Organizing the Chaos — How We Reduced Our Planning Time by 80%

As covered earlier in this blog series, before starting Sous Chef, we had a catering company called 2Forks.

---

Treacherous growth

Over the years as we were growing 2Forks, we found opportunities to expand with different menus and cuisines. On any given day we could be running multiple dishes from multiple menus with each dish count into the thousands. Needless to say, we had a lot of moving parts. If any part was missing or late it resulted in angry customers and a week of huge cost overruns. It was a phase of treacherous growth and we needed better organization.

Order to the chaos

Our first step was to institute a weekly meeting for our team to gather around an oversized spreadsheet printout containing our meals and their recipes and production steps, and develop a plan for the week. After spending hours meticulously filling in every cell, we felt like we had just summited Everest. It was a tremendous amount of work, but magical when it was complete.

As the weeks continued on we were tormented by the thought of either going through the pain of planning every week or not planning at all, which would invite chaos to take over. We had to come up with a way to make the process less painful.

Automating the chaos

When we figured out how to automate the process we all screamed out hallelujah—we reached the mountaintop. Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but we were very excited and got to work creating template prep sheets for each station and breaking them down by day of the week. Those templates would then automatically populate with information from each week’s orders.

Having 80% of the planning work done automatically, we were freed up to focus on the remaining 20% variability like changes to orders, staff calling out, batching production, and more. We quickly found that our labor costs decreased, our margins increased, and we were able to produce even more meals every day.

This kind of automation was at the heart of Sous Chef.

Variety wins customers

As we grew even larger our customers expected even more variety in our menus. We quickly found that we needed to find a better way to develop new menu items. Read that story next.