The meal prep industry moves quickly, and if you’re not organized, you may not be able to keep up with customer demand. The good news is, there are plenty of ways to ensure that you have everything set up to manage incoming orders as your business grows. With a scalable supply chain, delivery management, the right meal prep software, and more, your operation can handle the most common logistical challenges. Here are a few tips to streamline your meal prep company processes.
Set Up a Scalable Supply Chain
If you have the opportunity to source fresh ingredients from local suppliers, you can offer incredible quality to customers, even as you reduce the environmental impact of your operations. However, you need to make sure that your suppliers are capable of scaling to meet your needs when your business starts to grow. For this reason, it may be wise to have backup options in place, just in case you need to pivot quickly to manage a boom in orders.
Organize Your Kitchen with Meal Prep Software
In this day and age, an organized kitchen requires a marriage of labor and meal prep software. On the one hand, you need to create a kitchen space conducive to efficient workflow, with clear divisions for cooking, prep, and storage spaces, as well as plenty of room for people to move about. This is a fast-paced work environment and you want everyone to have space to work without being jostled or displaced.
On the other hand, you need meal prep business software that adds function and convenience, not only by taking orders, but by providing needed features like label printing and reporting to help your team stay organized and on schedule. This will ensure that your kitchen runs like a well-oiled machine.
Plan Efficient Delivery Routes
As your business grows, one of the difficulties you’re sure to face is optimizing delivery routes. First, you have to figure out how many drivers to hire so you have the coverage you need without overspending. You also need to keep food cold to ensure safety, and the longer it sits in a truck en route, the greater chance of problems.
A lot of your issues can be solved with routing software that helps you to juggle drivers and deliveries seamlessly, even when you have to add to routes to support your growing client list. From there, you can compare costs for options like ice packs versus investing in refrigerated trucks to ensure that meals remain safe and viable.
Let Tech Take the Wheel with Meal Prep Ordering
Yes, you still need hands involved in making meals, but in order to let your kitchen staff do what they do best, you need to take other tasks off their plate. With the right meal prep business software, you can automate time-consuming tasks like meal prep ordering, managing recurring subscriptions, sending customer notifications, and pushing promotions and referral programs, just for example. By automating these essential tasks, your team can focus on making the healthy, delicious, and convenient prepared meals that keep your customers happy.
Find this article helpful? Then wait until you see all the ways GoPrep can help you streamline your business.
