How Alfred Technologies expanded from a private clientele to corporate customers
By Yousra Benkirane
Behind every successful entrepreneur (or superhero) is an Alfred Pennyworth, the man behind the scenes who makes it all happen. Named after the resourceful butler from the Batman franchise, Alfred Technologies quietly supports the hospitality industry with their wine and spirits inventory solutions, keeping inventory management at a minimum while maximizing the profitability of daily operations. “We want to make sure that the superheroes [in] the hospitality industry have great tools to help them succeed,” said Pierre-Sébastien Gauthier, vice president of business development and major accounts. “Alfred [Pennyworth] manages the Batcave – Alfred Technologies manages the wine cave.”
Powered by AI, Québec-based Alfred Technologies works with restaurants, bars, hotels, and private wine collectors to streamline the inventory process. The company’s operations focus on three main pillars: finding the optimal tasting range by giving clients data on the maturity level, best sell date, and expiration of wine; perpetual inventory, a continuous scanning system used to record inventory in real-time; and the marketing purchases price tool, which gathers data to determine the current market value of each bottle so clients can customize the price to their strategy. The information is then put inside a database to create an intelligent wine list. Over the last 11 years, that database has grown to almost 370,000 products.
Founder and tech veteran Guy Doucet started Alfred Technologies with no prior experience in the hospitality industry. Known for his innovation in engineering, he was contracted by the Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ), one of several government organizations responsible for the trade of alcoholic beverages in Canada, to build a database for their website. “They were losing a lot of stock, so I helped them build a model of the database,” Doucet says. “At that time, we were also trying to build an application to serve all private collectors.”
After realizing the potential of what he had created, Doucet bought the database back from SAQ in 2015 and rebranded as Alfred Technologies. “We realized that if we had a great database, we could do a lot of those boring tasks that no one wants to do,” he says.
From 2015 through 2018, Alfred Technologies mostly catered to private wine collectors. Knowing that such a niche clientele constrained the company’s growth, the company began enhancing its technology solutions during the pandemic, rebuilding as an AI-based platform dedicated to bigger operations. “If we wanted to scale our business to the level that we wanted, we needed bigger operations,” Gauthier said. “[And I thought,] ‘We need big customers, and the States will bring them to us.’”
In 2021, the company opened their first U.S.-based office in San Francisco and then expanded into Miami’s Brickell financial district shortly after, with 40 employees globally. Pre-pandemic, the company’s revenue reached $2 million. Since then, Alfred Technologies has grown more than 50 percent each year. Clients include the Intercontinental in San Francisco, Fairmont Le Château Frontenac, the Bell Center (where the Montreal Canadiens hockey team plays), and several restaurants in New York. Recently, Alfred began work on a pilot to increase sales and customer experience for Miami-based Club Med. The famed resort is testing Alfred’s solutions in their Cancun and Charlevoix, Québec, locations; Doucet predicts that over the next two years his company will work with Club Med “in 30 or 40 clubs all around the world.”
Alfred Technologies is now looking to further expand in the U.S. and to lock down more business in Miami. “We’re now at the inflection point,” Doucet says. “We have big groups, and they’re all testing the platform. The results are good everywhere… I think we’re [going] to grow really fast this year.”
