An Afternoon with an Industry-Leading Chef - GoTab and meez

High COGs and labor shortages are a driving concern for everyone in hospitality right now. And unfortunately the truth is sometimes technology isn’t helpful. Think about it. How many times have you considered a new tool, but pulled out at the last minute when it became clear your team just wouldn’t adopt it, or that it would take more time and effort to get the benefits than you could afford?

When it comes to restaurant technologies, it’s definitely not about adding tech everywhere. Operators don’t need more tech. They need fewer, better tools that work seamlessly together.

By connecting front-of-house ordering with back-of-house kitchen and recipe management, GoTab and meez together can show you how to up-level your efficiency, ensure consistent quality, better forecast demand and report on your true costs. 

Last week our Rick Malthaner sat down with Geoff Kornberg, vp of culinary at Beatnic, a fast casual vegan restaurant with 10 locations in New York, and Sergio Hernandez, director of culinary and business development at meez to talk through a real-life example where the tech is actually making a clearly positive impact. We encourage you to watch the webinar. If you don't have time, check out a quick recap of what we discussed.

Doing More with Less Restaurant Staff

Geoff acknowledged the obvious up front: the last few years have really taken a toll on restaurants. With sales levels down due to the pandemic, they have to make do with fewer staff. And sometimes, the staff they have, are less experienced.

The good news is that with low-cost cloud tools that are easy to integrate, businesses of all sizes can get the functionality and optimizations previously only available to large enterprise brands. 

meez is a great example of this. It was a huge part of how Beatnic navigated the pandemic and is now core to how they operate today. With meez, pretty much anyone can make a recipe using a simple tablet in the kitchen loaded with photos and videos, detailed ingredients and step-by-step procedures.

No Math or Chef Travel Required

It especially comes in handy to help them to deliver a consistent dish, regardless of where it’s made. Whether uptown, or downtown, a Beatnic guest can order the same dish at any location and expect it to deliver the same taste and quality. And because order volumes vary by location, it’s especially helpful that Beatnic’s kitchen staff can scale their recipes to their forecasted number of orders without having to do any math. 

Previously, when Beatnic rolled out a new menu, they had to spend at least 3 weeks on the road, walking each location through the recipes, showing local staff how to prepare them. Now, they create all recipes as video content on meez and it’s simply a zoom meeting to walk through it.

They gather everyone together, go through the recipe steps. It’s intuitive, easy-to-learn, and makes it a lot faster to onboard new staff members.

Relieving Operating Margin Pressure

While it’s a great thing to see new highs in minimum wage all over the country, it’s another thing for  restaurants to juggle. They end up needing to simplify things, have fewer people doing more work, and/or deal with less margin. With margins in hospitality already tight, tools like meez, that lets you calculate theoretical food cost, and GoTab, that lets you scale with less labor, become all the more important to a restaurant’s survival. You can use the tech to fill gaps in staffing, or empower the staff you have to be more efficient.

Like pretty much every hospitality venue the last few years, Beatnic had to re-engineer some dishes since their COGs increased almost 30 percent across-the-board. To stay balanced and stay in business they did things like shifting out ingredients and quantities, and meez was integral to that process. Beatnic also uses meez’ product mix to forecast demand so they only produce what they’ll need, or very close to the amount they’ll need, and avoid waste.

How the Integration Works

The GoTab and meez integration is uniquely created to make your back-of-house and kitchen operations run smoothly. This integration allows operators to create and manage their recipes within the meez interface. When finalized, operators can sync the recipes and prep instructions with the product in GoTab. Every product with a meez recipe synced can be effortlessly viewed in the GoTab Task Display System. Operators with large square footage, complex events, or multiple locations can increase labor efficiency, improve quality and deliver consistency.

If you’d like to learn more about the GoTab and Meez integration, download the fact sheet. We’d love to show you how it works. Request a demo at gotab.com today.