How to overcome food-delivery challenges and streamline the process?
Running a restaurant is an exciting yet a tedious task. As a restaurant owner, you have to wear many hats. You shuffle tablets from various third party food delivery places. You also need to keep an eye on the inventory, food quality, as well as the arrangement of packaging materials. Furthermore, when the business is going incredibly well, it’s a bit challenging to keep the delivery operations running smoothly.
So, here we’ll discuss some major challenges restaurants face and ways to reduce the food delivery chaos. Let’s get started!
Simplify the order flow chaos
Sometimes your customers want to pick up their orders, while at other times, they may want to stay home and have the food delivered to their place. Clearly, this involves ordering variables and there is plenty of room for mistakes, especially if they order manually. This chaos can jeopardize customers’ satisfaction.
So, how can you simplify the order flow? Well, you can integrate all your ordering channels into your POS. This way, each order will be automated and queued in a proper place. This will reduce the number of manual entries made by the staff and free them up to focus on the customers.
Keep the packaging clean
Your eco-friendly coffee cups or fish and chips box won’t do any good if your delivery packaging is messy. Remember, your delivery bags and food packaging materials represent your brand. They are as important as the quality of your food. Thus, you should make sure that they stay clean.
So, what is the solution? Store inventory or stock such that it is not exposed to moisture or dust. One good tip is to store it in a room near the kitchen, so the staff can get it fast whenever needed.
Lack of view into incoming orders
When customers make their orders only in the restaurant, it is much simpler to determine whether you are able to meet their demands or not. However, adding off-premise orders increases the workload in your kitchen, making it more challenging to foresee precisely how order and customer service expectations are being handled. This can have a significant negative impact on your business’ operations.
Here, advanced kitchen technology can help. This provides you with access to your kitchen data from anywhere, anytime. This way, you can keep track of your business operations. To properly staff your kitchen and maintain a stock of supplies, you must obtain real-time data on its performance. This provides you with insights into how it is running to satisfy demand in an off-premise, digital-first environment, whether you’re studying average cooking times or speed-of-service levels.
Look for ways to manage excess food
Determine how to deal with extra items, leftovers, and unpicked delivery orders. Riders failing to show up to pick up a meal is always a possibility, even if it should happen rarely. But how do you handle it, and what can you do to prevent food waste and maintain the viability of your company? One way to sell the excess food is to create a discount or special offer for your customers.