Inside a restaurant dining room, long before the food arrives, anxiety often does. For millions of guests with food allergies, dietary restrictions, or medical conditions, ordering off a menu can feel less like hospitality and more like risk management.
That tension is exactly what Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Alervio, is trying to remove.
Wood joined Shawn Walchef on Digital Hospitality to talk about how lived experience, health challenges, and emerging regulation are colliding to reshape the future of restaurant menus and guest trust.
Taking Action
For Wood, the problem is deeply personal. Nearly eight years ago, a sudden shift in his health changed the way his body responded to food. What once felt effortless became a daily puzzle of inflammation, joint pain, and exhaustion. After years of testing, he discovered he was allergic to gluten and dairy. Foods he had eaten his entire life were now working against him.
“It came out of nowhere,” Wood explained. “And once you’re living with that reality, you realize how stressful eating out can be.”
That stress is something most operators never experience firsthand, yet they are often responsible for managing it at scale.
The Origin Story
Walchef sees that tension play out daily in his own restaurants. Guests often do not discover allergies until something goes wrong, and there is no routine checkup that flags food sensitivities before a problem occurs. When it does surface, it usually happens at the table, in real time, under pressure.
Wood understood that gap immediately. Alervio did not begin as a restaurant compliance tool. The company originally started as a consumer marketplace concept focused on sourcing allergy-safe products. But early on, Wood realized the real opportunity was not commerce. It was intelligence.
“The interesting part wasn’t selling products,” he said. “It was the profile. The personalization. Understanding how a specific human interacts with food.”
That insight led Alervio to pivot into a software company, building a domain-specific AI trained on nutrition, ingredients, allergens, medications, and disease-related dietary needs. The goal was not to overwhelm operators with more data, but to translate complexity into clarity.
California’s SB 68
That clarity is becoming more urgent as new regulation approaches. California’s SB 68 law, which goes into effect July 1, 2026, will require restaurant groups with 20 or more locations operating in the state to clearly label the top nine allergens on their menus. That includes both digital and printed formats.
Wood views the legislation as both a positive step and a moment of reckoning for operators.
“Anything that helps the allergen community is positive,” he said. “But I also understand why operators hear something like this and feel panic. Restaurants already run on razor-thin margins.”
Rather than treating SB 68 as a compliance burden, Alervio is positioning it as an opportunity to improve hospitality while reducing risk. The company’s first product to market happens to align directly with the law, even though the business was never built solely to satisfy legislation.
The Future In Ordering
At the center of that approach is what Alervio calls a table-side dietary companion. Guests scan or tap at the table and input their specific allergens or dietary needs. The system analyzes the menu in real time, recommends safe items or modifications, and clearly communicates instructions back to the server and kitchen.
It removes guesswork for guests. It removes memory lapses for servers. And it reduces brand risk for operators.
“Imagine a busy server being told someone has a citrus allergy,” Wood said. “They may not even know what that means. That’s where mistakes happen.”
By shifting responsibility from memory to software, Alervio aims to create a calmer, safer interaction for everyone involved.
The platform is currently in pilot stages, with plans to roll out publicly in 2026. Integrations with point of sale systems are a major focus, with Toast and Craftable among the ideal partners. The long-term vision is not to replace existing tools, but to integrate seamlessly into the systems operators already rely on.
“Our job is not to add chaos,” Wood said. “It’s to reduce friction.”
That philosophy was shaped by experience. Wood has built a tech company before and learned early that feasibility matters more than novelty. While almost anything can be built, not every idea fits the reality of an operator’s day-to-day life.
Why We Love Digital Hospitality
Looking ahead, Alervio plans to expand beyond restaurants into schools and healthcare, while also developing new consumer-facing tools that reimagine how people shop and eat based on personal health profiles.
Through it all, Wood remains anchored to the human side of the problem. “There’s a lot of anxiety at the table,” he said. “Sometimes people don’t even want to ask questions because they don’t want to be that person.”
Digital Hospitality exists to surface exactly these moments, where technology, empathy, and operations intersect. For operators navigating new regulations and rising guest expectations, Alervio’s message is simple: safer dining does not have to mean more complexity.
It can mean better hospitality.
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