Orderly Conquers Restaurant Inventory and Food Cost Management Woes

orderly food cost managementAccording to the National Restaurant Association, an estimated one-third of a typical restaurant’s sales go towards stocking food and beverage inventory. Operating with tight profit margins, how well a restaurant manages their food cost often determines the success or failure for the business. Historically, restaurant owners have had to go through an extensive process to determine food cost, including counting every ingredient, update their pricing, and maintaining an up-to-date ingredient list, resulting in a large percentage of restaurants failing to keep track. Orderly, the first company to apply data science to food cost management, announces its latest software update. Now, without having to count inventory, restaurant operators can get an accurate weekly cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) and monitor for waste and theft issues.

Orderly’s do-it-for-me solution, which includes a built-in waste tracking tool and par-based ordering feature, takes the company’s data-driven approach one step further by identifying potential over-ordering situations and highlighting where product waste or theft could be an issue. The company’s innovative approach not only saves restaurant operators time, but also gives custom, real-time information to improve profitability.

“We know that restaurant operators have enough to worry about without spending endless hours managing inventory or running complicated software,” explains Bill Jones, CEO for Orderly. “While there are other food cost management solutions out there, we take a radically innovative approach applying data science to deliver practical answers, rather than the brute force approach of counting and scrubbing ingredient lists. By studying the detailed patterns for every ingredient, we do the work for each restaurant owner, taming the supplier data problem and offering valuable insights along the way.”

In addition to capturing operational data, Orderly enables restaurant owners to compare pricing for like ingredients by its suppliers, allowing each restaurant to determine if it is getting the best price. Through its proprietary Restaurant Food Index (RFI), included as part of Orderly’s offering, customers’ prices are also mapped against up-to-date national and local benchmarks. The RFI is a constantly evolving index of more than 800 common ingredients, compiled from actual purchases from more than 14,000 different suppliers in the U.S.