The home life element as well as doing the jobs and everything else elements and and where do

you find time to get those healthy meals in there where do you find time exactly I mean
especially if you are on campus or in your workplace you have a back-to-back meetings or word
however much time to think about your food and especially if you want to follow the healthy
diet to have a local fresh affordable food or if you are vegetarian you won't have a more options
is not always easy yeah and when you do find those options out there glory the options are very
still a very the same over and over again there's no real change to them so there's no real
motivation to try something and change your your pattern seating at all that don't do that again
why did you that again and I think the other thing you talk about is the accessibility of it like and
when you do find that great option that there's not great options not in the vicinity of where
you're working it's sometimes harder to get ahold of it because gotta leave the office you gotta
leave the campus to do something and you might not have the time to do that so I think we
might have someone here today that might be able to help us with this challenge I think that
our gas through Monroe CU cofounder of up meals can help us about

accessibility to the healthy fresh affordable food let's welcome drew Monroe

we're so excited to learn all about out meal I think is going to be we're going to talk about a
little bit but we'd like to know a little bit more about you drew first and what brought you here
where were you at in this stage how did you come to up meal

Background :

well thank you so much for having me on the show very happy to be here a little bit about
myself I started my career as a professional chef that's actually my background I went to
culinary school right here in Vancouver and prior to launching up meals a couple of years ago I
actually ran one of the larger catering companies here in Vancouver for more than a decade so
my my background is very much on the food side and and what we realized running a very
traditional corporate catering style of businesses that you know the ways that large companies
fed their employees the ways that people access to healthy food was radically inefficient and it
was a ripe for innovation and so we came up with this idea for up meals and that we launched a

about:

couple of years ago to use some amazing software technology and also a hardware piece with
our smart vending machines to make healthy food accessible 24/7

and that's really what you list is all about can you just a little bit explain about your product
should I cook it at home no it's already

so everything that up meals does is is all about convenience so we make ready to eat delicious
meals that are all designed made by real humans real amazing chefs and nutritionists but
empowered by technology so we use AI and we gather preferences from the environments that
we service so students employees or customers and we turn that into customized Wellness
solutions that are funneled through our production environment they're also branded with
customized CFI compliant labeling you know with all the nutritional facts and allergens and all of
the dietary information that was a massive gap in how traditional caterers operated if you've
been through you know a buffet before you see you know it's a it's a mushroom chicken but
you're not seeing exactly what's in it So what happens normally is that you know will get frantic
calls from event organizers saying someones deathly allergic to this is this in the food so we've
solved that problem using our technology with our labeling automation and then what we really
saw is a massive shift in how offices and how universities and how really work environments
were evolving people weren't working normal nine to five hours anymore they weren't working
normal Monday to Friday hours so accessibility became a challenge so we developed our AI
powered smart vending machines which are designed to serve beautiful fresh healthy food 24
hours a day and we then figured out a way to deploy those in those environments in universities
and offices even in residential buildings to make our meal products iaccessible whenever they
were needed

so hot meals really started as a way to solve some of the pain points in corporate catering and
it's evolved into now this this scalable smart vending platform that can service customers
employees or students 24 hours a day seven days a week

Food and technology :

so the value the value on what you're offering is not save the food it's the technology to figure
out what ingredients to pull together to make healthier choices exactly I mean don't get don't
get me wrong I mean I always say in my you know when I'm talking to people are presented the
company that like you know we could have all the amazing technology in the world none of it
matters if the food sucks the food still has to be delicious it has to be awesome and fresh and
beautiful and unique but what we're doing is essentially you know using the technology to
automate creative process is like R and D label design which are huge pain points and
bottlenecks for most traditional catering companies or restaurants or ghost kitchens or meal
delivery apps and were then able to produce that scale and then the accessibility pieces the
awesome smart vending machines which which make those products accessible which is
another big challenge you know the way that meal delivery companies operated is radically
inefficient at crazy stat as we were preparing for our deployments of our smart vending
machines at UBC they shared with us that even during COVID there were up to 2 to 3000 trips
by meal delivery apps up to UBC per day so that's you know delivering one pad table to one
student and going all the way back down from UBC back to wherever they came from so not
only is that radically inefficient from a business perspective it's also terrible for the environment
the carbon emissions from a single vehicle going up and down for one meal so we're not only
able to service that needed a more efficient and cost effective and Safeway were able to make it
accessible around the clock where most options on campus or most options around you know
big offices will close at a certain time ours are available 24 hours a day

