Craftable CEO David Cantu joined Exec Edge Editor-in-Chief John Jannarone for a fireside chat at the ICR Conference 2026, covering Craftable's growth, what sets the platform apart, and how a profit management system built for hospitality helps operators make better decisions.
Watch the full fireside chat here: Craftable CEO David Cantu on Hospitality Tech: ICR Conference 2026
David Cantu came to hospitality technology through the dining room, not the data center. He started in restaurant operations at P.F. Chang's and Outback Steakhouse, co-founded HotSchedules and spent 21 years scaling it into a system much of the industry relied on, then led Black Box Intelligence before taking over as CEO of Craftable. On the Exec Edge stage at ICR, that operator background framed how he talked about Craftable: technology built to serve the people running hospitality, not to add another screen to their day.
David's throughline is that good hospitality software has to reduce friction for the team, not create it. His focus at Craftable is on simplifying operations and giving front-line teams the information they need, so they can spend less time wrestling with systems and more time on the guest experience.
That people-first framing isn't a soft note on top of the product. It's the design constraint. A back-office platform only helps if a general manager, a chef, and a controller can all actually use it, which is why ease of adoption sits alongside capability in how Craftable is built.
The clearest differentiator David pointed to is scope. Most tools that touch the back office solve one slice of it: purchasing, or invoice capture, or inventory, or accounting. Operators end up stitching several point solutions together, often on top of spreadsheets, and the seams between them are where data goes stale and margin leaks.
Craftable was built to cover the full back office in one platform, from procurement through financials. Purchasing, inventory, recipe costing, AP automation, payments, and financial reporting connect end to end, so the numbers that drive profit live in one place instead of being reassembled after the fact. It's built specifically for hospitality rather than adapted from generic finance software, and it gives operators live visibility into cost as it moves rather than a batch of reports after the period closes. That combination, full back-office coverage, hospitality-specific design, and live visibility, is the case for choosing one system over a stack of five.
Craftable's growth tracks the operators who feel back-office complexity most: multi-unit restaurant groups, hotel management companies, and entertainment venues, typically the ones running many locations under real margin pressure.
The scale behind the platform is substantial. More than 10,000 hotels, restaurants, and venues run on Craftable, representing over 80,000 hospitality professionals, with more than $5 billion in purchasing and millions of invoices flowing through it each year. As labor stays tight and margins stay thin, the pitch that resonates is straightforward: consolidate the back office, see costs while you can still act on them, and protect profit across every location.
Craftable pairs business intelligence with AI to analyze purchasing, labor, recipe, and sales data and turn it into decisions operators can act on, with live visibility that supports front-line teams rather than burying them in dashboards.
David's framing of AI is grounded in that outcome. The value isn't generating more information. It's surfacing the handful of cost anomalies, variances, and margin signals that actually matter, and explaining why, so managers spend less time hunting for problems and more time fixing them.
Hear David Cantu's full fireside chat on Craftable's growth, what sets the platform apart, and the future of hospitality technology, from the ICR Conference 2026:
Craftable CEO David Cantu on Hospitality Tech: ICR Conference 2026