The Food & Beverage landscape is changing at a rapid pace if you haven’t already discovered that.
Prior to COVID-19, the restaurant industry was facing many challenges ranging from labor shortages, labor cost increases, rising cost of goods, rental cost increases, commercial real estate cost increases, and cost of new construction to name a few.
If there was a silver lining, consumer spending soared in the past couple of years with more food dollars being spent away from grocery stores to restaurants, making them the beneficiary. The downside; there was a record number of eating and drinking places leading to market saturation and dilution of sales velocity per store in many cases.
Enter food & beverage technology
Technology, specifically cloud based operating systems, made major strides over the last decade. Operators that adopted these new food & beverage technologies gained significant advantages that allowed them to become more efficient at running their business. Many of these systems provide real-time data to monitor revenue & cost centers. They put the tools in the palm of your hand via an app on your mobile devices.
Now is a perfect time to look at everything you are doing in your operation and use this time as an opportunity to re-boot and adapt better ways to help you survive the immediate and thrive in the future. Technology solutions need to be part of that strategy.
Better controls on costs, give operators the edge when it comes to profitability. Analytical dashboards provide a snapshot of real-time sales, labor costs, sales by category or department, inventory, budgets etc. If you are not currently optimized in your business with the latest technologies, you are at a competitive disadvantage.
That will only get progressively worse!
In the current economic conditions caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic, surviving this for most food and beverage operations, specifically independent restaurants, will be a challenge like never before. The path forward is to adopt sound business strategy that enables you to adapt to the new landscape that will likely include decreased sales volumes for sometime.
Reviewing your operation
Now is a perfect time to look at everything you are doing in your operation and use this time as an opportunity to re-boot and adapt better ways to help you survive the immediate and thrive in the future. Food & Beverage technology solutions need to be part of that strategy.
Operational effects and positive outcomes through the use of food & beverage technology is real. Let’s say, you have a restaurant or bar with a simple POS platform. This is great for performing business transactions with a little bit of data gathered. The system will likely tabulate sales per period, payments, adjustments, number of transactions and perhaps broken into categories like Food, Wine, Liquor, Beer, and Merchandise Sales. If it’s fairly current technology, it likely will tell you exactly which menu items were sold through a Product Mix report. It also likely has a time-keeping feature so employees can clock in and out, record their sales and tips and provide labor cost reporting by department.
In my experience often, this is where it stops. The system is either not fully capable or has not been integrated into a total tech solution for the operation. Too often it does not integrate with back of house features like A/P, Payroll, Inventory & recipe management, P&L functions and other necessary business functions to ensure and maximize profitability.
Are you optimized for contact less ordering and payment in this COVID-19 environment? Contact less or digital communication with your customers will quickly become the “New Norm” for how you transact business going forward. Does it integrate with your Table Management system? Or other platforms that you may use to operate your business?
The good news is, there are many solutions out there that come in a variety of shapes and sizes that fit your operation. You don’t need to have features that can run multiple locations if you only want to operate one single unit. Making the right selection is where we can help. We stay abreast of new and evolving technologies across the Food & Beverage industry for you and will bring valuable insights.
Don’t wait! Reach out to us at FOODnBEVTECH for a consultation. We are here to help you make the right Technology choices for your business.