who's your target client so you can what I've heard most is about single people that you're
working working people for example not is not a very good thing for family or my right well for
for our smart vending platform that we're deploying I mean there's a wide range of uses where
we're seeing the most early success with that platform is certainly an on university campuses
and Ann because there's just such a huge unmet need you know if students are studying or
working or doing any activities on campus after most of the facilities closed there's really no
option for them to access healthy food without either leaving the campus or ordering from an
expensive meal delivery app so you know bringing those safe healthy convenient options to the
campuses to the students has been extremely well received an extremely successful and that's
the market were planning to take take on but also there's opportunities in corporate
environments for offices there's opportunities and fitness focused environments 24 hour gyms
where it just makes total sense to finish your workout and get a great healthy meal and I think
what you're referencing too is as is we also have a way to reach customers at home so you know
this has its own direct to consumer e-commerce platform so we're actually shipping you know
healthy curated meal subscription boxes directly to individual consumers all across Canada and
that's leveraging that same technology so users are able to input their preferences their goals
their dietary restrictions and our system will curate a meal plan for them based on those
preferences

so answer your question you know we serve meal plans ranging from two to five days users can
actually have multiple subscriptions for different members in their household who you know
not everybody eats the same thing right so some people might be on a plant based diet some
people might want you know all the meats and all the things and so that's possible using our
platform under the same account so that's how we address it for individual consumers

brilliant my friend brilliant customization personalization to the to the Max you know and that's
it's such a one of the things that

COVID has accelerated is that you know people are expecting consumers are expecting food to
be pretty much instantly accessible to them right and that's been accelerated by cobit and
they're even expecting now that those meals are those products are going to be in some way
personalized or customized to their preferences or goals that's actually becoming an
expectation of the consumer you know build your own an customize your own these are things
that consumers expect and want so you know in our in our experience that whoever whoever
succeeds at that in that space and does the best job at that wins right Ann wins that customer
because as I'm sure you know if you're ordering from the same set menu and set products you
get bored pretty quickly So what chef school menu fatigue so you you you tire and you got to
keep things fresh so having a platform that makes that process automated is you know what we
feel is our biggest advantage to not only us operationally but also to the user who is getting a
great experience with

explain about how your vending machine is working so is a is a name of the meal that I have to
choose or ingredients or how does it work at all yeah so it's a refrigerated machine designed to
serve fresh food think of it the easiest way to describe it is think of a four foot tall iPhone
strapped to the front of an awesome beautiful sleek bending machine and so you are navigating
an experience very similar to what you probably used to on like a meal delivery app or any sort
of platform that you're used to using and you're able to you know click into an item say a
healthy beautiful untradeable you're able to view beautiful photos view all the caloric
information the macro nutritional information at a glance before you purchase it all of the
ingredients all of the common allergens and browse that experience just like your browsing on a
website or a retail store but it's a vending machine if you want any of those items you're able to
simply tap a card for payment and it's dispensed in eight seconds or less so you know you're
getting that game against you also the thing that's really important that you know when we
were going through the process of getting our solution approved by all the health regulatory's is
that you know it's a sealed secured environment even when you're shopping at a grocery store
or cafe you don't know how many people have picked up that salad bowl before you're going by
it right and this is a a sealed secured environment it's dispensed just for you and no one else can
access or physically touch those products until it's dispensed to you so you know from a safety
perspective from an information perspective and from a convenience perspective our solution
really is unmatched in terms of what else is available in the market

but these are all pre packaged meals there in these in vending machines is the is the is the
element and I don't know drew where you're planning to go with it but are you able to leverage
the data of customers are coming be using this element to get closer back to your AI elements
meaning getting back to how do I get even that customer that customization personalization
back into those machines

yeah exactly it's a really important point Dave because that that's that's what makes the
technology and the hardware is awesome and it's a great experience but what really makes
up meals unique about what we're doing is leveraging the data we're collecting that through
those interfaces so in a normal vending machine world you know your chips in your pop
you're getting a very you know little boring CSV spreadsheet at the end of the day that says
hey you sold you know 2822 bags of Doritos right annular going OK like cool maybe I'll sell
more Doritos tomorrow right with ours it's where because it's our own cloud computing
module connecting directly to our software we're getting every single possible touchpoint so
not only what people bought but what they viewed and didn't buy or what they're spending
time browsing just like you would be tracking for a website or an analytics platform were then
able to use that data to drive the decision making on future product iterations optimal
stocking times optimal product configurations

