5-Out Emerges from the Kitchen's Spreadsheets, Applying Practical AI to Solve the Restaurateur’s Daily Profitability Puzzle

For the independent restaurateur or multi-unit operator, the daily calculus of profitability is a precarious exercise in guesswork. Each morning presents a series of critical, high-stakes questions: How many pounds of chicken should be prepped? How many servers are needed for the dinner shift? The answers are typically derived from yesterday’s receipts, a manager’s intuition, and a precarious balancing act between waste and stockouts. This operational guesswork, while standard, represents a significant leak in the already razor-thin margins of the food service industry. Every over-prepared ingredient is waste; every under-staffed shift risks service quality; every inaccurate purchase erodes profit. This is the relentless, daily puzzle that defines restaurant ownership; one that legacy software often complicates with dashboards of raw data but provides little executable guidance to solve.

5-Out was engineered not in a Silicon Valley incubator, but in the back office of a real restaurant. In 2013, career restaurateur Branden McRill, struggling with the same margin pressures, partnered with financial expert Mike Marian to build a series of predictive spreadsheets for their establishment, Rebelle. These early models, designed to forecast sales and optimize purchasing, proved so effective they became the intellectual blueprint for a company. The core insight was profound: the greatest value for an operator lies not in another data visualization, but in a prescriptive directive a concrete, actionable instruction like "prep 18 pounds of salmon" or "schedule 3 servers from 5-9 PM." The company’s mission evolved from providing insights to generating automated, optimized work product.

Today, 5-Out functions as an automated operational co-pilot for restaurants. The platform ingests historical sales data, integrates with POS and inventory systems, and applies machine learning to generate accurate demand forecasts. Crucially, it then translates these forecasts into precise, automated outputs: optimized purchase lists for kitchen managers, ideal labor schedules for general managers, and prep lists that align with predicted customer traffic. This closed-loop system forecast to action is designed to replace daily guesswork with data-driven certainty, shifting the operator’s role from reactive problem-solver to proactive optimizer.

The Prescriptive SaaS Revenue Engine

5-Out’s business model is built on a scalable, subscription-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) structure, but its value proposition transcends typical software metrics. It charges for outcomes reduced food waste, optimized labor costs, and increased profitability rather than mere feature access. The platform’s fast, five-minute integration with major POS systems like Toast and Square dramatically lowers the barrier to adoption, allowing rapid deployment and immediate time-to-value. This ease of onboarding is critical for the time-poor restaurant market. Revenue scales directly with the number of locations a client operates, creating a predictable growth path as successful single-unit pilots expand into multi-unit brand-wide deployments. The company’s pricing is positioned as a fraction of the hard cost savings it demonstrably delivers, framing the subscription not as an expense but as a high-ROI investment with a clear and rapid payback period.

Monetizing the Elimination of Operational Waste

The company’s primary commercial lever is the direct monetization of waste reduction. In an industry where food and labor can consume 60-70% of revenue, even marginal improvements flow straight to the bottom line. 5-Out’s AI-driven forecasts are engineered to shrink this cost center. By predicting demand with high accuracy, the platform enables “just-in-time” purchasing and prep, directly attacking the industry’s staggering food waste problem. Simultaneously, its labor scheduling tool aligns staff hours precisely with forecasted customer traffic, eliminating both over-staffing (a direct wage drain) and under-staffing (a risk to service and sales). For the restaurant owner, the value is quantified in saved dollars: fewer spoiled ingredients, lower weekly payroll, and increased sales from better service during optimally staffed periods. This tangible, weekly financial impact creates extreme customer stickiness and drives powerful word-of-mouth referrals within the tight-knit restaurant community.

The Operator-First Product Development Flywheel

A formidable competitive advantage is 5-Out’s foundational DNA of restaurant operations. Unlike tech-first startups, its leadership and product team are populated by former restaurateurs, chefs, and managers who have personally faced the problems the software solves. This ensures the platform is built for the chaotic, high-pressure reality of a restaurant kitchen, not a theoretical ideal. Features are designed to require minimal training and generate immediate, trustable outputs. This operator-first philosophy builds immense credibility in a market skeptical of complex tech solutions. It creates a product development flywheel where real-world usage in partner restaurants feeds directly back into refining the machine learning models, making the forecasts more accurate and the prescribed actions more reliable, which in turn drives higher customer retention and advocacy.

The Integrated Ecosystem over Point Solutions

5-Out strategically avoids being a single-point solution for forecasting or labor. Instead, it offers an integrated operations hub that unifies demand prediction, purchasing, prep, and scheduling. This holistic approach is a key differentiator in a market filled with specialized tools for inventory, labor, or analytics. By providing a single source of truth and automation across these interconnected functions, 5-Out reduces the cognitive load and administrative burden on managers. It eliminates the need to reconcile data between disparate systems, a common pain point that leads to errors and wasted time. This integration creates a more seamless and valuable user experience, increasing platform dependency and making it far more difficult for a client to replace 5-Out with a collection of cheaper, disconnected point solutions.

The restaurant industry’s path to sustainable profitability in an era of rising costs and wage pressures is not through raising prices alone, but through surgical precision in operations. Technology that merely reports on past performance is no longer sufficient; the winners will leverage AI to prescribe future action. 5-Out’s journey from kitchen spreadsheet to intelligent platform exemplifies this shift. By focusing relentlessly on generating the exact, actionable instructions that drive daily profitability, it is proving that the most powerful technology in a hands-on industry is one that removes guesswork, empowers staff with clarity, and consistently delivers the two things every restaurateur craves: more money in the register and more time to focus on the guest.

Branden McRill, Co-Founder + CEO

“We don’t just show you the data; we give you the exact list. Our job is to turn forecasted demand into the specific tasks that put more profit on your bottom line, every single day.”