Challenge
Wasted ingredients and stale food curb restaurant efficiency and can lower customer satisfaction. But how to prepare just the right amount of ingredients for any given day so that freshness isn’t compromised, food isn’t wasted, and customers don’t have to wait as ingredients are replenished? That conundrum led Mac Haik Restaurant Group, a franchisee of First Watch—a popular breakfast and brunch chain in Texas—to search for a way to optimize food prep.
Traditionally, ingredient inventory and prep are planned using spreadsheets. But these spreadsheets pose challenges:
- They can be technically complicated and difficult for new employees to grasp right away.
- Estimated food prep amounts may be inaccurate due to recent spikes in demand, changing demographics, or other anomalies.
If managers are spending time training employees how to use backend tools, that means they have less time to focus on imparting the restaurant’s people-first culture and developing relationships with guests. If line cooks are frantically trying to prep more ingredients because of a sudden, unplanned shortage, they can’t quickly prepare guests’ food, leading to longer wait times and potential for errors. In a nutshell, although Mac Haik Restaurant Group prioritizes freshness and customer experience at its First Watch franchise, it needed a better way to optimize prep so that the right amount of prep occurs each day, with no fluctuations, and if the restaurant gets busy, staff can easily handle the increase in sales.
Solution
PreciTaste, a technology company specializing in using AI to improve restaurant kitchen operations, offered just the solution Mac Haik Restaurant Group was looking for: Prep Assistant. This AI-driven solution guides kitchen staff on what, when, and how much to make, with no guesswork or wasted time. It includes a complete suite of smart features to optimize every step of ingredient prep. Managers can track task completion, reduce food waste, and uncover missed revenue opportunities—all from one smart dashboard. Using Prep Assistant enables Mac Haik Restaurant Group to better digitize its back-of-house operations to streamline staff performance, reduce costs, and elevate quality and service.
“Prep Assistant can tell you exactly how much you’re going to need on each day of your business in a more accurate way than anything we’ve ever seen in the past in this industry.” —Vanessa Verano, VP of Learning and Development, Mac Haik Restaurant Group
The solution uses an array of data sources:
- The restaurant’s Product Mix (PMIX) report, which analyzes individual menu items’ sales performance and provides insights into what is selling well and what is not.
- Recipe data throughout the ingredient lifecycle from purchase to sale.
- Historic sales data (last 12 months).
- Daily sales data to keep forecasts up to date.
- Weather and seasonality data.
- Inventory data.
“The kitchen team loves the technology. The first day we implemented it, every team member picked up on it within about five minutes. They were eager to get started with it, and it’s just made their life a lot easier.” —Keely Hayden, General Manager, Mac Haik Restaurant Group, a First Watch Franchisee
Using this data, Prep Assistant schedules food preparation tasks in equal portions each day. Every location follows the same process of prep task management and uses the same containers. Prep tasks are scheduled evenly throughout the week, leading to uniformity of the amount of preps per day and high food quality. This helps ensure the restaurant doesn’t run out of product or experience large spikes in prep. The system recalibrates food prep cycles if food runs out earlier than expected, helping to ensure that enough is available for the next day, but not creating waste.
“Our engineers can use OpenVINO to easily build our models and make them more intricate. And then from a user experience, that technical data is translated into very easily understandable information.” —Kenneth Hallwachs, Head of Customer Success, PreciTaste, Inc.
Prep Assistant’s user interface is simple and intuitive to make the solution easy to integrate into restaurant operations. Users simply tap a task to start and tap again when it’s done. Task icons eliminate language barriers. Because the solution is web-based, managers can track daily activity from all locations, monitor task completion, and compare key performance indicators (KPIs), whether at the restaurant, on the road, or at home.
PreciTaste is an Intel Premier Partner and worked closely with Intel while developing its sales forecasting model. The Intel® Distribution for OpenVINO™ toolkit was instrumental in optimizing PreciTaste’s AI models, which run on Intel® Core™ processors in PreciTaste’s private cloud.
“Initially, our expectation was a reduction in cost of goods, which we attributed to reduction in waste, as well as more of a redistribution of our labor to improve shift execution. But what we did not expect to see was an improved speed of service, which helped us improve our top-line sales growth, as well as a reduction in our comps and promos from a shift execution perspective.” —Dan Anfinson, Mac Haik Enterprises, Restaurant Group COO
Results
Since deploying Prep Assistant, Mac Haik Restaurant Group has seen over 90% accuracy for food prep estimates, based on 95% accurate AI-forecasting.1
“The savings we see more than pay for the system.” —Vanessa Verano, VP of Learning and Development, Mac Haik Restaurant Group
This has resulted in the following savings:1
- 50 basis points (bps) reduction in cost of goods, attributed to reduced waste.
- 40 bps reduction in labor due to the redistribution of labor hours.
- 80 bps reduction in complimentary meals and promotions, due to better and faster execution in the kitchen and better overall customer experience.
- Reduced ticket processing times and number of ticket errors.