Inspired by their love for food, a Raleigh couple noticed that single people go to one centralized place—a dating app—to look for matches while hungry people search a myriad of apps to find deals that match their tastes.
The husband-and-wife team of Douglas Kinnison and Kendall Totten have launched the startup Reffo to centralize this search for hungry Triangle residents beginning in May.
On the consumer side, Reffo is similar to AirBnb, according to Kinnison. Similar to how Airbnb users can filter rental homes by several categories, Reffo users will be able to filter their search for offers—”Reffo” is “offer” spelled backwards—among several categories.
Participating restaurants upload real-time deals to Reffo that immediately appear on Reffo’s website and social media platforms for the consumers to find. The deals are completely customizable for participating restaurants.
Customers secure their deal with a deposit that’s taken off their bill once they arrive at the restaurant, helping ensure that customers show up to eat (and pay for) or pick up their meal.
Kinnison and Totten considered opening a restaurant before starting Reffo, but they concluded that using their experience as front-end and back-end developers to create this platform would help the food industry more.
They hope that Reffo helps the food industry by enabling restaurants to control demand and limit food waste.
The couple envisions restaurants using Reffo whenever demand is low. Offering discounts on Reffo when demand is low will incentivize customers to come in when they normally wouldn’t, giving restaurants some control over demand. Restaurants can also turn off the deals when they are busy.
If a restaurant has too much supply of a certain food, they can use Reffo to drive demand for that specific food by offering discounts and deals on it before it expires. This helps reduce food waste and the losses that restaurants incur by ordering too much of certain items.
Kinnison and Totten believe Reffo’s ability to control demand when a restaurant has overstocked food or when demand is low will help restaurants increase their margins.
The Reffo co-founders hope that a byproduct of increased margins is that restaurants have more money to pay livable wages.
“If we can get restaurants to be able to keep more money in their pocket on a deal, they would have more money to be able to pay a livable wage,” said Kinnison. The people working there would have more honor and respect in what they’re doing, and we can get away from this dependency upon the grace of their patrons to pay for their business through tipping.”
Launching at end of April
The startup is already catching on in Raleigh. Kinnison said that around 20 restaurants will offer deals on Reffo when it launches at the end of April. Reffo is also integrating its system with all the major point of sale (POS) systems.
After its launch, Kinnison and Totten plan to expand Reffo outside the food industry. Kinnison noted Reffo’s already garnered interest from a jewelry vendor.
“Our focus right now is food because my wife and I are very passionate foodies,” said Kinnison. “Our society is built on food. It’s built around food. Everything is food, our whole society. And when the food industry has a problem, our society has a problem.”
Kinnison and Totten are now looking to raise a seed round of funding to help them with their post-launch goals for Reffo. The couple has bootstrapped Reffo up to this point.
Kinnison said he thought they could bootstrap the startup completely, but then a prominent competitor emerged. Wendy’s announced in its February earnings call that it planned to implement dynamic pricing somewhat similar to Reffo in 2025.
Wendy’s will make its deals and push them out through its app, whereas Reffo will serve as a common platform to find deals across all participating restaurants.
“Wendy’s is putting $30 million into the venture,” said Kinnison. “But we know we have a year to get our stuff really out the door and good.”
