When Tomatoes Become Data Points

This is the promise of Peckish, an Amsterdam-based startup that treats restaurant inventory management as an AI problem rather than an accounting headache. Founded in 2023 by former Uber employees Harpreet Singh and Sebastien Pradier, the company raised a pre-seed round of €800,000 in April 2025, raised by the Dutch angel group Arches Capital. It is now preparing a new funding round, planned for early 2026. But the real story is not the funding, it's the market gap they are exploiting.

The €132 billion inefficiency

Restaurants across Europe waste about 15 kilograms of food per person annually, contributing to the 59 million tons of food waste generated in the EU in 2022. The hospitality sector is responsible for about 12% of total European food waste, with an estimated market value of €132 billion disappearing each year. Yet, the core problem is not carelessness, it’s invisibility.

Inventory management in restaurants remains stubbornly manual. Operators often spend 10 to 20 hours a week on stock counting and data entry, equating to a significant portion of a full-time role. In an industry already pressured by post-COVID labor shortages and rising food costs, this represents a structural inefficiency that traditional restaurant management software has not solved.

The global market for restaurant inventory management software, valued at approximately €610 million in 2024, is expected to surpass €1 billion in the early 2030s, with an annual growth of more than 8%. But growth does not necessarily equal innovation.

Most existing solutions digitize the problem without reinventing it. They replace paper checklists with tablet forms. Peckish chose a different approach: eliminate the checklist altogether.

Computer vision as inventory management

Peckish's mobile app uses computer vision to extract inventory data directly from short storeroom videos recorded in a dedicated mobile app. A manager films his shelves, refrigerators, or storage rooms, uploads the clip, and receives structured inventory data synced with his inventory system.

Invoice processing follows the same philosophy. Supplier invoices are photographed via the app, automatically parsed, and matched to historical prices and current stock levels, highlighting discrepancies such as price increases or missing items.

Early versions of Peckish experimented with message-based workflows, but the company has since shifted to a mobile-app-first approach. This shift reflects a broader ambition: to become an operational system of record rather than a lightweight interface layer. The app integrates directly into daily restaurant routines while supporting richer feedback loops, quality checks, and retraining signals for its models.

Under the hood, Peckish trains and deploys multiple computer vision models using cloud-based AI infrastructure. Instead of relying on a single model, the system combines visual recognition, historical sales data, and inventory movement patterns to estimate actual consumption and detect anomalies.

Since launching in the United Kingdom in 2024, Peckish reports having processed thousands of video-based stock counts, saving significant operational time for restaurant teams. Customers typically report reclaiming multiple hours a week previously spent on manual stock tasks while gaining tighter control over variance and waste.

The hospitality execution test

The restaurant technology sector is littered with well-intentioned failures: beautiful interfaces that staff never adopt, advanced analytics that managers don't trust, integrations that break when POS systems are updated.

The backgrounds of Singh and Pradier in Uber's operational teams, combined with close ties to family businesses in hospitality, shape a pragmatic approach to product development. The focus is less on dashboards and more on reducing friction in high-pressure environments where staff turnover is high and margins are thin.

Arches Capital partner Diederik Stolk noted this execution speed: "From quickly acquiring initial customers, to setting up partnerships and building a great product. The team operates at record speed, with a deep understanding of "hospitality operations" [11].

What's next

Peckish is currently preparing a new seed funding round, planned for February-March 2026. The capital will be used to expand production capacities, grow its own dataset of food & beverage inventory images, and support further expansion in the UK, Netherlands, and additional international markets.

This dataset is strategic. Every storeroom video enhances the system’s ability to recognize products under varying lighting conditions, packaging variations, and storage arrangements. Over time, this feedback loop could become a meaningful moat, assuming Peckish can maintain model performance at scale.

That assumption is non-trivial. Computer vision systems in hospitality must cope with constant change: suppliers rename products, kitchens reorganize storage, and new ingredients appear without warning. Accuracy, trust, and elegant failure modes will determine whether Peckish becomes infrastructure or remains a useful but limited tool.

Competition is intensifying. Both established restaurant software vendors and AI-native startups are moving into adjacent territory, offering waste, recording, and inventory automation. The market remains fragmented, and differentiation increasingly revolves around distribution and execution rather than sheer technical capacity.

Regulation may also play a role. In 2025, the European Parliament approved binding targets for food waste reduction, including a 30% reduction in food waste by restaurants and food services by 2030. This could accelerate the adoption of waste recording tools, or invite compliance-driven solutions that integrate directly with existing POS systems.

The fundamental question is not whether AI can improve restaurant inventory management, it already does. The question is whether Peckish can translate that capability into widespread adoption quickly enough to define the category before better-funded competitors converge on similar approaches.

In restaurant technology, the second-best product with superior distribution often wins.

Willem Blom
Founder Dutchstartup.ai