Breadless was founded with a simple mission: "everyone deserves to eat good." Created with the goal of supplying communities with gluten-free, vegetarian, vegan, and healthy options that are also packed with flavour, the Detroit-based sandwich spot has seen lots of popularity in their community.
However, the path to growth is unfortunately not just a popularity contest. There are many other factors that get in the way of restaurants expanding. High food costs, high labour costs, low efficiency, and unpredictability are all factors that got in the way of expansion.
After nine months of struggling with their old system, Breadless found a solution to their problem. Their operation needed structure and accuracy to free up time to work on what mattered. Creating prep schedules, with the help of ClearCOGS, did exactly that.
Jason Brys, Director of Operations, didn't have time to focus on what a director of ops should be focusing on, "With us being so small, I'm not just running a lot of the back-end, but I'm running a lot of the front line stuff as well, managing the stores." Breadless was opened for nine months using a system where either Jason or the manager would have to manually calculate what they thought they needed to prep, with each manager doing calculations differently, and allowing a lot of room for error.
Because of this unscalable and unreliable system, over and under prepping became a costly issue. "Our biggest concern was greens that we had prepared but they were going bad because we were over-prepping," Jason shared. On the other hand he said, "I was having to go back into the kitchen to help catch up on prep at least three times a week."
Getting started was an easy process. Jason worked with ClearCOGS to map out their menu items by ingredient and take into account all of the Breadless standard operating procedures, while also ensuring that all the major pain points the Breadless staff were experiencing were addressed.
The team created daily automatic prep sheets that were making more accurate forecasts than the previous system. Breadless now starts each day knowing exactly how much to prep, meaning all the prep could be done at once, and staff could spend their time focusing on the customers.
Within the first month of using the new process, Breadless began seeing positive results. Overall, those results were a considerable decrease in wasted labour and food, meaning lower COGS and lower labour costs. In a month, Breadless saved almost 1200 GBP on food costs and over 500 GBP on labour costs. This is equivalent to an approximate 1.4% increase in profit margins.
"I've personally had to prep less since using ClearCOGS, I can help with prep in the morning, once, and then I'm able to focus on the rest of my day. Now I'm able to focus on the growth of the brand, implementing new standards to staff, fine tuning all those things that require attention to detail for the whole company." Jason shared. Jason and the Breadless team now have better capability to revamp their menu to drive additional profits, since having the support of ClearCOGS in guaranteeing freshness with optimised operations.
ClearCOGS uses AI/ML to help restaurants increase their profitability. Through the use of currently existing POS data, ClearCOGS creates highly accurate demand planning systems for our restaurants, providing operators with clear and concise prep sheets every day to streamline operations and better control COGS. Historically, ClearCOGS has helped restaurants with:
● Daily itemised prep schedules based on store-specific data to make the right amount of food for each day without running out or having any waste.
● Predictive AI algorithms look at seasonal data patterns such as day of the week, time of the day, down to the ingredient level to predict future demand.