SimpleMenu started at a restaurant table, not in a boardroom. This is the short version of how it happened.
A few years ago my daughter was diagnosed with food allergies. Nothing life-threatening, but real enough that eating out stopped being simple. Every restaurant visit became a small research project.
You learn quickly that most menus are not built with this in mind. In the best case, a partial list of ingredients in tiny print at the bottom. Or nothing at all, just a server who has to go ask the kitchen - and sometimes comes back with an answer. We kept a mental list of the places we trusted.
The restaurants were not the enemy here. Most of them wanted to help. They just did not have a good way to show what was in each dish. The information existed in the kitchen somewhere. It just never made it to the table in a way that was useful.
That is the gap SimpleMenu was built to close. Not a big ambitious mission statement. Just a practical tool that lets restaurants put their allergen information on the menu clearly, so the people who need it can find it.
There are a lot of people dealing with this. Parents with kids who have allergies. Adults who got a diagnosis later in life. People who just want to enjoy a meal without worrying that something might go wrong. They are not a niche - they are at most tables, just not always visible.
My daughter and I made SimpleMenu so restaurants can see them, and so they can find the information they need.
That is it. No bigger story than that.