Pittsburgh Public Schools seeks $2M software deal with FSH Tech to rethink cafeteria logistics

A Philly-based startup is reaching across the state with a proposed $2 million software deal to modernize operations at Pittsburgh Public Schools. 

The potential 10-year contract with Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) food services would provide custom-built software for the department, helping it bring five million meals to students annually. FSH Technologies would turn the complex, paperwork-based process of food distribution into a more modern endeavor, putting all the logistics onto one platform. 

“The public sector has long been underserved, especially in technology,” Lilly Chen, founder and CEO of FSH Technologies, told Technical.ly. “They deserve access to modern technology with modern [user experience] and [user interface] that actually work for their process, because every single town, city, school district has their own unique way of operating.” 

PPS food services’ current system involves using multiple software programs and manual methods like Excel spreadsheets and PDFs for various tasks, according to the director of the department, Malik Hamilton. 

With about 22,000 meals to serve daily, along with after-school snacks, school dinners and catering contracts with local private schools or daycares, the food services department needed a system that could integrate all its needs, Hamilton said, including regulatory compliance, production records, menu planning and forecasting. 

“We have a lot of paperwork, a lot of things that we have to keep track of,” Hamilton said. “We were looking for [a software program] that is more robust than what we’re currently using and that could help us grow into some of the things that we want to do moving forward.” 

The new platform that FSH Tech is building has a unified database, so the department can share data about menus, ingredients, vendors and more, Chen said.

When schools place food orders with the district’s central kitchen, the platform allows them to select the menu item, how many need to be made, when it’s being served and if the item is a main dish, side or dessert. 

The system automatically figures out what ingredients and how much of each are needed, placing the order with third-party vendors when the menu is made. 

Although the food services budget is not part of PPS’s recent deficit issues — because the department funds its operations through meal sales — the cost of the platform was still a key factor in choosing FSH, Hamilton said. 

FSH “did not come in as the lowest bidder,” Hamilton said. But he was optimistic the program would ultimately help the department save money because, as food costs rise, it would allow them to “closely monitor financial decisions that are being made in each building.”

The PPS board will vote on the proposed contract on May 28. Chen and Hamilton both said they are confident it would be approved. 

Software ‘assembled to order’ for public-sector needs

FSH’s goal was to create a system that used food efficiently and was easy to use for the district’s employees because it impacts students’ ability to access food, Chen said. 

“There’s a realness to what software does,” she said. “It serves real people who have lives.” 

The wider problem of outdated workflows or software platforms that don’t totally align with an organization’s operations isn’t unique to the Pittsburgh school district, Chen said. It’s a common issue often caused by budget constraints — especially in the public sector.

A former machine learning infrastructure engineer at Meta, Chen’s interest in public sector technology sparked while she was volunteering for Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s Open for Business initiative. 

She was helping to build a tool that would be a one-stop shop for Philadelphia businesses to access resources and grant information. That experience showed her how long and inefficient the process can be for developing government technology tools. 

“It kind of shocked me,” she said. “Everyone is so well-intentioned, so motivated to help, and yet we aren’t getting solutions delivered to the people that we promise that we’re going to deliver them to.”  

Most software is “opinionated software,” she said, meaning that it’s built to work a certain way using a specific method, but every unique city and agency has its own way of doing things. Instead, FSH focuses on composable software, pieces with specific functions that can be “assembled to order,” with a specific focus on municipalities, she said. 

The private sector doesn’t offer enough products for the public sector, she said. It builds tools that work for them and government agencies have to try to make them work, despite having different processes and serving unique groups of people. 

With the PPS contract, FSH learned what the needs of the school system are, the roles that employees play and designed the platform to check those boxes.

”We always say,” Chen said, “that we build technology for people first that works for your process.”