The restaurants were busy. Customers were lining up, bringing their friends and buying into a fast-casual hummus concept that eventually grew to six locations.
But when Christian Mouysset reviewed the numbers at the end of each month, he kept asking the same question.
Where was the money?
That frustration ultimately led Mouysset, a computer science graduate turned restaurateur, to build Tenzo, a restaurant operations platform designed to bring sales, labor, inventory and other business data together in real time.
From Restaurants to Restaurant Technology
Mouysset and a university friend opened Hummus Brothers in London in 2005. The company grew to six restaurants, approximately 100 employees and hundreds of corporate pop-ups each year.
“Setting up and running a restaurant is the hardest thing I have done and will ever do,” Mouysset said.
As the company expanded, he struggled to understand what was happening across the business quickly enough to make changes. Sales, labor and inventory could all be influenced daily, but the complete financial picture often arrived after the opportunity to act had passed.
“Every month I’d think, ‘Okay, we’re going to be good this month,’” he said. “We’d get to the end of the month, you’d crunch all the numbers, 10 days after the end of the month, and realize, ‘What is this?’”
Restaurant Data Expires Quickly
Mouysset spent much of his time downloading reports and combining information from different systems. By the time the data was ready, he had little energy left to study it or communicate the findings to his team.
Even when the numbers revealed a problem, managers were being asked to remember a shift that may have happened days or weeks earlier.
“The expiry date on data is so fast,” Mouysset said. “My view is real time.”
Tenzo now connects with 120 technology providers, bringing information from point-of-sale systems, labor platforms, inventory tools and other restaurant technology into one place.
Giving AI the Right Context
Tenzo cleans and organizes restaurant data before adding context about the company, its brands and the metrics it uses. Manager logs add details the numbers cannot capture, such as a broken dishwasher, a missed shift or bad weather forcing a patio to close.
“When you look back at it a day later, a week later, a year later, you’re not going to remember what happened that day,” Mouysset said.
Operators can then connect their Tenzo data with AI platforms such as Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT and Gemini. An operations director can summarize reports from multiple locations, while an area manager can identify which restaurants need attention and what to discuss with each general manager.
Start Experimenting Now
Mouysset recently brought approximately 40 restaurant professionals together for a Tenzo “Buildathon.” Some were beginning to experiment with AI, while others were building applications and automating reports.
“The pace of change is insane,” Mouysset said. “Try it because you will learn so much, and it will compound so quickly.”
For Mouysset, having more restaurant data was never the answer by itself. Its value comes from getting the right information to restaurant leaders while they still have time to act.
