Strong foundations will help scale your restaurant, takeaway or catering business.
We previously looked at 3 ingredients for award-winning operations. With a strong brand in place, the next challenge is replicating that success across multiple sites.
3 operational pillars will help food service businesses:
Once you’ve created your first, perfect venue, it’s natural to start thinking about growth. Growth comes with a whole new series of risks though. The biggest being that your unique brand and customer experience can start to become watered down as standards slip.
Maintaining consistency as you grow is hard. HQ tries to maintain control, often throwing so many initiatives at sites that admin snowballs.
You need a rule book. An operational blueprint.
You may choose to use a staff handbook and/or a series of notices and instructions for this, but we believe that digital is better. With your operational blueprint stored safely in the cloud, your staff can simply pick up their device and begin their shift.
By guiding teams through their day with simple, intuitive tools, the brand standards are reinforced habitually from the first site onwards.
Business rates, wages, food — costs are going up. Unfortunately there’s very little that can be done about these external pressures, but there are changes you can make internally to build a buffer against them.
Start forming habits (not audits) and throw out those logbooks! Audits are time-consuming, laborious, and instantly out of date — all of this lends to them being very costly. Multi-site organisations need continual, real-time data (and a top notch system to host it).
44% of customers won’t visit a venue with FSA rating of 3 (good) or less. With scores on the doors becoming mandatory very soon, restaurants have to act now to get (and maintain) a perfect 5.
FSA regulations are continually being updated. Let’s take the recent acrylamide regulations as an example. How are you going to prove to your EHO that you’re cooking food for longer, under 120 degrees?
If their slogan is “go for gold” how about snapping a quick pic of your dishes at that perfect golden-brown, and uploading it to an easy-to-use app, along with a temperature reading below 120? This form of data recording can be applied to all manner of safety checks.
And lots more. Check out some of our use cases for more examples.
It just takes one teeny, tiny complaint from a disgruntled customer to get your business reported to the ICO and an investigation instigated. Either you, or an appointed officer, need to be reviewing how you capture and store data, like yesterday, and get it up to scratch.
Once you’re confident that your processes and tooling is all GDPR compliant you need to ensure your teams are educated in how to make sure they stay that way.
Trail can help you grow your food service business consistently, efficiently and safely. Get in touch and we’ll show you how.