Food Service Platforms Meal Ticket, MarketMan Merge

Meal Ticket, a business management solution for the food service industry, and MarketMan, an inventory management platform for restaurants, have an announced a merger backed by a $100 million investment from the growth equity firm PSG.

The companies announced their merger Wednesday (Jan. 12), saying it would join their software and provide “more automated, efficient interactions between food service distributors and restaurant operators.”

Founded in 2011, Meal Ticket’s platform offers distributors “customer-first” insights to help better serve clients and increase sales.

MarketMan, launched in 2013, lets restaurants manage orders and inventory, monitor the cost of food and analyze back-of-the-house operations to save time and drive profitability.

The two companies say they will continue to operate their existing products while developing new offerings together, and plan to “significantly” expand Tel Aviv and New York office staff, with a special focus on the engineering and product development teams based in Israel.

“Meal Ticket and MarketMan are natural complements to each other’s businesses,” said Wink Jones, CEO of Meal Ticket. “Meal Ticket analyzes over $40 billion in supply chain transactions from its food distributor customers, while MarketMan has a significant footprint of over 7,000 paying restaurant locations around the globe buying from thousands of distributors.”

MarketMan CEO Noam Wolf added that the deal was a “unique opportunity” to continue serving restaurants, “but also accelerate the development of the platform.”

“With significant new investment capital from PSG, an experienced growth investor in B2B SaaS and payments, as well as significant resources and expertise from Meal Ticket, we will be able to push forward a variety of exciting product initiatives for years to come,” Wolf continued.

Read more: Magic Moments’ Hasten the Inevitability of Embedded Online Payments

PYMNTS spoke to Wolf last year as part of a roundtable discussion about embedded payments. He spoke about the realization that embedded payments, tied to a range of other restaurant management tools, presented a great revenue opportunity.

As Wolf put it, some entrepreneurs focus on building better horses, not on upgrading to cars. In other words, they’re thinking about working with the tools they have, rather than imagining what they could have.