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Local whiz's FusionPrep app helps restaurant kitchens nationwide

 
Chon Nguyen’s 212 Digital developed the app that’s used in about 300 professional kitchens nationwide.
Chon Nguyen’s 212 Digital developed the app that’s used in about 300 professional kitchens nationwide.
Published May 18, 2015

Chon Nguyen, 32, was a veteran entrepreneur back in high school, fixing folks' printers and connecting peers' PlayStations. After graduation he founded three Tampa-based companies: Digital Aspire, AVIT and 212 Digital, the last of which developed an app called Fusionprep that now powers approximately 300 professional kitchens nationwide. Fusionprep is an iPad-based kitchen tool that helps restaurants go paperless and maintain consistency, with clients like PDQ, World of Beer, Tijuana Flats, Carmel Kitchen and Wine Bar, Lee Roy Selmon's, Rooster & the Till and Besito. We caught up with Nguyen, who grew up in Trinity and New Port Richey, to find out how Tampa Bay diners may benefit from his innovations.

We've started seeing iPad menus in the dining room, but how do they help in the kitchen?

There's been a lot of coverage of tablets in the front of the house, but we power a lot of the kitchens and the back of the house. That story doesn't get told. There hasn't been a real focus on technology in the kitchen.

We mount iPads in the kitchen so the culinary staff is able to make changes to their recipes and then have it all in synch across the different units. They can print food safety labels from there, and all their training videos and photos are available on the iPad. It's like a paperless kitchen solution.

Describe how it works.

Imagine someone at work in the morning and they need to prep a sauce. They pull up the recipe and execute it, then they push the "print label" button, they select who they are and each recipe already has shelf life on it. A label prints on a continuous roll of adhesive. The health department loves it because all the information is there. Typically, kitchen workers are using Sharpies and masking tape.

How does it benefit multi-unit restaurant concepts?

It's for when you're looking to ensure that you have standards and consistency in units that are disparate because you can be agile and adapt more quickly. Plus, it's "green."

For a company like PDQ, which has 40 units, when they used to want to change a recipe, they would have to print, laminate and send out a new sheet to each location. It was hard to ensure that all units were using the same recipe. Now it's always up to date.

Where did the idea come from?

Before AVIT (which manages audio visual technology for restaurants), I used to manage an IT company. We were doing a little bit with restaurants and I walked into a kitchen and saw that they had these messy recipe binders there. A chef said it would be really cool to digitize them. We had this very simple version of what we have today to put your recipes on the iPad, and it kind of caught on.

Kitchen workers aren't always tech-savvy, and many aren't native English speakers. How easy is it to use?

Because the iPad is a consumer product many people are familiar with, there's not a lot of training. Everything is very familiar with them and people buy in pretty quickly. The adoption rates are good, and we support multiple languages.

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What does the future hold?

We continue to innovate. We didn't originally have checklists. We're looking at that work flow and looking at how a chef goes from concept to production. We're trying to be really thoughtful about features we add, but we're toying with the idea of doing a large, 50-inch screen display in kitchens.

Contact Laura Reiley at lreiley@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2293. Follow @lreiley on Twitter.