Prep planning ate a full day a week at every location. Now it mostly runs itself.

Prep planning was a weekly ritual: head chefs cross-checking the event book, walking the cold store, and scribbling supplier orders on the back of a menu. It took most of a day a week at every location, and it still missed — a fair bit of food thrown out, a few inventory mistakes a week, and a long lag between realising they needed something and the supplier actually getting the order. Their operations lead was honest with us: she didn't think this could be automated. She'd spent the better part of a year looking at off-the-shelf tools, and none of them could handle the way her chefs actually plan. We came in right at the point where she was ready to build something that fit, rather than license something that didn't.

1. We started with a few months of booking data, lined up against actual sales and what was received at the door — a handful of menu types covered the vast majority of bookings.
2. A week on-site with the head chefs came next: walking the receiving dock, the cold store, the prep stations, writing down every rule that only lived in someone's head — supplier minimums, allergen swaps, what's in season.
3. From there it was a matter of mapping every ingredient, every supplier, the lead times, and the point at which something starts going to waste.

• Tasting sessions ran at one location while we built it — chefs tried the prep lists the system produced and told us what felt wrong.
• There was a standing early-morning call with their operations lead through the first few months — the one time of week everyone was on the same line.
• Site visits rotated through every location during rollout so every head chef met the team face to face.

• The system looks at what's booked, the usual walk-in numbers for that day, and the type of event, then produces a prep list per shift, broken down by station, with the portions worked out around each chef's allergen and dietary swaps.
• Supplier orders get drafted every morning with waste limits built in — if the pattern says a chunk of something usually gets binned, the order quietly comes down by that much. Allergen swaps get checked automatically.
• Prep lists land on the kitchen tablets first thing, and supplier orders go out shortly after — including the few suppliers who still only take a fax.
• Every morning the owners get yesterday's numbers per location waiting for them.