In the weeds

It’s already 8:50am and the orders are nowhere near ready. Matt, the Executive Chef, has been at it since 6am and it doesn’t feel like he’s gotten anything done. Delivery drivers are showing up in an hour and there’s still 150 meals to plate. The prep cook is frantically flipping chicken breasts on the smoking hot grill, the sous chef is mixing grain salads, and Matt makes sure everything is cooked and seasoned correctly.

He’s short 15 pounds of quinoa, so he throws some raw quinoa and vegetable stock into a hotel pan, shoves it into the steamer, slams the door shut, and luckily remembers to set a timer. It’s just one of those days: they’re in the weeds.

The food finally gets done, loaded, and the drivers are off by 10:20am. The team gets a chance to take a break and decompress from the hectic morning. Deep breath.

Thirty minutes later, Matt’s phone rings. One of the orders was short by 10 meals that got added on the day before, but forgotten in the morning rush. The customer is pissed. All that hustle and hard work from the morning is totally overshadowed by a critical communication error. Ugh. Matt is deflated.

Digging into the weeds

When we first started working with partners like Eat Club and ZeroCater, we were thrilled at the order volumes but soon became overwhelmed with updates and the details of every order. Since we were working with multiple partners and taking direct orders there was not a single place for us to check our orders. Every day our team would have to look at a combination of dashboards, emails and phone calls. We needed one place where we could check on all our orders.

Finding our way out

So we built what we called “Orders Today”, in google sheets, which was the single location that our team knew was always up to date and stored all our orders across all our partners. Every order and every change was immediately entered into this sheet, and every morning, Matt and the team would review this sheet to make sure they didn’t miss any orders or changes.

Orders Today tracked:

Order details like
- menu items
- dish amounts
- modifications
Customer details like
- company name
- address
- contact name
Delivery details like
- delivery time
- which driver was taking the order

This Was Version 1 of Orders Today at 2Forks:

Version 1 of 2Forks’ Orders Today Google Sheet

We quickly came to recognize that keeping up with changes and delivering the meals on time was just as important as the food itself. What took a little longer to understand was that Orders Today would become the backbone for everything we would do. Having all our order information in one place enabled us to build reports and monitor all the following information for our kitchen:

Build production sheets
Auto-generate order guides
Eliminate waste
Understand staffing needs
Determine menu pricing
Manage logistics
Manage multiple menus with multiple partners

Green pastures ahead

Little did we know, Orders Today would plant the seed that would become Sous Chef. Now we use Sous Chef to track all our orders, recipes, menus and generate all the reports we need to guide our culinary and logistics teams.

Sous Chef - orders section:

From orders to recipes

The next step was tackling recipe management, read about it here: The Ultimate Recipe Manager: Ingredients, Labor, and Margins

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In The Weeds! The 1 Tool that Helped 2Forks Conquer its Corporate Catering Orders