I'll give you a real use case so that's a very high level at UBC we're realizing that you know
students were responding at a certain time of day and we were absolutely selling out of all of
our wraps we make these beautiful healthy fresh sandwich wraps that the students went crazy
for so we said OK this is an unmet need we have a market opportunity we need more wraps we
plugged that into our automation software within a week had developed 4 to 5 brand new rap
concepts that met the needs of the popular items funneled that through our labeling
automation funnel that through our production environment and they were in the machines
within seven days right so we're able to be really agile in terms of how we respond to it so from
the user perspective you know that if you're responding to certain items the products in that
machine are actually tailored to your preferences into what you're purchasing you can almost
think of it kind of like how it's like Netflix on a vending machine you know like when you are
responding to products when customers are interacting it's displaying customized information
and products based on what's performing well in that machine

that is fantastic but you need partnership right you need the partnership for are wending
machine or do you just rent them

that's where all you know a lot of the back end work happened over the last two years building
this platform so you know where where there's a number of components that we have sourced
and compiled into a unique combination of of hardware and technologies that is unique to
appeals so you know those are assembled for us in sort of an OEM relationship by the
distributor so the parts are compiled there assembled and we place a single order for a
complete unit and then from up meals and once that machine is ready to be installed we
connect it to our cloud cloud app and we push the interface and set it up for that specific
environment which then connects to kind of the main the main software hub so for us that
that's really when you're when you're building anything that has a hardware component you
know getting that rock solid is really super important you know we we leveraged alot of North
American suppliers for a lot of our core components which has allowed us to largely
circumnavigate a lot of the supply chain issues especially from overseas a lot of the shortages
and it also allows us to be really confident in scaling our platform anytime you're building
something completely completely custom from an engineering level an outsourcing from
overseas you reach a point where maybe that suddenly that factory says OK well sorry we can't
do anymore 40 or hey I need 1000 machines but there's no way we can make and your business
is completely cut off at the knees so for us we made sure to leverage really high volume strong
reputable suppliers for the base components and then we've leveraged our software to make
them smart connect them and make them up meals essentially

how do you make your end users the place that your rent your machine is that how you and
make them loyal so the model that out meals has is up meals actually owns the hardware so
those those those smart vending machines are up meals assets and the reason for that is is that
that allows us full control of the experience and the product and we don't want our partners
you know our universities are our our our corporate partners that we have these machines
installed in to really be feeling like they're they're taking on a brand new business that they have
to manage that's really what we've leveraged the software in the technology to do on ourselves
so we wanted to feel like a partnership with the environment where in the example of a
university this is adding tremendous value for the students it's solving a massive pain point for
university and making sure that students have access to healthy food whenever they need it
added affordable price so that's the partnership level where leveraging their anwer also then
you know we really engage with a lot of the marketing teams for the UBC and SFU to make sure
that we're coming out together and helping it be successful together but mills owns the
platform we own the technology in every machine we install is is an up meals machine that we
own and manage ourselves and then drew
can you can you leverage like from this collection of data that you're gaining and elements can
you leverage like GPS software and things like that to help future customers find your machines

when do you start to get to that loyalty element absolutely so in our road map now that we're
not meals is growing our network of machines were really having clarity on which segments to
target as the university segments open up and corporate segments open up so we are currently
building our own mobile application which will have all of those functions which were very
excited for so you know that's going to be you know using having leveraging the technology to
find machines near you if you can believe it will be able to actually have users select a machine
that's near them or favorite a machine that's on their campus they use they can actually view
the real-time inventory of that machine actually reserve in order products right so then you
walk up to a machine you're not worried you know if you in an office of go Bob from accounting
like sniping that last like good salad bowl from you it's there it's reserved for you and then you
walk up and and and you scan a code in the machine it'll know that you've paid for it and
dispense the item so so those are sort of the functionalities which then allow us to do things
like loyalty points and rewards you know pushing notifications hey we've got these new
products in your favorite machine go check it out so it allows us to engage with the users in a
Martin I really more meaningful way now that we're growing our network of machines does it

