Without food, any celebration would not be complete. After all, food is not a formality but a whole emotion that will make the celebration more memorable and enjoyable. Therefore, catering is an essential industry that provides food services for private and public events of all sizes. Some caterers only provide the food, while others offer complete arrangements such as stalls, table sets, crockeries, tableware, linens, and more.
Due to the high demand, the catering industry is very beneficial and might bring high profit for you. However, it is not easy to handle because in catering service, you not only serve food, but you also have to manage all the cooking process, purchasing, inventory, and more. Those cases are often prone to error if you do those manually. That is why you need a Catering Application to solve those problems. Using a Catering Application will help you manage your business with all its advanced features. So, here are the six ways to minimize ordering errors with the Catering Application.
Also read: What are Catering Automation Methods with ERP Systems?
1. Direct Communicate Customers to The Kitchen
Handwritten orders on paper are still standard in some catering businesses, but they can confuse the kitchen, especially if the server is in a hurry or uses shorthand. Using paper and pen is cheap, but it leaves room for mistakes and makes it hard to keep track of the orders. You can easily read and track the order digitally with the Catering Application.
The best solution is for the point of sale (POS) to send orders straight to a kitchen display system from the front of the house. The kitchen staff can see if customers want to add or remove a specific ingredient or how they want their food cooked. You can also add important notes, like allergy alerts. All this information is clearly on the screens next to each order.
2. Displaying Ingredients
Millions of people suffer from food allergies, and many can be life-threatening. Many cases have happened where people with food allergies got sick or even passed away because of the forbidden ingredients in the food that they ordered in catering. Hence, it will adversely affect both the customer and the catering owner. The catering owner will have to pay millions of dollars in legal costs.
It is best to give your customers clear information about ingredients and allergens. When you use a Catering Application, you can make menus and recipes centrally and send them to all touch-points, along with details like ingredients, nutritional value, and allergens. This means that you always have detailed and up-to-date information about all the dishes on your menu at the point of sale, digital menus, self-service kiosks, websites, and anywhere else where servers and customers can access them.
3. Make Menu Updates Happen Instantly
Ingredient substitutions and unavailable dishes are unavoidable in busy catering and huge chains, but if if you don’t convey these correctly, you risk angry consumers. In the past, you had to cross out a dish from the printed menu or, even worse, tell a customer that the word wasn’t available as they were ordering it. With the Catering Application, you can keep all your menus up-to-date in one place since you can take orders online and have digital menus.
You can also ensure that all prices and discounts are accurate and up to date across all of the different touch-points. Because costs and values are also set centrally in the back office of a single platform, there is no danger of inadvertently charging the incorrect price or using the wrong promotion. This is one reason why you only need one platform.
Also read: 6 Reasons Why Catering Software is Important for Your Business
4. Make Sure Your Food Comes Out in the Right Order and Time
With a paper-based ordering system, mistakes often happen in the kitchen with orders. Someone might misread an order, some words might be too small, or the order might even get lost. But when the POS and kitchen screens are linked in real-time, and all orders are sent digitally, you can ensure that the kitchen receives clear information and can make all the dishes in the correct order and at the right time.
That is because the application acts as a traffic officer between the front-of-house staff and the kitchen. It eliminates the chance of people losing their tickets and the chaos that comes after that. By automatically putting new orders in the proper queues based on how long it will take to make them and sending fryer orders straight to the fryer display station, the Catering Application makes sure that staff always knows what they need to make and that no dish gets forgotten.
5. Communicate Information Delays in Time
The incidence of delays is undesirable, but they are frequently unavoidable. It is possible to have a customer who understands the situation rather than one who is upset by just communicating delays in time. The application and the point of sale that the servers use can communicate with one another in a two-way, real-time manner by using a Catering Application.
This implies that servers can transmit orders to the kitchen, and they are also able to track whether the charges are on progress or whether they are still in the line. When a chef is done perfecting a dish, they will bump it as complete so that the servers may notice it and bring the food to the table as soon as possible. Similarly, they can promptly inform clients if there will be a delay in their meal delivery or if it will arrive shortly.
6. Track Consumption Data and Plan Your Purchases Better
If you’re running your catering business with pen and paper, you’re probably overbuying ingredients more frequently than not. When working with perishable ingredients, it’s easy to overbuy and waste money. However, if you run out of a component, you may lose customers and their loyalty. So, you can better prepare for and monitor consumption with the help of a Catering Application that includes recipe management features.
You can see how much of each ingredient to use in each dish when you set a recipe. Since you can keep track of sales and recipes with the same software, you can also make it easier to buy things. All of the information will be put together by the system’s reports and analytics, so you’ll know how much you can expect to sell next week or next month and how much of each ingredient to buy to ensure your guests are happy while minimizing waste and spoilage. Combined with automated restocking, this functionality can help catering chains get the most out of their purchases with as little guesswork as possible.
Conclusion
Just like every other business, the food catering business is moving online. The existence of a Catering Application is changing the way people find and work with caterers in general. In the same way, this platform helps catering businesses find and serve a large number of customers in different parts of the market. HashMicro comes to help your business by providing Hash Smart Catering Technology, as this system will facilitate you to manage your catering. Discuss your business needs with us as a trusted business software consultant. Get a free demo and the Hash Smart Catering Technology pricing scheme from HashMicro now.
