Andrea Tassistro CEO of Foodetective, the Super-App for Food & Beverage

Andrea, tell us more about you and your background!

My name is Andrea Tassistro and I’m a 30-year-old entrepreneur born in Geneva, Switzerland. I come from an Italian household – both my parents come from Italy – so I grew up in between two cultures, which gave me very enriching experiences and a mix of languages!

I studied in Geneva and Lausanne, where I did my Swiss Maturity. After a gap year, I enrolled at the University of Westminster, in London, for a Bachelor in Management with Entrepreneurship. I’d say that marked the beginning of my humble yet intense Entrepreneurial life.

I started working in the Food Industry in 2012 when I worked a student job at Tommi’s Burgers in London. After 3 years, I moved back to Lausanne and launched “The Green Van Company”, a burger food truck that had great success and that I sold a while later. In 2017, I found “Let’s Brunch” in Geneva, where we organized brunch events and did brunch home delivery.

During those 6+ years, I learned about the restaurant industry and took my knowledge with me to create solutions to the persistent problems of decentralization and lack of organization within restaurants and their services. That’s how Foodetective, the Super-App was born.

When was your company born and who is your core team?

Foodetective was created in Geneva Switzerland on the 19th of January 2018. We’re turning five years old in 2023!

We started off with a team of multitaskers who had to start building the first version of the product and making sure our business could be found. I like to call them the core team: Edouard Thimon (Co-Founder & COO) who looks after our BD & Sales from Paris, Veronica Stacey (CMO) who leads our Marketing efforts from Madrid, Antoine Schaller (CTO) who manages all the technical aspects of our products from Zurich, working very closely with Maxence Lovato (CPO) who’s in charge of our product roadmap & development and finally Yannick Jorand (CFO) in charge of our finances & admin also based at our HQ in Geneva. Today, 30 people compose the team in Paris, Geneva, and Madrid and we’re growing at a steady pace.

Foodetective allows merchants to merge their entire tech stack & operations in a custom, centralized dashboard and intelligent interface. Tell us a bit more about it.

Businesses commonly use 18+ softwares or apps covering a variety of categories including delivery, payments, bookings, stocks, HR, marketing, and procurement among others.

This means: we eliminate the excess hardware by centralizing their entire tech stack, apps & suppliers on a single platform. With this, merchants can finally manage their business as well as analyze their performance from a centralized dashboard. Leading to an increase in revenues and a decrease in operational and administrative tasks.

In short, Foodetective provides merchants with a unified platform (API) to integrate, manage & automate their entire operations seamlessly.

“By automating their entire online operations from a single tool, we are able to push intelligent notifications & actions to every merchant based on their tech stack, type, size & location, fulfilling our mission to become the intelligent operator of every merchant & entrepreneur out there.” – Maxence Lovato, Chief Product Officer

How many restaurants and bars does Foodetective’s platform host?

Although this number changes often (for the better), today we count approximately with 30K businesses listed on our platform.

What is your strategy to penetrate the market?

We would have to kill you if we told you, but here’s what we can tell you:

With every stage, there comes a different approach and adaptation process. At first, we had to do what most start-ups do, knock on doors, and talk to our target audience in person to understand their pain points and how we should communicate. Which we still do.

We also worked on our online presence by targeting keywords and investing in SEM and SEO by creating a Newsroom and Blog to educate restaurants. Social media has also been pivotal to create brand awareness and engagement, most of our leads come from there. Restaurants are usually there and can get their customer’s attention. This helped us understand where to spend on paid advertising. For B2C, this strategy has been much more straightforward. PR has also been a strong focus this past year. We’re making in-house efforts by building strong relations with top journalists and bloggers to whom we pitch regularly. Since this is our model, partnering with other companies also helps us and them increase their online visibility. This provides us with mutual partner growth and immediate value for customers and partners. Recently, ApicBase has joined this program already formed by others such as Stripe, Square, MarketMan, Kitro, Wicc Menu, among others.

These days, as we are preparing for our global expansion, we expect to meet the right investors, partners & distributors for our US rollout. Additionally, we want to bolster our European standing and continue our success in the most advanced yet challenging tech market.

How did you go about financing your project?

Initially, we raised some money from Family & friends, then with Angel investors.

Raising this pre-seed round was hard, as at this stage as we did not have a product or team fully developed. We joined Station F start-up campus in Paris, we received support from different organizations to connect with new investors, get mentorship, and attend events. These include Google For Start-ups, SAP.io, Tech Tour, Innosuisse, Fongit, among others. Today we are lucky enough to have some of the best VC investors backing us in our journey to make merchants’ lives much easier.

How do you think being an entrepreneur has turned you into a better person? What is your vision?

Being an entrepreneur has its ups and downs. Sometimes inevitable things don’t work the way you expect them to and you need to adapt quickly. Other times you feel extremely grateful and motivated to keep building and growing. It’s all a roller coaster, I’m not going to lie.

In general, I would say being an entrepreneur makes you learn fast. Some days you have to be a lawyer, a marketer, a developer… all at the same time! You end up learning a lot of different things across many verticals at a very fast pace. It can also be a very humbling journey, there are always possible modifications to be made that turn up when you least expect them to. Right when you thought your product is ready, there’s always something that reminds you that you need to keep working and that perfection requires continuous time and effort.

Our vision is to become the intelligent OS & interface of the tech industry. Providing Business owners, entrepreneurs & SMBs with a tool that supports them in their daily lives. That’s not it since we also want to be involved in people’s lives, by centralizing their day-to-day interactions with businesses, restaurants, and hotels… all in a single app.

Next step?

We’ve recently released our brand new mobile application & website that enable anyone to discover, book, order, or pay for restaurants from a single App. We’re also looking to expand into more industries & categories as we speak.

In addition, we’re finalizing the release of Intelligence V1 as well as a lot of different tools enabling merchants to book influencers, work with content creators, manage their stock, and reduce food waste.

One of the most exciting news is that we have recently announced the opening of our Public API, which goes in line with Foodetective’s recently announced licensing rollout offering any players in the industry from ambitious start-ups to corporates, to use its top-notch technology in order to power restaurants and merchants at a global scale. As we have said time and time again, we do not seek to replace solutions, but agnostically partner with existing ones to offer a holistic solution to F&B businesses. Our product is built on partnerships and integrations, so this being a priority to achieve our vision is a no-brainer.

Learn more about Foodetective here