Return On Investment: A Look At Galley’s Impact On Profitability
Food teams are among the hardest working people in any industry. Everyone has been burned with food software. We know the stories. We’ve lived some of them ourselves. Despite promises of saved time, food, money, and materials, food industry software has traditionally left leaders and operators wanting and suffering through the mundane.
It’s been this way since the 1980s when food production began to evolve, shifting into the fast-paced model that is rapidly transforming food today. Food software didn’t evolve with it. It’s why custom spreadsheets, internal software, point solutions with fragmented data, and legacy ERP tools are creating frustration among food operators. Our industry is undergoing a major shift in how food is being produced and sold, and the gap between business needs and software capabilities is widening further.
Given the state of the food software landscape, leaders in food must be careful about what platforms they build their businesses on. You need a sure thing.
We’ve written about how Galley is a recipe-first food data platform that can future-proof your business—now, let’s discuss what the labor ROI looks like. In the process, we’ll cover…
How food companies can lose labor struggling with food data
Why Galley impacts multiple line items on your Profit and Loss statement
ROI breakdowns for three different Galley Customer Use-Cases
Let’s dive in:
You’re Probably Losing Money (Without Realizing It)
Before we talk about Galley’s return on investment, it’s important to know where food operations are losing money.
A few examples…
Culinary teams create recipes, but as the supply chain gets squeezed and prices fluctuate, getting into the food costing spreadsheets to substitute ingredients from various suppliers to keep profit margins in check takes way too long. More often than not, margins are unknown or unclear.
Executive Chefs may have to communicate recipes in Excels, PDFs, or slide presentations on how to prepare new dishes, by email, only to miss the updated version because it’s time, and they’ll always be weeks behind on email. It’s a law of nature; we don’t make the rules.
Line Cooks need training, but when they have extra questions, or can’t remember process or quality controls for preparing food , they don’t have one place they can go to see all of the recipe data and information in one place (there might be a binder in the back office, but it’s a couple of years old!). They end up asking tons of questions, or running around, instead of prepping food at max efficiency.
Nutritionists and Registered Dieticians try their hardest to keep the menu nutritionals updated across internal documents, usually using specific nutrition software, and then have to enter it or communicate it to the teams and all the places nutritional and allergen data is: online ordering platforms, the website, and the marketing team. Then Culinary goes and changes things and everyone’s data is inaccurate again. This is a source of conflict and risk.
Procurement teams look at the next week’s menu and are math wizards to get the order right: 1,500 orders of gnocchi, so 750 pounds of potatoes, but we’ll lose about 10% to trim yield, so we really need 825 pounds of potatoes, or in other words 17 cases of potatoes. That’s a lot of room for human error, across 1,000 SKUs, and 100 menu items, and $350,000+ food spend per teammate.
Food Business Leaders need to be able to measure profitability to make important decisions, but each kitchen has different food waste numbers and sales, and they’re all taking ages to email the data over. Leaders are left with weeks or months-old data and not very helpful in a quickly-changing economy were responding in real-time is the trick to thriving.
These challenges occur daily and are largely the result of manual processes, hands-on data entry, and poor communication between tools and people, and datasets.
Extrapolate these efficiency roadblocks across dozens or hundreds of locations; you’re looking at money and labor due to these inefficiencies. And those are just the examples off the top of our heads.
The stress bad software creates is terrible, but standing still is expensive. Our industry has struggled with managing food data, and it is like trying to fill a strainer up with water.
If you want to guide your business into greater profitability or scale, something’s gotta change.
Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
Overview: Galley’s Multi-Leveled P&L Impact
The challenges we’ve discussed are all built upon the same core data: the recipe. The recipe determines how profitable dishes are, which impacts menu planning, which is what procurement uses to order food, and so on and so forth.
That’s why we built the recipe as the core of Galley’s data model. When you get the recipe right, there are compounding impacts for everything that’s built on top of it.
When it comes to Profit and Loss statements for food businesses, these compounding impacts can have a wide reach. For example:
Menus and Planning — Culinary and planning teams can pull in vendor real-time data, calculate food costs in seconds, and find smart ways to improve the profitability of whole menus collaboratively.
Inventory and Purchasing — Real-time inventory (powered by a UX kitchen teams actually like to use, and granular data bits like trim yield and anticipated spoilage) informs procurement teams what needs buying and when—and even creates purchase orders automatically that just need to be reviewed and sent.
Production and Service — Kitchen teams always have access to updated food and recipe data, and automated production guides demonstrate the exact steps line cooks need to take to complete prep and cooking tasks.
Technology and Overhead — Galley’s Open Food API turns your food data into a universal language that plays nice with all your future tools and software, opening up the ability to use the best-fit tools for your use case (and not just mediocre ones that check the right integration boxes). This IT unblocking has its own whole set of compounding effects.
Galley users typically see a food cost reduction of 1%, plus labor savings through workflows surrounding communicating, accessing, and managing recipes.
Once again, this is just the tip of the iceberg. So much is possible when your recipe data is changeable, centralized, easily communicated, and available in real time.
Next, let’s see how this plays out for different types of food businesses.
ROI Overview for Multi-Unit Restaurants
Let’s say you’re a multi-unit restaurant brand with 100 units.
Labor savings on time lost touching food data (data entry and more) can be significant:
Department/Team —> Team Size
Corporate: Culinary —> 4
Corporate: R&D / Procurement—> 3
Corporate: Finance —> 2
Per Location: Kitchen Manager —> 2
Per Location: Line Cook —> 3
ROI Overview for Contract / Non-Commercial Foodservice
If you’re a non-commercial foodservice provider with 100 accounts, here’s how it looks for headcount and potential time saving:
Department/Team —> Team Size
Corporate: Culinary Leadership —> 10
Corporate: Nutrition —> 6
Per Account Level: Chef —> 1
Per Account Level: Kitchen Manager/Sous —> 2
Per Account Level: Purchaser/Inventory Specialist —> 1
ROI Overview for Delivery-Native Food Brands
Let’s say you’re a prepared foods delivery service with an efficient food as manufacturing production operation from 2 food manufacturing facilities.
Here’s how it looks for the team, who are touching food data every day to get their work done:
Department/Team —> Team Size
Corporate: Culinary Leadership —> 4
Corporate: Purchaser —> 3
Corporate: Product/Engineer —> 4
Corporate: Nutrition —> 2
Per Facility: Cooks —> 14
Per Facility: Kitchen Manager —> 4
Imagine how much time teammates spend every day searching for, editing, changing, accessing, and referencing food data — it should be easy and instant, and it can be with Galley.
Get Galley’s Impact at Your Business
Many of the largest and fastest growing food companies in the world are choosing to work with Galley to help reduce stress when collaborating with food data, improve profitability, and reclaim labor and time.
Want a deeper look at how Galley yields this level of ROI? See Galley live here.
Lead Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Meta Description
A walkthrough of how Galley plugs the leaky bucket holes most food businesses experience: ROI breakdown, inefficiency examples we solve, and more.
