Castle Peak owns the connection nobody else would.

I am Johnny Auer. Twenty-five years in food and hospitality, on every side of the layer. Most recently I led food transformation for Sodexo's North American portfolio. I evaluated kitchen automation, built off-premise food programs, authored acquisition theses, restructured product portfolios, and learned how large organizations actually decide what to buy, from whom, and why.

Before that, between 2009 and 2013, I ran an agency in Chicago representing dozens of restaurants. I knew the rooms, the people who ran them, what they were trying to build. Of twenty-five I can name, five are still open. These were not reactive operators buying off a recipe card. They were the opposite, the chef-driven press-covered tier driving the local-sourcing movement in the city, milling their own flour, building direct relationships with farmers and purveyors, constructing independent supply chains specifically to route around the consolidated middle. They were as proactive as operators get. And it caught them anyway, because they were proactive on one face and exposed on the others. That experience is in every essay on this site.

I built Castle Peak Ventures because from the inside I kept seeing the same failure from every side of the chain. Suppliers who could solve real operator problems but could not get past procurement. Operators with the problems but no time to map who builds for them. Investors funding the right idea into the wrong channel. The connection was slow, mostly accidental, and nobody was accountable for making it work. Castle Peak is accountable for making it work, and earns when it does.