Ensuring students are served healthy, nutritious, and well-balanced meals is just one part of the job for a catering team in the education sector. Portion and serving size are especially important in education as school children have specific requirements for their nutrition and calorie intake to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
But with tight budgets, strict spend limits and multiple dietary needs to cater for, just how can kitchen staff and catering teams keep focussed on balancing profit margins whilst ensuring the well being of their pupils and students?
Managing profit with multiple sites
Business Intelligence (BI) reporting and data analytics helps to keep track of key metrics such as profit, spend at site level and trends, this allows the management of spend and gives insight to spot suitable more cost-effective alternatives where needed. Data insights are key to understanding what is going on in your business and by using BI tools to track and report the metrics you will be able to make more precise, data driven decisions and stay on top of your spend. But how can you control the rate at which spend occurs across multiple sites with multiple kitchen teams operating on varying menus?
Our CaterCloud menu management platform is designed to do just that. With a host of clever profit management features that allow you to set targets, cost meals and set portion sizes all at the same time, all whilst calculating nutritional and calorific information of your recipes, CaterCloud’s intuitive features prevent you from eating into your profit.
Our handy menu planner has a traffic light system clearly showing how your recipe performs against nutritional recommended daily allowance and daily target price, this gives visibility to both the end user and head office of where alternative options or improvements need to be made.
The flexible menu planner feature has an easy-to-use drag and drop system, so that chefs, cooks and kitchen staff can move dishes and recipes to different days and mealtimes to create suitable menus that meet both the dietary needs of their students but also keep them within budget and on track to achieve profit margins.
Whilst all businesses remain focussed on profit, there is a strict requirement for government run schools to remain within budget. CaterClouds menu planner gives visibility of the average cost per person, per day, ensuring that meals are created within daily budgets, to maintain profit margin all without compromising on nutritional values.
But the clever insight doesn’t stop there, by monitoring spend across all sites our clients are not only able to maintain profit margins but are able to reduce spend across all their sites. When combining CaterCloud with our powerful purchasing platform Freshmarkets, our customers benefit from a customised BI reporting tool Power BI, this enables our clients to manage every aspect of their spend and provides valuable insight to other business metrics.
All items purchased through Freshmarkets are visible in the downloadable reports and clients have full flexibility to see order and spend information either by individual site or head office and group level. This allows for full visibility of site performance and gives full control on managing spend and budgets, for example if one site serving the same number of students is spending more than another our clients and their dedicated account managers will not only have the visibility to see this but can access the data to drill in to order volumes, number of deliveries and more. This allows investigation at site level to improve efficiencies and bring spend in line with other like-for-like sites.
And what’s more, clients can easily access the data they need on any device, enabling them to view up-to-date reports whenever, wherever.
For more information about how EF-group can save your business time and money, please visit www.ef-group.co.uk/education or contact Steve Walker on 07837 212719.
