Ross Cronin speaks from his Dublin office, with rain pelting his window. He’s used to it.
Ross Cronin, CEO and co-founder of RocketBox
“We really only have one season,” he said with a laugh. “Our summer is only a few days.”
But the rain isn’t darkening his mood about the pending launch of RocketBox, his company that offers a variety of AI-powered KDS solutions. On that his attitude is sunny.
He’s set to soft-launch RocketBox at the Food On Demand Conference in early May and roll it out widely in June.
Cronin got his start in restaurants as a young man working at his father’s pizza shop, delivering leaflets to promote the business. He found the whole enterprise entrancing. “I would deliver the leaflets just to be able to have a peek at the kitchen,” he said. “I was obsessed with it.”
Soon he knew everything that went on in the kitchen, in the dining room, and everywhere. Over a 10-year period he helped his father build the business to 43 locations, handling much of the operations. He oversaw the dispatch outlets, which is where his interest in restaurant technology sparked.
He decided to build his own platform, MENUU Software, which is a white label online-ordering solution. It has a promotions engine, consumer insights, marketing automation, everything to make an operator’s life a bit easier.
“I built that over six years and scaled it predominately in Ireland, the UK, and Canada,” he said.
Yet the old pull of the kitchen called him back. Six years ago he launched his own pizzeria, Uno Pizza, which specializes in Neapolitan-style pies.
One would think between MENUU and Uno, and three children, his time and energy would be maxed out. One would be wrong. He saw an opening in the KDS vendor space and couldn’t resist.
“I saw that there was a gap in the market for synchronizing the kitchen with drivers, even with an aggregator that brings all of the orders into your POS,” he said. “I wanted to help operators manage the challenges they face during order preparation.”
His vision was to let operators look at one screen with all the orders prioritized. He didn’t want managers to need to think about anything. Just act.
“How much time does a driver waste waiting for a restaurant to make their food? Say they have been assigned two orders. One may go cold. The other is at the end of a ticket list. This creates frustration. Our solution makes all of that disappear,” he said.
It does this through AI-powered order management, which sorts orders by prep time, urgency, and delivery deadlines. The platform provides real-time order adjustments and syncs with delivery platforms to align prep times with driver arrival.
RocketBox offers a unified dashboard, which communicates bump speeds and station metrics, so managers can see where bottlenecks are occurring.
Cronin used to dream of such a platform early in his career. “When you’re working for that long in a hard-core pizza delivery business, you get to see all of the elements of technology that you’re using,” he said, “and you hope for something better.”
RocketBox offers three integration options to operators.
“You can use our API to integrate yourself. Or you can use a middleware option, where if you have a third-party aggregator, like Omnivore or Deliverect, you can go through them. Or you can use our platform as a totally independent system,” he said.
RocketBox was designed for maximum flexibility. “We’re kind of a hybrid between a KDS and a POS because we do all kinds of things in the background, like tracking the ticket journey, from station one in the kitchen, to station two, to the driver, to the destination,” he said.
The product was unveiled at the Web Summit in Qater last month and will soon be widely available. Cronin has high hopes for it. “We’ve built the platform to scale,” he said.
But is he built to scale? He already has two other businesses he is overseeing. Could RocketBox be a rocket to Mount Excedrin?
Cronin isn’t worried. He’s already planning to roll up his sleeves and work under the hood.
“My plan is go deep in to operations,” he said. “This is an area in which I have a lot of expertise. I can walk into kitchens and see problems pretty fast. Things can get complicated for brands in high-density urban areas that rely on third-party delivery drivers. Those operators just want to know what order to make next. We’re perfect for them.”
