucial for any business, but it’s more important to have a glimpse into the future,” says Radwan. “With AI, we’re not just helping our clients understand their business performance, we’re helping them to predict how customer behaviors will change over time and understand what areas will need attention to meet and exceed their goals.”

This level of insight is also available to those simply thinking of opening a restaurant. With visibility of demographics, seasonal trends, pricing and other factors from Foodics’ ecosystem, strategic business decisions can take place early, informed by reliable, proven data collected from tens of thousands of customers. It’s exactly what’s needed to gain an edge in such a competitive market.

With Snowflake at the heart of its insights engine, Foodics is looking forward to expanding its capabilities and exploring new functionalities, aided by a hands-on relationship with its Snowflake account manager.

“We have direct contact with Snowflake, and our account manager is always there whenever we send him a question, have a concern or want to discuss something,” says Radwan. “The support is brilliant, and I’ve never seen it from any other system. To have a dedicated person who proposes enhancements, has monthly calls, and suggests new features and improvements — it’s beyond excellent.” 

In this relationship, and with Snowflake in general, Foodics has found the long-term solution it — and the customers it serves — needed to grow and succeed. 

“Snowflake plays a huge role in our ecosystem, both internally and externally,” says Radwan.  “The support we get, the resilience of the system and its features allow us to help our customers now, but also ensures that we’re ready for the future — it’s a solution we can rely on.”