How Chelsea Arts Club Cut Manual Data Input & Gained Better Kitchen Visibility Using growyze
Chelsea Arts Club is a London-based private members' club for practising artists in disciplines such as painting, sculpting, photography and music. Established in 1890, it hosts various member areas including a bar, dining room and member’s table and holds regular events.
Ex-Head Chef Joby Wells is the Club’s Operations Director, responsible for the kitchens, reception and hospitality areas managing all aspects of F&B including stock, HR, staff management and finances. Prior to growyze, the club used Excel spreadsheets for food stock management, alongside hours of manual data input to align the correct pricing to items.
Here, we learn how the club adopted growyze for better visibility across stock, supplier pricing and product ordering.
Before growyze we used many different phone, email and online systems to make supplier orders. Now we use growyze for 100% of our orders, the team does it all in one place, and they can do it from their phone.
growyze makes the entire process of ordering and accounting automation easy and lets us see how much products actually cost us. From the first call, I knew the team were very genuine and that it was a platform I could trust!
I really enjoy using growyze and I think it's really really intuitive. Stocktake saved us a lot of time, saved hours of labour and is less daunting...And ordering is even much easier than on Amazon.
Challenges overcome by using growyze
- Management now has instant visibility on the profitability of each business area and can easily spot inaccuracies or decisions which affect the bottom line
- The stocktaking process is streamlined, with clarity on which products are being ordered, and how much they cost, without requiring hours of manual data input
Joby was initially introduced to growyze for monthly food stocktakes, but quickly moved onto adding all of the recipes to growyze’s platform.
“The reality of it is our stocktake is quite small,” explains Joby. “We haven’t got a huge amount of products because everything’s fresh so it’s in and out quite quickly but once we started adding all of the recipes it worked really, really well.”
“The menu here changes every month”, shares Joby.
“Over the years I’ve been shown plenty of stock management platforms that can control some stock areas but often they can’t manage recipes that change as frequently as ours. If you have a fixed menu it’s easy but to my knowledge, no one had come up with a system that works when the menu constantly changes. This is where growyze is really good, when you need to make constant recipe updates and add new prices and basically create a closed system from the orders going in, to items being sold.”
Having moved from being Head Chef, to Operations Director, Joby also appreciates the visibility growyze provides.
“When you’re in the kitchen day-to-day it’s very easy to know exactly where you are with your spend because you can see products coming in, you can see the invoices and how much stuff is costing, the wastage and so on. From a holistic point of view it’s easy to get an idea for whether you’re going to be down or up. But when you’re not in there day-to-day like I’m not anymore, growyze has made it a hundred times easier to be able to check what’s happening because the data’s there.”
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This ensures Joby can keep an eye on the operations and make improvements where necessary, before they become a problem. “I can easily see if the dishes have been costed correctly, or what mistakes have been made when people are ordering, like are they ordering from the best priced supplier? So from a management point of view it’s been really good.”
This has led to growyze becoming embedded across the various club areas.
“We now have three accounts with growyze for each revenue stream which allows us to have a different section for the bar, kitchen and dining room. With growyze we’ve literally got a live update of exactly where we are based on the previous stocktake, what we've purchased, and what we've sold. Just being able to pull all that data down straight away works great.”
Using growyze also ensures that Joby can streamline how they log, and monitor, supplier pricing.
“Previously after every stocktake I’d have to go through every single product line and check the prices are correct. This meant phoning up suppliers at the start of every month getting prices. Even if it was an existing dish obviously the price has changed since last year so we were always having to redo the costings. It was painful. Also, if you’ve got two or three suppliers all providing milk you have no idea who’s been ordering from which company and that creates inaccuracies. With growyze it’s easy to see what’s been ordered from where, and what it costs, so the time saved for us is often not just on the actual stocktake but the processes that follow the stocktake as they’re already done.”
To see how growyze could help streamline how you manage your hospitality venue, saving time and money, book a free 30-minute demo today.
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