Galley helps food businesses make more profitable decisions with Flatfile

Galley works to improve the lives of people who work in the food service industry by helping them optimize their kitchen operations. Its goal is to transform the way food professionals work, improve their decision-making, and drive efficiency in the global food system and its clients include restaurants, airline food production facilities, hospitals, college university dining halls, corporate campus dining halls and prepared meal companies.

Complex data import requirements

The process of making food, explains Benji Koltai, co-founder and CEO of Galley, is the same no matter the type of food or how big the operation. Galley offers centralized recipe management, menu planning, food costing, inventory tracking and automated ordering platform that helps people do things like store recipes, scale up recipes, create shopping lists and apply the cost of each ingredient so that the cost of a recipe can be automatically calculated.

This is the "food data" that Galley works with, and it includes recipes with associated imports of recipe data like ingredients, allergens, units of measure and vendor items, and it's complicated. Galley’s customer onboarding process often includes recipe files from clients, CSVs from vendors, allergen information, tax size information and more. Adding to the complexity, multiple vendor items can be associated with a single ingredient, and single ingredients might be used in multiple recipes.

Before Flatfile

Before Flatfile, Galley had CSV importers for internal use, but the team wanted to find a user-friendly platform that would allow customers to import their own data. Its homegrown CSV importers were quickly replaced by the Flatfile Data Exchange Platform.

Galley’s original CSV importers weren’t feature-rich and didn't offer a user-friendly spreadsheet interface that allowed users to change or update cells during the import process. It was also cumbersome to work with and lacked a feedback mechanism that would allow for easy customization. Additionally, the benefit of having a richer UX was of enormous value to Galley. In order to get to a comparable level of user experience, the Galley team would need to devote ongoing developer time to improvements. "It's either delightful or it's not," said Koltai, "And when it's not delightful, that contributes to a sense of dread that has an impact on culture." 

It took approximately ten hours to implement each new importer by hand, so the Galley team decided to weigh the cost of taking the time to build solutions themselves against paying for a solution that included performance improvements, AI enhancements and more.

Flatfile: The ideal solution

Flatfile was exactly what Galley was looking for, offering schemas that declare transforms on data validation and a developer experience that allowed Galley to create the reporters they needed. Galley and its customers now use Flatfile on a daily basis, eliminating the time that the team would have been forced to spend developing and maintaining their own tool.