We’re nearly a year and half into the COVID-19 pandemic and restaurants—one of the hardest hit business types have yet to fully recover.
The Restaurant Recovery Act provided a major boost to the industry, but cash alone isn’t the single solution. In order to combat the ongoing labor shortage, one way that restaurants can improve their operations and bottom-line margins is adopting a new type of back-of-house technology: unified supplier ordering.
There are limited options, but one relatively new company, Cut+Dry, is a comprehensive solution that consolidates all supplier ordering into one single app, plus much more. Cut+Dry allows restaurants to order any wholesale product or supply from any national broadliner or regional distributor in a single, unified, digital interface—for free. Cut+Dry users report a 50% reduction in time spent on order management, totaling hundreds of labor hours and thousands of dollars saved per year.
Most restaurants manage multiple vendors via time-consuming pen-and-paper order guides, which creates a logistical headache. This multi-step process on a per-supplier basis involves ordering, receiving, coding, expense tracking, and accounting, which is often spread across various staff members resulting in miscommunication, errors, and food waste. Multiple locations only further complicate the ordering task for those responsible.
As one independent, multi-location GM put it, “It’s loosely organized chaos at best.” The errors, the waste, the stressful calls, texts, or emails to supplier reps for out-of-stock, missing, or damaged products is a major contributor to tight margins. Many independent operators are ditching these old-school processes and stressors in favor of unified digital ordering that brings greater transparency, control, and peace of mind to the supply ordering process.
Cut+Dry alerts restaurants when order cut-off times are approaching, provides order pars, displays last order quantity, and then submits orders to any given supplier with the click of a button. Suppliers receive and confirm orders and when orders are delivered, restaurant staff utilizes the app’s check-in function to mark items as received or instantly request credits from the supplier.
The app’s Supplier Chat function creates a single communication thread to be alerted of any order issues, out-of-stock items, and to accept or deny recommended substitutions. Given the live, digital nature of the order record, operators can go back at any time to verify what they actually ordered and what was ultimately received. Cut+Dry streamlines communications amongst restaurant teams and locations and eliminates lost in translation errors that often occur when placing orders via phone or when handing off mid-order from shift to shift.
Lastly, and unique to Cut+Dry, restaurant operators are also given the ability to pay any invoice from any business using ACH or credit card, even where cards are not accepted. Just scan an invoice, select payment method, and Cut+Dry sends payment on behalf of the restaurant. Additionally, the platform automatically identifies reward-eligible products within digital order guides and deposits cash rewards directly from major brands into a restaurant’s Cut+Dry Cash digital wallet. Finally, an app that pays the restaurant and not the other way around.
Conclusion
As labor shortages continue to hinder the post-pandemic restaurant recovery, operators in the already tightly margined industry, need to find ways to do more with existing staff. In support of the independent restaurant operator, Cut+Dry is taking a different approach to digital ordering with their supplier-agnostic ordering, payments, and rewards platform. The Cut+Dry app is free, simple to use, and can be implemented in under an hour. Restaurants can go here to create a free account and get started today.
This guest post was written by Cut+Dry. To learn more about our guest blogging opportunities, contact us.
