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Stephanie Porter

Jon King is one of 10 alumni-millennials featured in a recent issue of Luminus who are storming out of the gate – with a spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship fuelled at ������Ƶ. Check out the Gazette for a new profile every day until Aug. 23.

Like so many great business ideas, Fytics began as a solution to an everyday challenge.

“I constantly struggle in my household with food going bad in my fridge, or not using what’s in my cupboard,” says Fytics founder and CEO Jon King, B.Comm.(Hons.)(Co-op.)’17 .

“I started to work on ways to figure out what you have, how much and what can be made in a pinch to use up the food you have.”

Problem-solving principle

It was a solid idea — but Mr. King realized building a customer base for that sort of personal service was out of his marketing budget.

So, he decided to apply the same problem-solving principle to larger operations: restaurants and bars.

“I thought, what if we could build a better way of managing inventory and make waste go away?”

And that’s what Mr. King and his team did.

“Businesses want to know exactly what they have, what they need to order and how much it’s costing them every single day.”

— Jon King

Two years after launching, Fytics has 15 employees (most of whom are ������Ƶ graduates). The company has 68 clients from Canada, the United States and the Netherlands.

Mr. King hopes to have 200 users, including some national chains, by the end of this year. He’s rolling out an affiliated project that manages bar inventory and it is already catching on.

“These businesses want to know exactly what they have, what they need to order and how much it’s costing them every single day. And that’s what they come to us for.”