Birmingham-based startup Croux is making an ambitious bid to solve one of the largest problems facing the hospitality industry today — staffing shortages.
Lindsey Noto, Croux co-founder and executive chef for Sysco of Alabama, said the inspiration came when five like-minded people with experience in the restaurant industry agreed that limited staffing was an issue they wanted to tackle.
Additional founders include Jennifer Ryan, owner of Blueroot; Kenny Kung, CTO of Telegraph; Stewart Price, CFO and operating partner of more than 40 Jimmy John’s locations across the Southeast, and Brett Ables, owner of Feast Bham.
Croux is a platform that matches pre-vetted talent with businesses such as restaurants, hotels, breweries or catering companies that have temporary staffing shortages, providing workers the flexibility of a gig economy approach to working in the food-serving and hospitality industry.
The company, founded in January, entered an Open Beta on the App Store this week.
"We've seen a lot of our workforce transition over to those jobs like being shift shoppers, driving for DoorDash or GrubHub or driving for Uber. So I think the timing was really great," Noto said.
"And not to mention, you know, I think anybody who eats out or has worked in a restaurant or knows someone who runs a restaurant has seen the struggles that everybody is having finding and hiring employees, but it's really not the full-time employees that they necessarily need. It's just those few shifts here and there they need covered."
Businesses pay a monthly subscription fee to post shifts on the app along with required skills and qualifications, and Croux matches shifts with qualified talent. If the shift is accepted, businesses also pay a service fee.
"Right now there's this ecosystem that exists manually in the form of a text message, where when we're short-handed, we just send out a text message or post on Facebook to everybody we know like, 'Hey, can anybody come in and work tonight?' And so we thought it would be really cool to be able to take that ecosystem that exists and automate it through an online platform," Noto said.
Croux is open to anyone, Noto said, from college students to retirees.
"We're able to offer people an opportunity to create an entire career for themselves based on flexibility, choosing when and where they want to work," Noto said.
And the experience of getting a startup off the ground in Birmingham has been rewarding.
"I think that Birmingham loves to support anything that's grassroots and organic, and that's really special. We were really blessed that we happen to live in a community that loves to support the community, and so it just kind of made sense that we're all in this industry and that we happen to be in a space that loves to support local businesses wants to support anything that is of Birmingham," Noto said.
The startup is sponsoring upcoming event Lakeview Hullabaloo and working to get the word out about the Open Beta. Noto said the hope is for Croux to launch ahead of the World Games in July. Future plans include expansion to Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, Auburn and Mobile, hitting a new market every three months and eventually expanding outside the state.
