From Personal Pain to Platform: Reinventing Food Transparency with Dylan McDonnell

🍽️ Growth Capital Podcast — Episode 69 🍽️ What happens when a personal health challenge exposes a massive market opportunity? In this episode of the Growth Capital Podcast, host Justin Dixon sits down with Dylan McDonnell, Founder & CEO of Foodini, a dietary intelligence platform helping restaurants communicate clearly with customers who have food allergies or dietary restrictions. After living with celiac disease for most of his life, Dylan experienced firsthand how difficult it was to navigate restaurant menus safely. What began as a personal frustration evolved into a startup tackling one of the restaurant industry's most overlooked infrastructure problems: accurate dietary and allergen data. Today, Foodini works with restaurants to ingest menu, recipe, and supplier data to create personalized menus that tell customers exactly what they can — and cannot — eat. With new allergen disclosure regulations emerging across the U.S., Dylan explains why this problem is becoming not just a customer experience issue, but a compliance and operational necessity. 🔍 In this episode, they cover: Why nearly half the U.S. population has a dietary restriction or allergy • How new regulations are forcing restaurants to rethink menu transparency • Why restaurants lose entire groups of customers when dietary needs aren't addressed • The hidden data problem inside restaurant operations • How AI is helping scale allergen and dietary intelligence • Lessons from building a startup around a personal problem 🚀 Whether you're a founder, investor, or operator, this conversation reveals how regulation, data infrastructure, and consumer demand are converging to create a new category in restaurant technology. Connect with Dylan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylan-mcdonnell-a5787574/ Website: https://foodini.co/ Email: [email protected] 🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch here on YouTube. 👉 Subscribe, like, and comment: Would you trust a restaurant more if its menu clearly showed what you can safely eat?