Roots & Berries opened its first cafe in 2014 to create a place that could help a local community thrive. Founders Charles and Frances Oppenheim wanted to provide welcoming cafes nestled amongst the beautiful wild areas of London's parks.
Word travelled as quickly as the smell of their freshly baked bread, and it wasn't long before nearby neighbourhoods opened their arms. Currently, in five communities, with nine establishments, one CPU (central production unit) for baking and 90 staff, just eight years since opening their first doors.
But opening multiple new locations meant spreadsheets quickly became unreliable, untransparent and too open to human error.
The Challenges
Managing accurate food information across multiple sites.
Accurate data to be available to every site.
As the business grew and new sites opened, Roots & Berries needed a better place to record and manage their data. Spreadsheets didn't guarantee live or accurate information for their ingredients and recipes and were open to technical and human error. This meant cost and allergy details had to be updated manually across multiple spreadsheets, every duplication wasted time and presented a new opportunity for error.
Back and front of house integration.
When creating and managing recipes, one ingredient change can affect a recipe's allergen information, nutritional data and cost. Having a live data source for total transparency is crucial, but so is flexibility. Roots & Berries have a dynamic menu, whilst they provide a partly standardised menu, they change and update this often and a single site may require temporary changes in isolation.
Planning, costing and purchasing.
As Roots & Berries continues to expand and supply its multiple sites, availability and demand change, efficient planning and waste control became scaling issues. They needed a tool that ensured all sites knew availability of product, could be used to forecast production and track waste to target any problem areas.
The Solutions
A central system that all team members can access across all sites.
Readily available, live information for all.
Roots & Berries knew they had to install a "menu engineering and allergen system", Charles says, to provide accurate data to staff and customers. Kafoodle provided a robust solution for staff to view and update information, instantly displaying updates to all Kafoodle users and customers.
Dynamic menus driven by live records.
By syncing Kafoodle’s menu feature with the ingredient and recipe management database, Roots & Berries can update menus in real-time. Providing customers with accurate allergen, nutritional and pricing information on labels and menus. Using Kafoodle to collect and manage data, managers and Chefs can view valuable insights to help engineer the menu and correctly cost recipes.
Tracking stock and waste value.
Roots and Berries use the Kafoodles stock calculator to record stock at the end of each month. They also record wastage on the software to identify trends and reduce overall company waste. Both of these tasks were previously carried out on spreadsheets that had to be updated with products and prices every month. A task that used to take hours per month has been reduced to just minutes.
Which Kafoodle feature would it be hard to live without?
- Recipe costing
- Allergen management
- Stock & waste reporting
The Results
Accurate data, information and costs all in one place.
Fast data, quick decisions.
Roots & Berries can access up-to-date data faster than ever with readily available information. Kafoodles user access management and change history report is used for traceability and has dramatically reduced Roots & Berries' vulnerability to human error. Allergy information is taken from the ingredient data uploaded right at the beginning of recipe creation and used throughout the entire system, without the need to copy and duplicate information from multiple sources.
Data flowing both ways.
Customer information is provided directly from the back-of-house kitchen management system, ensuring accurate and compliant data on both labels and menus. "Change one ingredient to update all the menus", Charles said.
Roots & Berries can also collect menu and recipe performance information, helping them identify popular or highly profitable menu items. With a historical database viewing changes in recipe costs, and the result on profit margins is available to view and export for further analysis. This wealth of information is automatically collected and is used to further develop and improve the performance of their menu.
Tracking and planning for the cost-conscious.
With Kafoodle, Roots & Berries can update costs instantly and see the knock-on effects right through to the final sale price. A complete overview of the value of their stock, coupled with the ability to track and reduce waste, offers greater cost control and allows users to easily identify and mitigate future losses.
"Miles better than using a spreadsheet."
Charles Oppenheim
Root & Berries
Finally, when developing or updating a menu, Roots & Berries reduces costs by re-using and updating recipes already created. Using historical data and past changes to guide decisions.
Advice from Co-founder Charles Oppenheim
"Really think about who will own and look after the software internally. Have they got the skills and time required to set it up and ensure their colleagues are using it effectively? You need a super user, someone to champion it."
