Liinked

LiiNKED deploys web and mobile applications to help the most ubiquitous of small businesses, the restaurants, navigate and thrive in the post pandemic landscape. LiiNKED especially focus in assisting the most important but most neglected members of the food supply chain, the kitchen staff.

LiiNKED leverages on technologies as well as on our the thirty years extensive experiences in the food industry to execute the following goals:

1/ streamline operational and marketing activities to drastically reduce associated costs.

2/ deploy our proprietary SmartLiink system to effectively manage food orders, food deliveries as well as quality control.

3/ deploy our food network LiinkNet that pioneers the Airbnb business model in the food industry to run a viable and sustainable national network of catering and food deliveries. 

4/ leverage on the aggregated purchasing power of LiinkNet members to negotiate favorable prices for supplies and services normally enjoyed by large food chains.

5/ spread the development costs among LiinkNet members to develop cutting-edge technology at a fraction of the normal cost (currently less than 5% the industry costs).

6/ develop LiinkEvent platform to promote effective event organizing activities at offices and companies which then stimulates corresponding food catering orders.

7/ develop technologies and procedures to help optimize the food preparation processes as well as make meaningful improvements on working conditions for staff.

8/ promote "take ownership of your creation" program through which all restaurant members of LiinkNet are committed to give %5 of their earnings through our channels directly to food preparers.

Using web and mobile application, LiiNKED assist restaurants in deploying the Airbnb business model in the food industry. 

LiiNKED developed LinkNet as the platform that seamlessly connects demands for food deliveries and catering from offices and companies to restaurants in the network the same way Airbnb connects customers to homeowners who have extra rooms in their house to rent out. LinkNet leverages on the restaurants' kitchen and staff resources during 6AM to 10AM down-time to prepare LinkNet own brand of catering foods using our ingredients, recipe and food preparation techniques.

LinkNet receives catering orders from companies and office workers and match the demand with supplies from the restaurant members of the platform. LinkNet offers menus of our brand of foods covering six cuisines: American, Asian, Mexican, Italian, Mediterranean, Japanese. The menus are simple but optimized like that of Chipotle Mexican Grill.

LiiNKED does the marketing and distribute the orders efficiently through SmartLink to various restaurants in LinkNet for fulfillment. LiiNKED also uses SmartLink to organize/coordinate the deliveries by restaurant members. In 1993, we pioneered SmartFood, the world's first online grocery delivery service at MIT (featured on CNN and other national news outlets in 1995) as well as partnered in online grocery with Kroger (the nation's largest supermarket chain). We have also operated commercial commissaries for over 30 years, so we have a lot of experience in food delivery service at massive scale.

Restaurant members pay LiiNKED with 10% of the value of the orders to compensate for LiiNKED's operational costs. Our system in turn shares half of this revenue as bonus directly to the workers that prepare the foods.

LiNKED is also developing cutting edge operational and marketing technologies that would be available to all restaurant members at 5% of the average market cost.

In summary, LiiNKED is a technology platform similar to Airbnb. LiiNKED attracts office food orders for deliveries or catering and match those orders with restaurant members in LinkNet for fulfillment, bringing much needed additional business to the small independent restaurants. 

LiiNKED serves three communities: the consumers populating office buildings and the restaurant owners and workers.

LiiNKED deploys LinkNet to provide high quality catering foods to office workers and companies. The founders of LiiNKED are drawing from the thirty three years of successful experiences in the for-profit sector of the food industry as well as the extensive training and hand-on experiences at the forefront of technogy and e-commerce to execute on this nonprofit mission. 

LiiNKED main mission is to serve the small restaurant communities by deploying the Airbnb business model to create reliable demands as well as implementing technologies to make the mission viable and sustainable. 

In 2019, we created EverLynked, a food network that put our business proposition to rigorous tests in San Jose, CA. Restaurant paid 10% commission on the food orders from us. In return, we helped our catering partners significantly increase their revenues while reducing their operating cost by 27% (-12% labor, -10% cost of supplies leveraging on purchasing power of the network, -5% on food waste and efficient procedures). 

We've been around the food industry for more than 30 years, so we know that there's no harder job for the same pay than being a kitchen staff. People who work in commercial kitchens, the majority of whom are immigrants, endure long hours with tough working conditions while getting paychecks that do not even cover the rent. Most have no choice but to take on a second job to barely survive.

We take 10% commission on the orders but route back 5% (50% of our revenue) to the people who make the foods, the kitchen staff in our partners' kitchen. We also heavily promote tipping to food makers and delivery associates. The combined 5% in shared revenues plus tips would more than double their $16/hour salaries. 

