CEO Daniel Baven says food service is heading for its “iPhone moment.” Retailers will become kitchens, restaurants will become experiences—and the entire food economy will shift to an IP-powered platform.
Five years ago, Daniel Baven noticed something nobody in hospitality wanted to see: the restaurant industry wasn’t just struggling—it was quietly losing its structural footing. Fuel revenues were collapsing for convenience retailers, tobacco was in free fall, and global supermarkets were searching for a new category to anchor their business. What they all found was food.
Retailers were training their eyes on the one thing they had never seriously attempted to own at scale: freshly prepared meals.
“It’s a tidal wave,” Baven said during our conversation. “The restaurant platform is dying. Retail is coming for this space—everywhere, all at once.”
It was in that realization that Noahs was born: a company built not to compete with restaurants, but to build the digital, operational, and distribution infrastructure that will allow retailers to become the world’s largest food providers. And for brands, Noahs offers something even more radical: a way to “upload” their identity, recipes, and operating manuals into a system that can deploy them across thousands of retail locations.
Baven calls it the “Spotify of food”—a comparison that’s grown from an analogy into something closer to a blueprint.
The Shift No One Saw Coming
The core idea behind Noahs isn’t simply cloud kitchens reimagined. It’s the belief that the next frontier for food isn’t restaurants or delivery apps—it’s retailers.
Retailers already have the locations. They already have the labor. They already have reasons to attract foot traffic. What they’ve lacked is a culinary operating system, a brand ecosystem, and digital infrastructure to turn stores into full-fledged food hubs.
“Retailers want recognizable food brands,” Baven explained. “They want the IP. They want a system where those brands can plug directly into their business without hiring hundreds of chefs, designers, architects, and operations teams.”
In Noahs’ world, the retailer becomes the operator—and the restaurant transforms into an IP owner.
Just as artists upload music to Spotify and generate revenue wherever listeners are, food brands will be able to “upload” their manuals, recipes, and media kits to Noahs’ platform—and retailers will deploy them at scale, paying for the rights to run them across their physical network.
“When that happens,” Baven said, “food becomes digitized. Not the product—the infrastructure.”
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The Name: Why ‘Noahs’?
With a laugh, Baven admitted the brand’s origin story is “a little romantic.”
“We saw the tidal wave coming. We wanted to build an ark to save great food traditions and great brands — and carry them to the other side.”
A Full Operating System, Not a Kitchen Strategy
The first thing Noahs learned? You can’t graft hospitality onto retail. You have to rebuild it from the ground up.
Retailers often lack hospitality-grade technology stacks. They lack systems designed for multibrand menus, real-time delivery integration, and omnichannel fulfillment. They don’t have the cultural muscle memory of running kitchens.
“No retailer wants a six-month integration project,” Baven said. “They want something that works with Wi-Fi.”
So Noahs built an entirely self-contained OS:
- menu management
- aggregator connections
- real-time BI dashboards
- financial reporting
- inventory systems
- pickup lockers and kiosks
- omnichannel order routing
- brand configuration tools
- digital storefronts
A retailer doesn’t become a hospitality operator; Noahs becomes the hospitality layer on top of retail.
And because Noahs controls the whole loop, nothing “breaks” in the way legacy systems break. Issues are superficial—such as UX changes and menu adjustments—not existential.
Retail’s iPhone Moment
When Baven talks about 2026, he sees a collision of forces reshaping the entire category: robotic mobility, drone delivery, aggregator expansion, and consumer demand for freshness.
“Retail is about to go through its iPhone moment,” he said. “What the iPhone did to phones, retailers will do to food.”
That moment isn’t just about technology—it’s about mindset:
- Retailers will become producers, not just sellers.
- Restaurants will become premium, experiential spaces.
- Food brands will become IP companies.
- Delivery platforms will expand deeper into suburbs, where retailers already dominate.
“When that shift happens,” Baven said, “home cooking will start to decline. It will simply become cheaper, faster, and easier for consumers to get great food made for them.”
The question is no longer whether this shift is coming; it is whether we are prepared for it. It’s how fast—and who will control the infrastructure beneath it.
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Reinventing Authenticity When the Restaurant Is Invisible
One of the most common criticisms of multibrand kitchen models is that customers can’t “see” the restaurant—they only see the screen.
But Noahs flips the script: the brand becomes physical inside the retailer.
“We design the retail environment so consumers walk into a food court, not a gas station,” Baven said. “There will be real brand presence, real staff, real design. Authenticity becomes physical—just in a smaller footprint.”
This inversion changes everything:
- retailers become culinary destinations
- brand variety becomes a competitive battleground
- hospitality talent migrates into retail
It’s a reshuffling of where culture sits in the food economy—and it’s already underway.
The Future Talent War: Retail vs. Restaurants
As retailers scale their food operations, Baven predicts a major talent migration.
“Hospitality talent will move into retail,” he said. “It’s where the money and the opportunity are shifting.”
Retailers will hire former chefs, restaurant operators, and hospitality leaders to run their food hubs. Meanwhile, restaurants will evolve toward high-touch experiential dining — smaller in number, but premium in offering.
“Retail will do more of what restaurants historically did,” Baven said. “And they’ll do it at a scale restaurants can’t match.”
For Builders: The Real Opportunities Are in Friction
Asked what he’d tell young professionals chasing “platform thinking,” Baven doesn’t hesitate.
“Go where the friction is,” he said. “The food world is full of it. Solve that, and you’ll build something meaningful.”
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2026’s Most Overhyped Term?
When asked about buzzwords, Baven offered one that sounds like a joke but isn’t.
“Foodvenience. Everyone’s using it. And as much as it sounds like a buzzword, it’s actually describing a real shift: retailers becoming food operators.”
Given that there are 3–4 million retail locations globally — far more than restaurants — the scale of that shift is enormous.
A Future Built on Infrastructure
Noahs isn’t building restaurants.
It isn’t building cloud kitchens.
And it isn’t even building a consumer brand.
It’s building the infrastructure layer for the next food economy — one powered by retailers, scaled through technology, and monetized through brand IP.
It is, in every way, the food world’s first serious attempt at a platform era.
And if Baven is right, we’re only at the beginning.
