Sauce

Restaurants sell on DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub at whatever price they typed into the menu once, and then leave it there. Delivery demand is not that steady — it moves by daypart, by day of week, by weather, by store — and every point of margin on a delivery order is already thin. Sauce is the service that keeps the prices moving.

What it does

Sauce connects to a restaurant group's delivery platforms and to the POS or aggregator sitting behind them, pulls in menus and the order stream, and works out what each item should cost right now. Price changes then go back out to every platform on a schedule, store by store, without anyone opening a merchant portal.

Highlights

• Priced across the delivery stack. DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub for the storefronts; Toast, Revel, Square, Olo, Otter, Chowly and ItsaCheckmate for the POS and aggregator layer — with new integrations built out when a client runs something not on the list.
• An operator's dashboard, not a black box. Stores, menus and items are managed in one place, promotions run alongside the pricing rules, and the reporting compares what actually happened against the counterfactual — sales and revenue with Sauce switched on versus off.
• Where there's no API, there's a browser. Several platforms never exposed a way to update a price programmatically, so those integrations log into the merchant portal in a headless browser and make the change the way a human would. Scheduled operations route API-based and browser-based platforms down separate paths so one flaky portal can't hold up the rest.
• Built to run unattended. Pullers, schedulers and workers keep menus and orders in sync, health checks watch the integrations, and emailed reports land in the operator's inbox rather than waiting to be discovered in the app.

Stack

React and TypeScript on the front end, with a Next.js marketing and onboarding site alongside it. Two backends: Django and Python for the pricing side, and Node with Apollo GraphQL and MongoDB for the application, the integrations and the scheduling. Puppeteer drives the portal-based platforms.

"When it comes to the future of the restaurant industry, there's no such thing as too much Sauce." — Forbes