With food businesses being hit hard by the pandemic, it’s time to take stock, rethink, and redevelop to not only survive but thrive. Adapting to changes in processes, customer’s trends and behaviours, as well as physical changes to your layout, there is so much to consider. But your food inventory management system is a great place to start to achieve a post-pandemic sales surge.
Here are our four top priorities for those in the food and beverage sector to make this a reality.
1. Go Digital With Your Stocktake
We can’t say it enough. You have to get your stocktaking system online. The olds ways of collecting this information are dead. They are rigid, high risk, slow and contribute to poorer decision making. A digital food inventory management solution is what every business needs to keep ahead of the curve.
Spot minor fluctuations in your margins or the start of an issue and intervene before anything can develop. Having this information at your fingertips at all times means you have the best oversight and insight into your business.
2. Reduce Food Waste
The firsrt step in reducing your food waste is to start measuring it. You can’t manage it if you don’t measure it. You can analyse the data, see what needs to be done and put steps in place to reduce waste. It’s imperative to become a sustainable food business in 2022 for your customers, business, and the planet. We all have a role to play in achieving the latest targets announced by An Bord Bia, and it starts by getting visibility on your margin.
3. Save Time
By implementing the above, you will immediately save yourself valuable time you can use elsewhere in your business.
Labour is your second highest cost, every hour of which needs to be justified and relevant. Manually counting stock is not a productive use of your team’s time. Surplus hours of work are not the operational efficiency you are striving for, but analysing margins is. An automated stocktaking system means you can engage your staff in solutions regarding food waste and customer experience, which is the best use of their time.
4. Increase Your Accuracy
We’re in the business of margin management software. To increase it, you need to increase the accuracy of your food inventory process. If errors are occurring, you need to know straight away without manually searching through your stock for them. With our platform, you can verify your count in 20 seconds. Not only saving your time but increasing accuracy with optimum visibility across all sites. If you can spot the big issues quickly, you have a head start, and you should never be in a position where you are second-guessing the accuracy of the count when you don’t have to.
As we edge closer to a post-pandemic world and prepare for it, we also suggest recommend conducting weekl stocktakes. This will save you time in the long run and support making more informed decisions meaning better results. That’s ultimately how you will not only keep up but remain firmly ahead of things – by implementing the solutions that will make your processes more efficient, effective and improve those margins as the sector recovers.