also lead towards that I don't know if you thought about this I will it but also leads towards the
gamification of it like all of a sudden you start to pin other machines against each other which
one has a better selection today and you start running around trying to find I like the beach of
this one

yeah absolutely I think that's it leverages what meals does really well because one of the cool
things about our platform is that each machine actually is a little bit different in terms of what
stock because of the data collection so even the machines at the same campus we have two
machines at QVC two machines at SFU as an example the machine product mix up is actually it's
slightly different and that's because the data is telling us different things that students in those
different locations are responding to different products so that's really cool and now now as a
student if you want to know where am I going right to get the meal that I want you have that
access at your fingertips which is really awesome

it is fantastic business model I guess an what is your necessary activities what are they for day
today we have a few a

few key elements of our business so you know we one of the main differences that separates us
from other vending operators who largely are stocking third party items you know pop and
chips and sodas and whatever else we actually make the vast majority of the product so there's
a production element we have a fully has of certified production facility hasip is the highest
level of food safety attainable it's it's like what a hospital or a large commercial manufacturing
would use with the hair Nets and the full garb you you probably seen the pictures it's it's not a
it's not a restaurant kitchen or ghost kitchen it's at a higher level of safety which is required for
us to sell our food into these large commercial environments and so that's one critical activity is
the production which we run that route to 24 hour a day off 24 hour day operation we run our
production at night and we run our prep and packaging and pick and pack during the date we
also have our logistics and operations so up meals actually services all of the machines and all of
our other clients with their own vehicles our own team around driver and then of course we
have our other administrative duties so we have our own marketing and sales teams and all the
office and administrative duties of running the company but those are the three core elements
for a

do you see an opportunity drew to move more like you you were in the catering business before
do you see an opportunity to scaling out to support other business like a beta B model where
you're sporting coffee shops and small business elements where they don't have the facilities to
deliver this can element but still want to deliver that type of service yeah an actually did that

that's how up meal started before we even had the smart vending element fully fleshed out We
actually started doing kind of leveraging the early stages of our technology doing custom
products for retail brands for offices so you know if you visited any of the 15 like body energy
locations around town most of those products that are served in those stores are up meals
designed products that have been leveraged through our technology so so you know we service
some big players like body energy spud and fresh prep and some of the big players and they
don't have as you said they don't have the capacity or the wherewithal to to play their own
fresh food production environment so we're giving them the ability to sell a product to their
customers using our system so we are doing that and what we're actually really excited for now
that offices are starting to open up as we've actually built out sort of a modern office catering
hybrid that we can deploy as sort of a corporate catering replacement so you know this is
outside of the realm of the smart vending but if you're working at an office environment you're
getting again that beautiful customized experience you're getting a fully compliant CFI compliant
meal it's individually packaged meal and sustainable packaging so you're able to get a great
experience that safe that's modern and that's ready whenever you need it and we're actually
quite excited about the potential of that that vertical in our business

that is fantastic what are the most important costs that you have well any food operation I
mean your to big ones always food cost and labour so you know we we are quite efficient in the
sense of how we built our model is more akin to a a production line a model versus a traditional
restaurant or catering model and we view that as we have large quantities of products being
produced in a single run which is more efficient than running you know let's use a ghost kitchen
as a model where your you got all this prep components ready and you're waiting for that little
tablet to to beat that you to make that one bolt you're not exactly sure how much you're going
to be selling that day it depends on how many orders come in with us we're only producing
based on actual orders that are created in our system so we're able to more accurately forecast
and manage the production environment so and then again on the food cost side again it's
always something that needs to be managed extremely closely one of the most important
functions of our custom software that we built is the ability to use dynamic supplier pricing so
we're actually leveraging an edi and data interface with a large vendor like a GFS or Cisco so
we're talking to their platform and pulling dynamic pricing so if for example you know the price
of quality flower quadruples because of some you know situation that's happening in where
that where that product is being grown were able to see that respond to that an modify
products accordingly to keep our costs like

wow that's that is absolutely beautiful drew and I think probably in that kind of modeling you
probably are able to create more of a sustainable food source element then for reduce the
amount of waste that's happening in order to meet the market need

