Investment into our London based software solutions business continues to grow, and with an expanded team of developers and technical specialists on board, we are focussed on enhancing our platforms more than ever, specifically with our clients in mind!
Our powerful purchasing solution, Freshmarkets, and our leading-edge menu management system, CaterCloud, both have technical roadmaps that see new features and enhancements dropping throughout 2023.
Freshmarkets
The team continue to work behind-the-scenes, ensuring the platform maintains its slick performance to support our growth in non-food categories and the increased range of products that brings. Alongside performance enhancements we have also been focussed on driving efficiencies within our own teams. We have dedicated many releases to feature enhancements aimed at improving the working processes for our Customer Operations and Business Improvement teams, all of which allow us to continue to deliver better service for our clients.
In the past 12 months, we have released over eighty feature upgrades that both improve usability and functionality for our clients and their teams. Working with one of our key clients, Amey, we have developed and released a ‘Bulk Purchase Order’ module to allow them to control and monitor their budgets and spend across different divisions and sites and have also launched a brand new ‘click & collect’ feature which supports the rollout of electrical item purchasing and other non-food categories via Freshmarkets.
Our short-term focus remains on the continued user interface improvements and feature enhancements to improve usability and drive more efficiencies for our clients. Moving into 2023 our focus shifts to enhanced alerting and out of stock messaging as we continue to support businesses through the widespread supply chain issues.
CaterCloud
Our in-house software business inherited the CaterCloud platform and have spent the last quarter significantly improving the core code base on which the platform is built, this not only keeps our platform performing at top speed but also future proofs us for all other releases
Like Freshmarkets, focus areas for CaterCloud include improvements to help the useability for our internal CaterCloud Customer Support team, as well as enhancements to improve the customer experience. These changes range from minor upgrades to entire new modules and features, such as our recent development to expand our nutritional reporting to include micronutrients (vitamin A, vitamin B, magnesium etc.) which supports clients in Scotland to adhere to new government legislation.
In the past year we have worked on large scale releases to ensure our clients business can remain fully compliant with new legislation such as Natasha’s Law labelling. We have also gone one step further by developing the allergen matrix to further support our clients with the challenges of allergen management.
The creation of interactive drag and drop weekly menus has become a key feature for clients, providing caterers with flexibility to manage menus at site level and provides cost and nutritional analysis. This, along with CPRD (Cost Per Resident Per Day) reporting for the Healthcare sector and QR code menus, has allowed our system to better support our clients with cost control, menu management and compliance and has established us as a key business partner.
Moving into 2023, a new era of CaterCloud will see existing CaterCloud customers paying subscription fees from February, whilst our Freshmarkets clients continue to use it for free as part of their package. Find out more about our CaterCloud charging model here.
There is plenty more in the works for the medium and long term as we make decisions about which features can best support the growing needs of our clients and their industries.
Although supply chains have experienced difficulties in recent years, our incredible internal team, suppliers, and clients have enabled our business to grow, allowing us to continue to invest in the development of our systems to support our clients’ needs. Our growing development team and streamlined processes will ensure that our systems remain ahead of the competition and are future-proofed for the coming years and industry challenges. Our key priority as a business is supporting our clients any way we can, so our future developments will continue to be centred around this as the business continues to grow.
To find out more about our solutions and how partnering with us can save your business time and money and keep you compliant, contact our Sales Director, Steve Walker: stevewalker@ef-group.co.uk / 07837 212719.
