How are you guys doing your food orders? I have for the absolute longest time just had spreadsheets with pars on it and walked the store going from item to item and just marking if I need the item on the sheet, crossing it off if I don’t. Its incredibly simple and just works fine for me. The problem is my managers just seem to absolutely struggle with it. Like I don’t know what it is but they constantly miss items totally (like pizza sauce this week) . So I was like, lets ask pmq what they do and thought maybe there was a mobile app I could load on a tablet that could make it harder to mess up.
Food ordering q
- Thread starter clownhair
- Start date
MSG
Active member
We are still very manual and “chef’s judgement”. We don’t have much of a problem, but I think that is because we perform a weekly inventory, half of which is personally conducted by the chef and the other half is supervised by him. Then, the chef makes the food order for the week while it is all top of mind.
literally the day after I posted this my delivery showed up and the manager had accidentally swapped the 16" boxes and 14" boxes as well as ordered about 30 gallons of vegetable oil. Like I am not 1000% with the pen and paper, and mistakes happen, but some of these things are pretty mind boggling to me.
Rico
New member
Sounds like they may be rushing through it. Do they have a set time where they are scheduled to just concentrate on the food order and not have to worry about making orders? If not maybe try incorporating and hour in the schedule where they can sit down and concentrate on putting the order in. I have the inventory taken 3 days early and have the par levels adjusted accordingly. They have an hour on Sunday to take counts and an hour on Monday to place orders to be delivered on Wednesday. This gives us Tuesdays to correct anything if we catch it.
yeah they actually do it Tuesdays before we open. Some things I had looked at were apps that could maybe help with food orders but they are kinda pricey. I also thought of making a google sheet that would take input of inventory and spit out the order. I might try doing the food orders a day earlier like you do so we can review it and catch any errors.
We have an order sheet we created, it has columns for about 8 orders so we can go back and see what we ordered on the previous order and if there’s something we are in between on ordering it or not, we can look at the previous few weeks to break the tie one way or the other
I have trucks 6-7 days a week. I used to do it myself but one of my managers does it now. I use Gordon Food, Sysco, Ferraro, Cheney Brothers, and a local produce company that delivers Sunday. I added Sysco and Cheney Brothers during covid so between the 4 I usually can keep most things in stock. Still do it on paper with lists, although we place the Gordon and Sysco orders on their apps. Everything else we call in.