How Two Hands Café Uses growyze to Instantly Sell New Menu Items, Reduce Waste & Create Accurate Reporting
Two Hands Southampton is part of the Two Hands Food Group family, an innovative group of cafés that reside within coworking spaces. Providing coffee, bakery products and fresh breakfast and lunch options, as well as event catering, for stylish coworking communities.
Prior to finding growyze, Café Manager Danielle Cozens had been working with Two Hands’ existing inventory management system; an Excel spreadsheet that made managing inventory difficult, and often delayed.
Since implementing growyze Danielle has had access to accurate, live sales and inventory data, with a true record of waste at the end of each week. It’s also meant that the team has been able to use up products going out of stock by creating instant menu items, whereas previously this process would have taken over a week.
Here, we speak to Danielle to find out more about how they use growyze for inventory, waste and product management within the Two Hands Southampton branch café.
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
- Recording waste takes seconds, and is far more accurate as it’s based on live pricing information
- Chefs are able to create instant new recipes, and get them live, reducing waste on near-end stock
- Week-to-week inventory is faster and more manageable, without missing items and discrepancies that can’t be accounted for
“The Two Hands café in Southampton has been open for about three years now and I’ve been the Café Manager here for two years”, explains Danielle. “We have a café based at the bottom of an office building block so all tenants can come down and purchase from the café and we also supply hospitality and meet and greet lunches to anyone within the offices or for events they may hold.”
Danielle’s role is extremely operations focused, covering everything from the day-to-day running of the café, to staff management, as well as all of the stocktaking and management procedures. Prior to using growyze, Danielle explains that stocktake was a difficult task:
“We count stock every week on a Friday and on the last working day of the month we do a full count, which includes everything like food, soft drinks and confectionery, but also disposables, cleaning materials, packaging and so on. Prior to growyze this was all done by Excel spreadsheet so each team member would cover a section, count stock manually and write it on paper. They would bring it to me to input into the spreadsheet” explains Danielle.
“With this system you could guarantee that when you sent the stocksheet, the formulas weren’t correct or the opening and closing stock weren’t correct. Our Area Manager found growyze and since I started using it I can say I honestly love the software.”
As well as creating more accurate stocktakes and simplifying the weekly stock counts, growyze has also enabled Danielle’s team to be more reactive to near-end products, to reduce waste and make the most of the stock they have available:
“Just today, there was an example of something that’s so simple but that we couldn’t do before growyze. The Chef came to me and said he had some feta that needed to be used up. I asked him to create something with it, so he made some feta and spinach parcels. I chucked the recipe straight onto growyze, added the cost and instantly I know what I need to sell it for, what my GP is going to be and I can get the button on the till, all within ten minutes.”
“Before growyze I’d be sitting there going through suppliers, checking prices, I’d have to send it off to a Manager to check the costings are correct and by the time you’ve done that the feta might already be in the bin. Something as simple as that, that a chef should be doing everyday to easily use up stock, was a nightmare. Whereas with growyze it’s just so easy and straightforward. Before using the app I couldn’t say that within ten minutes I’d be able to sell a product that wasn’t on the menu, it would be a week long process. It’s made everyone’s lives easier”.
Another key business area that growyze has supported is the ability to effectively track waste.
“The biggest time saving thing I found was waste,” explains Danielle, “because when you're working from a spreadsheet, you then have a different chart for your waste and the price doesn’t always come up. So you have to go and search a spec to find out the price of the dish and you might be looking at a potato and leak soup that was spec'd in January and since then the leaks have actually doubled in price. This means your GP isn’t correct, so it doesn't matter how good you are at recording that waste, it's never going to be accurate.”
“With growyze, that was one of the brilliant things I found, that the dishes could be added as waste per portion, so on a Friday it takes me seconds to record waste. I type the product in, how many portions and it’s there, accurate. Whereas before, you're back and forth from one spreadsheet to another spreadsheet and you're looking at three different suppliers, and so you could be sitting there forever just doing the waste.”
When asked if it was easy to get buy-in internally for using growyze, Danielle said “The cost for the app was very reasonable, and there was no tie-in to a contract which made it easier to get sign-off”.
Danielle also mentions that to anyone else considering growyze she would tell them to go for it: “I would advertise growyze and the people that work there, hand on heart, 100%. The team there put their heart and soul into the product - you can tell when someone cares and they really do”.
Find how growyze could work for your venue by booking a demo with the team.
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