Since the founding of FanFood about two years ago, we have been on an unrelenting journey towards one single mission: to make concessions delightfully simple for both fans and concessionnaires, so that everyone can have the seamless and enjoyable gameday experience they deserve. We overcame obstacles, challenged the status quo, and have grown from just three co-founders to a national team with a presence in over 20 states. And it’s just the beginning.
2019 is a turning point for the company. Not only are we launching a new website and updating all apps with a refreshed branding, but also we are expanding the FanFood team with some of the most talented people I know — people who share our mission and are capable enough to bring FanFood to much greater heights. Today I’m thrilled to introduce one such person, FanFood’s Chief Technology Officer, Jeremy Niecikowski.
There’s nothing short of impressiveness about Jeremy’s experience. Over the last decade Jeremy has been leading technical operations at several tech companies in the Chicago area. He spent over three years at GrubHub as Director of Technical Operations, leading the deployment of the OrderHub platform — a POS system and order fulfillment platform offered to select restaurant partners. He directly managed staff of the Service Desk, Site Reliability Engineering and Production Operations team in both Chicago and New York, and is absolutely incredible at motivating and mentoring his teams. But technical capabilities aren’t his only strong suit. Jeremy was also fantastic at negotiation, one of such examples being how he negotiated discounts from managed service providers and achieved nearly $400K in annual savings for GrubHub.
Jeremy continued advancing his career in the food and beverage delivery space by joining Peapod in 2017, where he first served as Director of IT Security and Systems Engineering and later on, Technology Lead. He led the effort to modernize Peapod’s ecommerce platform, maintain PCI compliance and implement technical security controls across all on-premise systems and cloud platforms. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Jeremy spearheaded every aspect of digital transformation and IT security of Peapod, truly laying the technical and security foundation for the publicly-traded company today.
Having Jeremy onboard means we are now joined by an industry veteran with the expertise and experience of driving the modernization in the F&B space. In fact, Jeremy has already been working tirelessly on the technological upgrade of FanFood, leading the entire engineering team to develop our new website, consumer app, fulfillment app, runner app and our new in-suite products all at the same time. This is a very busy and exciting time for FanFood, and I can’t wait to share with you some sneak peeks of what you can expect from us on the product side very soon.
Q&A With Jeremy:
What got you excited about FanFood? In addition to the impact that I can make working at FanFood, I was extremely excited about an opportunity to learn a great deal about an industry that has so much to gain from technology. Our mission is centered around making the fan experience better and we support that by bringing tools to both the fans and everyone involved in providing the ultimate fan experience. Why did you end up joining the team? I was presented with an opportunity to create a technical roadmap and set a vision that would fully embrace cloud services and serverless technologies and architectures. Our software will be in the hands of thousands of fans, concession operators, and executive suite operators. We are barely scratching the surface of what we can achieve from a technology perspective and I am so grateful that I get the opportunity to see the vision come to life.With a technology leadership that’s both visionary and hands-on, as well as new products that are better designed for our customers’ needs, FanFood is ready to finish this year strong and head into 2020. We are beyond excited to see how the F&B tech space continues to evolve, so that we can all enjoy and celebrate life to the maximum — so that we never miss the big moment.