Choppin’ It Up: Craftable’s Cantu on Boosting Restaurant Profit

Craftable CEO David Cantu says restaurants have focused too narrowly on prime costs and should build stronger financial acumen at the manager level to reduce broader losses, including food waste. He also argues the back office is becoming the next major area of innovation in restaurant technology. The piece is largely an interview and commentary, with no specific financial figures or immediate market-moving event.

Analysis

This is a slow-burn margin story rather than a headline-demand story. The real economic exposure sits with operators that have fragmented unit economics and weak back-office discipline: lower-traffic casual dining, franchisees with thin labor buffers, and concepts where shrink, spoilage, and invoice leakage can silently erase a meaningful share of EBITDA. The beneficiaries are software vendors that can prove hard-dollar savings in procurement, inventory, labor scheduling, and cash reconciliation because their ROI is easier to underwrite than front-of-house tech.

The second-order effect is that CFO-led buying should intensify in restaurant tech over the next 12-24 months, but only for tools tied to measurable payback. That favors workflow and financial-control platforms over “nice-to-have” consumer-facing features, and it should pressure legacy POS vendors that rely on bundling rather than quantified savings. It also creates a procurement advantage for multi-unit operators versus independents, since scale improves data quality and purchasing power, widening the gap in food cost and labor control.

The contrarian miss is that better financial acumen can actually be deflationary for tech spend in the near term: once operators see true leakage, they may consolidate around fewer systems and delay discretionary software adoption. So the near-term winner set may be narrower than the broad restaurant-tech bullish narrative implies. The catalyst to watch is earnings commentary from restaurant chains on inventory turns, waste, and manager training expense; if operators start calling out basis-point improvements in controllable costs, that would validate a multi-quarter upgrade cycle for back-office software.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long Toast (TOST) on pullbacks over the next 1-3 months; best risk/reward if management commentary shows attach-rate growth in payments + back-office modules. Target a 15-20% upside if operators keep prioritizing measurable cost savings; stop if customer churn rises or SMB spend softens.
• Relative-value: long restaurant workflow/back-office software exposure vs short legacy POS incumbents over 6-12 months. Prefer a basket approach if available, because the market may overpay for scale while underestimating software that directly reduces leakage.
• Long the highest-quality restaurant operators with centralized controls versus short weaker casual-dining names over 3-6 months. The spread should widen if inflation stays moderate, because disciplined operators can convert control improvements into 100-200 bps margin outperformance.
• Avoid paying up for broad restaurant-tech names without clear savings attribution; wait for customer case studies or earnings proof before adding. This is a validation trade, not a momentum trade.
• If a public back-office/ERP restaurant software name reports accelerating net retention tied to inventory and labor modules, buy immediately on the print for a 1-2 quarter catalyst window; the market may rerate that revenue as less discretionary than front-of-house software.