Thomas Cecil headshot

Innovator of the Week

Thomas Cecil

Co-Founder & CEO of Orchard Systems

Please provide your 30-second pitch about your company.

OrchardBeeLogoThe future of food service is digital. Orchard deploys data automation software, via Point-of-Sale terminals, to increase restaurant profitability. The cost savings to restaurants are astounding. For example, we work with a chain of 42 locations that spends almost $1,000,000 a year on IT. Using Orchard, they will save 70% of that. Our solution offers all the technological benefits found in only the largest national chains, to restaurants of all sizes. We primarily work with multi-unit operators seeking to streamline operations, establish brand continuity, and increase profitability.

Who or what was your best resource for starting your company?

Thomas pitching at the 2017 DEN Entrepreneurs Forum

Dartmouth has been a wonderful environment to start our company in. We started by building a simple online ordering service, OrderOrchard.com, for the Hanover community. Students found the service so exciting that within months our software infrastructure could barely support our user base. The daily traffic forced us to completely rebuild the website, which is when Dartmouth really helped us. Dartmouth’s DALI Lab was instrumental in this software reconstruction. We’ve spent countless hours there building the software with student developers and receiving exceptional engineering advice from, Tim Tregubov, DALI’s technical

Orchard Systems won the 1st Place prize at the 2017 DEN Entrepreneurs Forum

director. Dartmouth’s entrepreneurial network, DEN, also provided much-needed grant funding to accelerate our development cycle.