In 1998, I decided to volunteer tutoring students in East Palo Alto, a socially disadvantaged neighborhood. Initially I thought it would be for a few hours a day for a year but that grew into a full-time volunteering job for twenty years. Stanford and other colleges have lots of resources and volunteer students for mentoring and tutoring but parents in East Palo Alto have no time to guide their kids to these wonderful resources. Most are struggling with two jobs to survive. Even when we built apps that brought online tutoring to their homes, the parents have no time to encourage their kids to use them. A sense of hopelessness often dominates their daily activities and takes away the key ingredients for success in education: motivation. Students often give up by the time they reach high school as most of the parents toil away in restaurant jobs.

To bring the well deserved assistance to the most vulnerable and most neglected population of the food chain requires an a tremendous amount of reengineering in technology, business approach as well as our own willingness to solve layers of challenges to even get to our main objective. Our solution brings great benefits to the consumers, restaurant owners so that we can secure the 5% "ownership" for restaurant workers. Solution are sustainable only when everyone win along the food chain. Deploying technologies appropriately to transform the lives of others, and not just to make shopping easier, is the spirit of the Challenge.

To our organization, the most pressing problem is the chronic barely-for-surviving-salaries of restaurant workers.

The government tried to solve this by increasing the minimum wage. Based on our own experiences and countless well documented cases easily found through Google, an increase in wage often resulted in restaurants curtailing their job options for employees. For example, the thirty-year-old Original Joe restaurant near our headquarter in San Jose, CA permanently closed its lunch hours in response to new minimum wage. It simply couldn't afford it.

Our solution is a natural progression of mutual benefits made possible by technology that solves logistics problems and creates propositions from real and sustainable values. 

Currently, when an office worker order a $12 sandwich to be delivered through DoorDash or UberEat he will be charged $12 plus a $5 delivery fee for a total of $17. The restaurant would be charged $3 (25% of the order). The kitchen staff get nothing for making the sandwich. With this cost structure, the office worker would often bring lunch from home and restaurants would only use DoorDash for marketing because 25% is their profit margin. Kitchen workers grudgingly detest working for free for DoorDash so they often produce inferior products that leads to stagnation in sales. DoorDash never reach critical mass in demand, not even during the pandemic.

Our technology and business model allow customers to order individually but LiiNKED delivers large aggregated orders together only at 11:30AM, 12PM and 12:30PM making delivery fee unnecessary. The kitchen staff receives 5% from delivery and catering orders so they want these activities to grow by producing high quality products. Receiving great lunches without the delivery fees encourage the office workers to order more often. Owners of restaurants enjoy increase in revenue paying only 10% commission (half of which would be routed back to their staff) and benefit from a 27% reduction in cost thanks to operating in a network.

The numbers simply add up in the logical framework where everyone benefit from real values created by the implementation of technology equitably to an ecosystem that is people-centric.

We currently are setting up to serve twenty four restaurants in Boston MA, Houston TX, San Jose CA and Arlington, VA that have a combined 212 employees. The restaurants we normally serve has on the average 8 employees. 

Our goal is to have at least fifty restaurants in LinkNet by the end of this year with an additional fifty restaurants in 2024.

We conservatively can manage up to 500 restaurants with 4,000 employees in our network by the fifth year.

The restaurant communities in the US (initially in Massachusetts, California and Texas) are where our solution would be initially implemented. 

At first, we decide which restaurant in a specific geographic area to invite to LiinkNet. We then approach the restaurant owners with our propositions. The owners of the restaurant would make the decision whether to join.

We've approached twenty four restaurants in Boston MA, Houston TX, Arlington VA, San Jose CA. All twenty four restaurants decided to join our network after the first meetings because the benefits are substantial and sustainable, especially in a post pandemic landscape.

Our past innovative and successful track records in the food and technology industries tremendously helps our outreach program. Despite our rigorous technology trainings, most of our important experiences have been coming from the food industry. We come from and uniquely speak the language of the community we serve. That help make the communications authentic and organic to everyone in the community.

We normally concentrated on let-success-lead-to-further-success strategies and focus on executing to the best of our ability. Potential partners usually seek us out seeing our successful past ventures and engaged activities in social networks.

For each restaurant we bring to our network, our organization would be able to substantially improve the earnings and working condition for the owner as well as for 8 to 10 workers.

Partnership with Truist Foundation and MIT Solve would bring incredible prestige, connections and advices that would help any nonprofit organization many steps forward in achieving its goal

The more game-changing your business model, the less visibility you have ahead for yourself. We need all the expert assistances we can get, especially from the MIT Solve, MIT community and the Truist Foundation.

A large part of our successes in the past are due to the fact that never shy away from asking for direction when problem arise.