FOBOH

FOBOH is an AI platform that simplifies F&B wholesale trade. The company helps its customers scale profitably, reduce waste, and get paid faster. The wholesale industry today faces a technology deficit, leading to fragmented data across different channels and systems that are not fit for purpose. Sales teams lose valuable time re-keying orders from email, SMS, and WhatsApp, and these manual processes lead to errors that erode margins, degrade the customer experience (delivery errors and returns), and prevent companies from scaling profitably. Accurate forecasting can be challenging owing to unstructured data, which leads to increased food waste and carbon emissions. Rising costs and labor shortages further compound these problems.

FOBOH’s products are designed to drive efficiency in order management, deploy data and analytics for growth, and enable secure digital payments. FOBOH’s first product is an AI-powered omni-channel order ingestion system that reduces error-prone manual labor and enhances the customer experience without changing the way a customer’s clients interact with them when placing an order. The company will also enable digital payments and data centralization for resource management. This will ultimately enable FOBOH’s vision to create a smarter, simpler, and more sustainable wholesale ecosystem. Headquartered in Sydney, Kshitija Deshmukh (CEO) and Beth Lovell (CPO) founded FOBOH in May 2023.

The founding team has deep domain expertise in the food and beverage wholesale industry and has worked together for years at Woolworths, the largest retail supermarket chain in Australia, where they experienced the problem firsthand.Kshitija, a computer engineer by training, was previously Head of Commercial Partnerships (B2B Food) at Woolworths, where she led cross-functional teams to drive strategy, revenue generation, and cost optimization across the E2E value chain. Beth, a product leader, was previously Head of Digital for Woolworths B2B, where she led the automation of complex manual processes, delivering data and digital products for wholesale businesses.