For over two decades, The Good Eating Company has redefined workplace catering with its commitment to delivering restaurant-quality food to corporate settings. Founded in 1999, The Good Eating Company entered the scene when uninspiring sandwiches and lackluster salads dominated the workplace menu.
As Natasha's Law was coming into effect and ambitious national expansion plans were in place, The Good Eating Company needed to find a system to manage all their recipe information, ensuring their customer's safety and providing transparent data to their growing number of sites. We interviewed The Good Eating Company's Director of Food & Operations, Maxwell McKenzie, to find out how Kafoodle has helped them provide a consistently safe and high-quality standard of food.
The Challenge: Ensuring Precision in All Aspects
As Natasha's Law came into effect, The Good Eating Company faced the pivotal challenge of ensuring absolute precision in their allergen information. However, their challenges extended beyond allergen management. With numerous new recipes constantly being created and ever-changing ingredient costs due to supply chain challenges, the need for accurate food costing and up-to-date nutritional information became paramount.
Their existing manual documentation system posed many issues – repetition and duplication, inconsistent information across documents, dispersed data storage, access complications, and susceptibility to human errors. Food costing was labor-intensive and prone to errors. Nutritional information was managed through NutriCalc, requiring a dedicated software solution and a full-time employee.
The Solution: Kafoodle's Comprehensive Recipe Management
After evaluating various options, The Good Eating Company chose Kafoodle as the answer to their recipe management conundrum.
"Kafoodle stood out for its rapid recipe creation capabilities while maintaining flexibility for site-specific innovation," according to Maxwell. Along with "Kafoodle's ability to connect with third-party solutions and a willingness to explore new integrations. The Kafoodle team is very good at working on an open API and great with integration, which is a massive plus for us... what we don't want is loads of different systems to log in to; we want it to all work together, and Kafoodle is always the one to say yes we can create that connection."
With numerous distinct sites, each boasting unique menus, setups, resources, and pricing structures, The Good Eating Company required a central repository that accommodated site-level customization.
Kafoodle's Recipe Builder offered a selection of ingredients from the ingredient database with unit-of-measure quantities. This empowered the company to calculate recipe costs accurately, including plating costs, and assign target Gross Profit margins to ensure the correct sell price.
The Recipe Builder leverages live ingredient data, allowing any change to ingredient information to automatically update costs and sell prices across recipes. With live supplier database integrations and team members updating ingredient information from smaller suppliers, the result is a continuously updated, reliable, and consistent pricing structure.
This live database didn't just revolutionize food costing but also streamlined the calculation of nutritional statistics. With all nutritional values assigned to ingredients, users simply select an ingredient from the database and specify the quantity required. Kafoodle automatically calculates nutritional values per serving or per 100g/ml for energy, fiber, protein, salt, fat, saturates, carbohydrates, sugars, and allergens.
As with food costing, any ingredient changes trigger automatic updates across all recipes. Moreover, users can swap ingredients when necessary, automatically updating every recipe that relies on the substituted ingredient. What once required a full-time employee and dedicated software solution is now managed effortlessly by the Kafoodle Recipe Management System.
The Result: Precision, Efficiency, and Sustainability
The Good Eating Company's partnership with Kafoodle has revolutionized its culinary operations, ensuring precision in every aspect of recipe management with a robust central database accessible to employees across various locations. This standardized information foundation translates to consistently exceptional culinary offerings.
"Having been London-focused for so long and now as we expand from a geographical perspective, we needed a central hub that could help us manage a constantly increasing number of sites spread across various geographical locations from a central location, something that Kafoodle is very good at," according to Maxwell.
For example, Kafoodle has assisted in onboarding new staff members, with all necessary information presented in a digestible format, simplifying the transition. Recipes feature visual representations, precise methods, presentation instructions, chef insights, and all the technical intricacies essential for cooking perfection.
Food costing is now accurate, efficient, and responsive to changing ingredient costs. Nutritional information is calculated effortlessly, and updates are instant, regardless of the scale of change. Change management was once a significant operational challenge and is now a streamlined, automated process.
"Switching to Kafoodle streamlined the entire nutritional calculation procedure, saving the equivalent of a full-time role," says Maxwell. The company's expansion would have necessitated one or two additional staff members had Kafoodle not been implemented.
But the benefits continue. Many of The Good Eating Company's sites have embraced sustainability goals. To address this, they've activated Kafoodle's food carbon labeling bolt-on feature, allowing customers to calculate the carbon emissions of their recipes in kgCO2e and receive a carbon rating in label/badge format. This aligns with The Good Eating Company's aspirations as they work towards B-Corp accreditation. Carbon labeling is a pivotal aspect of becoming B-Corp certified and an additional service that resonates with customers eager to label the environmental impact of their food products.
Advice from Maxwell McKenzie
Get software in before you need it. We started with recipes and nutrition and kept growing into the system. Always have a plan on what you want to use it for and how you want to use it. For us, that was compliance and consistency. Also, be very aware of who can add and alter information in your system. Luckily, Kafoodle has change tracking so that you can access historical user actions should an unwanted change ever occur.