yeah I mean one of the one of the things they that drove me absolutely nuts about running my
previous business in catering was the sheer amount of food waste that is generated at a large
catering event a traditional event that you probably all been to a million times with e-mail
passed around canapes zenan buffets and Ann just food food out right 'cause you really think
about it it's like what is what is every caterers worst nightmare and it's running out of food right
so like you rented a food and suddenly like your reputation is gone everyone's angry everyones
upset table six didn't get beef and Table 7 didn't get desserts to eat you bring more than you
need and the and that's the problem with that model is that is that once the food is out and set
up you can't do anything with it it's been out it's been exposed to air to people to people filing
through so the food bank won't take it you can't donate it and essentially about 20 to 25% of all
the food that is served at every event is literally thrown in the garbage right like dumped in the
garbage so you know and again like this is an ugly part of the events industry the catering
industry that you know it's not really talked about but it happens so literally at at the end of
events there are people that come in and clean up and go back to the kitchen and literally are
scraping hundreds of pounds of food literally into the garbage right and so this just drove me
nuts and you know I called around for months and months and years and years trying to find a
source for this and no one would take it because it's not safe and so without meals because
everything is individually packaged it sealed it safe it served to one person were able to re
purpose any surplus products from our operation unsold meals from our smart vending
machines instantly in the same day through partnership so we use a great company called
Vancouver food runners which is a fantastic not-for-profit here in the local the local city so they
actually will come and collect four times a week any surplus products from our kitchen these
are like unsold meals or Sir plus is in production and re purpose those instantly to local charities
and groups that are in need so truly it's a it's a zero food waste operation that we run

so with that in mind do you see that being the future for this element do you see more of this
element instead of you know I just said that the large events elements do you see more of this
element of like let's package it so that if it's not sold it still can be distributed elsewhere

I hope so is the answer to that I hope that is the way that we go you know everybody got really
used to eating at a containers in the last two years raytown and ordering from meals delivery off
so like even the idea now and I know things are opening up which is great fantastic but even the
idea now of you know like crowding around a buffet of with 100 people and sharing utensils it
kind of kind of weirds me out right and it was always kind of why don't we do that in the first
place and it's still not going to be a thing for the foreseeable future maybe ever a lot of these
large cafeteria style operations that these companies were running are actually permanently
shutting down and their shifting their operations to either a grab and go model you know a
micro market sort of a model Aurora vending model so you know there's a there's a really
unique position there where you know we can add value for these companies and for these
groups and that's really what we're trying to to do without meals is to to add value and add
safety at the same time

so true go on this journey and even into cova times you know what kind of challenges has up
meals faced throughout yeah I think and it's really important question I think you know one of
the comments I get often is like oh it's in a vending machine like you guys must have you guys
are a coby business like you guys you guys must be killing it right but like when you really think
of it we've enjoyed we've enjoyed success but the platform that we built like my experience was
in corporate catering right and we knew and we still obviously still believe that this is going to
be the future of how companies are going to feed their employees and then what were the first
things to shut down at the start of coalbed right everybody worked from home so none of the
off so so we built this platform and you know within a few a few months your target
demographic is completely wiped out right so you know and so yeah that was a significant
challenge so you know we continued building up we started to service these LG BT contracts in
the home delivery and grocery delivery space which turned out to be a great vertical for us we
explored new avenues for the smart vending we installed in residential condo buildings 'cause
we figured hey everybody's working from home let's go to the home right and give them an
awesome option and then as universities and places opened up we we we went back full steam
ahead on installing those deployments which have been very successful so you know there
there were some significant challenges both operationally and also with you know our
marketing strategy that were impacted by covidien and thankfully you know those are starting
to be lessons now that we're coming and opening up

So what do you see the future challenges being for for your business and what do you think the
opportunities are

I think the future challenges for us I mean we always envisioned up meals being a global
company one of the things for me personally that I felt II love the creative element of running a
catering business but catering is so localized there's no it's a highly fragmented market you
know there's 70% of the operators are running $5 million or less revenue companies and there's
no way you can take a catering company pick it up from Vancouver and drop it somewhere else
and say Chicago and have it be a huge success it's dependent on the local infrastructure so for
us we wanted to build a platform that could be a global company and those are going to be the
biggest challenges as we start to operate as we're having success here in Vancouver Ravens
success here in BC if we wanted to have a smart vending machine in every university campus in
North America an really when you think of it why shouldn't there be how would we execute
that and how would we be able to maintain that meals level of quality that were known for here
so those are the big challenges that we're executing on as a team that we're strategizing on as a
team and I think those would be fun challenges for perhaps the students that are listening to
this podcast