A case for building
Hello to Panso, tech to support hospitality led by industry veteran Britney Ziegler.
Last year, a great new spot called Saluhall opened in the center of San Francisco. There’s a lot to love about Saluhall; it’s a food hall, a cooking school, a bar, an event space, a showcase for a handful of local restaurants. It’s bright, cheery, and a little bit unexpected, attached to the Ikea store next door. Mostly, it feels like a nice place to be.
Saluhall opened last spring to significant fanfare. (Eater SF set it up to potentially become, “a big anchoring landmark to spark local citizens back to life.”) But the tech that powers this modern business — the kind of technology that, when deployed properly, stays out of view from consumers — has intentionally remained outside of the spotlight. Until now.
Food halls, in varying formats, have proliferated across the country. They often open with great promise and, in many cases, close with as-yet-unfulfilled potential. This week, for example, New York City’s Citizens Food Hall announced its impending closure, joining a handful of other semi-recent closures in the city. San Francisco lost its own ambitious project, the La Cocina Marketplace, in 2023. But there’s some truth in the spate of food hall openings. Diners clearly want casual, creative, fun, welcoming spaces with options. They want an experience.
Britney Ziegler is founder and CEO of Panso, a just-launched software product for restaurants. Ziegler calls Panso a hospitality and customer relationship management system for hospitality businesses like social clubs, hotels, and, yes, food halls, including Saluhall. For the last year-plus, Ziegler has been working with Saluhall and a handful of other clients to hone the purpose-built platform.
Panso is built to complement a point of sale system and reservations software, pulling information from those platforms and tying it to other valuable customer data — website clicks, event sign-ups, cabana bookings, merchandise purchases, gift cards, and more. (It’s a feature, at least at launch, that Panso helps customize dashboards for its restaurant clients and all of their sales channels, so choose your own adventure here.)
Part of Panso’s strength, Ziegler believes, is that it’s built from scratch in a post-Covid world, meant to solve problems for modern businesses.
“Not having a tech background, I didn’t know how to do it any other way than building from the ground up,” Ziegler told me.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Expedite to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.