Automated Shopping Lists: Our Kitchen's Biggest Time Saver
Photo by ja ma on Unsplash
As covered earlier in this blog series, before starting Sous Chef, we had a catering company 2Forks.
(Painful) Growth
We always thought growth would feel great. But it turned out that growth was extremely painful. Trying to keep up with all the orders, recipes and weekly changing menus was a full-time job. Then on top of that, managing the growing team, hiring new staff, making time for customer conversations... It was crazy. For someone like me, a total control freak, it was an extremely uncomfortable situation.
Inception: subrecipes within subrecipes
Since we had already created recipes for everything, I thought that it should be straight forward for Chef Matt to calculate the ingredients we would need, make our shopping list, and send the order to our suppliers.
Wrong.
A single recipe by itself would be pretty straightforward. But we ran many recipes each week. Most of those recipes had subrecipes and some of the subrecipes even had subrecipes. It was subrecipe inception. From one week to the next our menus would be completely different. We were not about to make it easy on our selves.
So. Much. Math. Every. Day.
Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash
Every day, Chef Matt would be sitting in the office, scaling each recipe, and printing it out. Then he’d take the printouts, and start manually adding up all the different ingredients to get a total for his order to suppliers. And this was happening on a daily basis.
Time saved: 20 hours per week
But there was hope. Since all our recipes were documented and our orders were in a central location (read the “Orders Today Sheet” story here), we were be able to combine all of the information to automatically calculate our daily shopping list.
Voila, like magic our ingredient shopping list would automatically generate. When new orders would come in or an existing order would change, the shopping list would automatically update. No more need for Chef Matt to be constantly worrying about if we had enough product. A quick inventory check replaced hours of manual calculations.
Our new automated shopping list turned out to be our biggest time saver for Chef Matt. He saved over 20 hours per week. As an added bonus, our more accurate calculations helped us reduce our food waste to less than 1% of our overall revenue.
It wasn’t just our kitchen that found this time saving; as we shared Sous Chef with other companies they had the same results.
Shopping List in Sous Chef
The next big time suck: the prep list
But that’s not the end of that story. Chef Matt saw the potential of automating his busy work and soon enough, we would tackle the other big time-suck task: the daily prep list for the team.
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