With information-rich digital signage tools, MealViewer is making sure schoolchildren stay in the lunch line long enough to grab a nutritious meal, especially in underprivileged areas where that might be the most they eat all day.
But MealViewer isn’t another well-funded Silicon Valley or New York unicorn. It’s a bootstrapped homegrown start-up out of Augusta, Georgia, also home to US Cyber Command. As PCMag was in town for TechNet Augusta, we stopped by MealViewer’s headquarters in a large, converted storefront on Broad Street to learn about modern school meal tech.
It was co-founder and CEO Tommy Wafford’s mother who gave him the initial inspiration. He was already well-versed in start-ups, with two behind him, including a Groupon-style local couponing app, and looking for a new challenge. Mrs. Wafford worked for the school district as a Food Service Director and, after showing her son the low-tech and uninspring options (think: dry-erase boards), Tommy Wafford knew he’d found his next challenge.
“The methodologies were all out of date,” he told PCMag. “And so I said ‘We can fix that’—and we did, creating the first prototype of a digital signage, mapped it all out, and looked to source a company that my mom could use. There wasn’t one that we liked, so we built it ourselves, and here we are, four years later.”
Similar to other tech ventures, coders at MealViewer sit in an open plan area flanked by small, glass-fronted offices. But 18-foot ceilings and 8-foot windows flood the space with light, and walls are stenciled with inspiring slogans in saturated primary colors, such as “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” There’s a low-slung couch, cold brew coffee flagons by the shiny refrigerator, and plenty of geek mascots on desks.
Two odd additions to the decor stood out: a ship’s brass bell and squishy cows.
“We ring the bell to celebrate when someone makes a sale,” Wafford told PCMag. “And the cow is a stress toy, and a company mascot, which we all sign as a keepsake when someone does something great for the product.”
The tech team was busy coding beneath headphones at the front, but most of the office was empty when we visited. Where was everyone?
“Out selling,” smiled Wafford. “But we try to ensure the entire team is here on Fridays so we can all catch up together. The rest of the time our sales staff are touring the country, doing demos at schools and so on. Food service is very much a face-to-face business, but 20 years behind from a technology standpoint, so it takes everyone developing personal relationships with school administrators for us to be a success.”
So how does the product work? Wafford pulls up a live feed on a large flat screen and shows us the meal options at a local school for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which nutrition data (salt, fat, protein, calories, carbs, and so on). It’s entertaining and clearly aimed to capture the attention of pupils socializing in line, full of bright colors and appealing icons (pushing those healthy veggies).
The screen is also split into zones, so administrators can use the interface to show scrolling, text-based announcements alongside school spirit items, like live HD video from football games (“Go Huskies!”).
“Administrators can manage all of this from a simple Web-based content management system,” explained Wafford, “depending on their partitioned access. They can login anywhere, make updates, and see it live in the cafeteria instantly, dramatically reducing task time and keeping them USDA compliant.
“It has a robust back-end reporting tool and takes in data from all point-of-sale software and nutri-analyses too, so we automate building their menus for them. It also has built-in intelligence so if some ingredients, say peaches, didn’t get delivered that morning, MealViewer can compile alternative menus, and make changes to the digital signage on the fly.”
The stack is all MSFT SQL server with .NET suite and Web API, and native apps built out for iOS and Android. School districts pay MealViewer an annual fee for a cloud-based managed services model and all front-end/back-end updates are pushed to clients automatically (i.e. no hidden upgrade fees).
So is everyone at MealViewer a local “Augustan”?
“It’s real important to us to recruit locally,” confirmed Wafford. “Luckily, we’re one of the few consumer-facing tech companies that’s not US Army Cyber Command-based, so for people who want to be in our genre of tech, we’re one of very few options. Plus we work for ourselves so people get rewarded and feel invested in the results. And we encourage constant innovation. Every month we set time aside to let developers build what they want, on our dime, just to get creative and try out new stuff. For example, one of our team wanted to integrate with Amazon Alexa and we said ‘Go ahead!'”
If you want to see how a busy parent (who didn’t get time to pack a lunch box) was helped by MealViewer and Echo, check out the video below.
MealViewer is currently installed in more than 10 states, as far west as Washington State, north to Vermont and south to Texas. But as Wafford pointed out, that’s only 11 percent of the market so far, “so there’s plenty of room for growth.”
Any plans to expand and join the tech crowd in Silicon Valley or get a fancy office in mid-town Manhattan? Wafford smiled and shook his head. “It’s a good life here, why would we leave?”
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.
