JON KING

LIKE SO MANY great business ideas, Fytics began as a solution to an everyday challenge.

“I constantly struggle in my household with food going bad in my fridge, or not using what’s in my cupboard,” says Fytics founder and CEO Jon King. “I started to work on ways to figure out what you have, how much and what can be made in a pinch to use up the food you have.”

I thought, what if we could build a better way of managing inventory and make waste go away?

It was a solid idea — but Mr. King realized building a customer base for that sort of personal service was out of his marketing budget. So, he decided to apply the same problem-solving principle to larger operations: restaurants and bars.

“I thought, what if we could build a better way of managing inventory and make waste go away?” And that’s what Mr. King and his team did.

Two years after launching, Fytics has 15 employees (most of whom are Memorial graduates). The company has 68 clients from Canada, the United States and the Netherlands and Mr. King hopes to have 200 users, including some national chains, by the end of 2019. He’s rolling out an affiliated project that manages bar inventory and it is already catching on.

“These businesses want to know exactly what they have, what they need to order and how much it’s costing them every single day. And that’s what they come to us for.”