Since 2007, Biscuiteers have been crafting delectable hand-iced biscuits, lovingly personalised for their gift-giving clientele.
Their journey has been marked by impressive growth, with ventures expanding into cookbook publications, high-profile collaborations with big names like Warner Bros, Harrods, and Uber Eats, and the launch of cafes in iconic locations like Notting Hill and Belgravia.
However, with success came complexity. The dynamic collaborations, ceaseless bespoke requests, and personalised services led to a massive recipe database and a recurring wave of new labels every month.
Their spreadsheet data management system started showing cracks, becoming less productive and increasingly time-consuming.
To better grasp their transformation journey, we sat down with Andrea Barzaghi, the Head of Process and Technology at Biscuiteers. He shared insights into how Kafoodle has re-transformed their production process.
The Challenge
The catalyst behind Biscuiteers' quest for a recipe and label management system was the limited automation of spreadsheets and their persistent demand for manual data entry and upkeep.
The greater the manual input, the higher the exposure to human error. This invited the potential for data inaccuracies and, in worst cases, full-label reprints, squandering valuable time and resources and piling up waste.
Ingredient Changes Stirring Production Mayhem
The unsteady nature of the supply chain led to an ever-evolving ingredient list. Even the slightest changes triggered an avalanche of new costs, allergen, and nutritional data across countless recipes and labels.
Each recipe had its unique spreadsheet, making ingredient updates a manual, recipe-by-recipe process. As Andrea reveals, "Updating the information on the labels affected by one colour change to icing could take up to one month to complete."
The Challenge of New Products
A relentless innovation of new products partly fuels Biscuiteers' impressive growth.
However, each fresh recipe SKU requires a new label. With 30-40 new recipes emerging weekly and each label taking up to 40 minutes to create, this process required the undivided commitment of a full-time team member.
The Solution
Kafoodle came forward as the perfect fit. User-friendly enough for everyone to utilise and benefit from, it did not compromise the functionalities expected from more complex food labelling systems.
Despite being a ready-made solution, Kafoodle demonstrated impressive adaptability during onboarding. Biscuiteers also leveraged the bespoke development service to fine-tune the system, aligning it seamlessly with their existing workflows.
System Updates Triggered by Ingredient Changes
At the heart of Kafoodle lies the ingredient database — the storage for cost, nutrition, and allergen data. A recipe is merely a curation of ingredients from this database.
Therefore, any alteration in an ingredient instantly cascades down to every recipe and label it features in.
Product Development Reinforced by Sophisticated Support
In the fast-paced world of bespoke food manufacturing, time is of the essence, which is why the Kafoodle Recipe and Label Management System is perfect for businesses looking to create more recipes in less time.
With an extensive ingredient database, selecting components becomes a breeze, whether starting from scratch or duplicating and editing existing recipes.
The Result
Kafoodle transformed Biscuiteers' food management process, enhancing accuracy and agility.
It has reduced label creation time dramatically, enabled automatic data generation, and made way for template-based label building, ushering Biscuiteers into a new era of efficiency and compliance.
Focusing More on Supply, Less on Search
Kafoodle replaced Biscuiteers' dated spreadsheet system with a unified ingredient-to-label food data management system.
Now that all the features are connected and using the same single source of data, information is more accurate, and what would have taken "one month to update as a result of an ingredient change in an icing recipe now takes 10-15 minutes." according to Andrea.
No limit labelling
The old labelling process was an uphill task, requiring up to 40 minutes to craft a single label, with a significant chunk of this time dedicated to calculating nutritional values and identifying allergens.
Manual label creation was more than just time-consuming; it escalated scaling costs.
Now, Kafoodle empowers Biscuiteers to create and manage their recipes, seamlessly generating reports for costs, nutritional data, and present allergens. The system forwards this data to the integrated food label builder in the recipe, providing the packing team with the confidence to produce labels in the correct format featuring the latest information.
With choices for front and back of pack labels, compliance features, and the ability to save label templates as presets, the team is assured their labels meet legal specifications and have the most current information.
Advice from Head of Process and Technology, Andrea Barzaghi
Try to find a flexible system, as businesses can change, and the process must react. Your vision for software may be different in one year, and you need something that can change so you're not constantly swapping software solutions. Have all the functionality you could possibly want, not just what you need now. The software has to help deliver goals for the business, not just solve current challenges.
