Companies Changing Technology in Franchising: SimpleOrder

In the restaurant industry, restaurateurs will usually know how much money they made in a week. ut far less frequently will they know exactly how much they’ve spent. That’s what Elliot Hool, Chief Marketing Officer of SimpleOrder, says. And he adds that this is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to running a successful restaurant. It’s also why many restaurants close.

“Everyone is constantly focused on front-of-house operations, food quality and what they’re serving, but people usually don’t have a pulse on food costs and what’s going out,” said Hool. “Essentially, understanding food cost affects if you’re successful.”

That’s why SimpleOrder created an easy solution to help restaurants be more efficient with food costs and understanding what inventory is in the kitchen. The team built a platform designed to streamline the ordering and inventory processes while tracking operations.

“What we’ve found is that single location restaurants with smart enough operators can keep good track of what their expenditure is and learn the basics to get by just by guessing a few things. But when they go from one to two to three restaurants and beyond, that becomes harder,” said Hool. “We’ve created a product that allows a restaurant to turn itself into a business and look at its costs to act more effectively, efficiently and profitably.”

As businesses grow, the more important it is for them to monitor and control costs. What makes the restaurant business more unique than other industries like retail is when someone buys a pair of socks, those socks are now sold, says Hool. However, a restaurant buys tomatoes but doesn’t sell tomatoes, so it’s almost a food factory, which makes it more difficult for restaurateurs. SimpleOrder’s goal is to make it a lot easier for restaurant operators to understand what they have in their kitchens.

For that reason, SimpleOrder is bottom-up. It starts with an ordering app, and then brands can add inventory and even input menu items and recipes. It connects to a restaurant’s POS system and automatically deducts the used product the moment you sell a dish, which will spur automatic inventory replenishment.

A benefit to using SimplerOrder is that people running a restaurant might not know where their kitchen costs are coming from, and they might not even realize it until they do tax returns. There are also certain dishes you don’t want to be selling in certain seasons because of the cost, and SimpleOrder can help identify that as well.

“SimpleOrder gives you any indication of where leakage is,” said Hool. “It could be over portioning, bad recipe management or theft. If you link up your purchasing and sales, we can tell you exactly what your inventory levels should be. That’s an indication of how your business is being run.”

Because it’s cloud based, SimpleOrder is an easy solution that doesn’t demand installation or intense training. It can be set up in under an hour, and even though users can’t expect automatic inventory overnight, within a week, the kitchen will be automatically digitized just by ordering through the system. The platform is as simple and user friendly as possible while also making the tool easily accessible.

“We’re basically giving restaurateurs a 360 degree view of the restaurant by combining purchasing, inventory, menu and sales all in one place,” said Hool.

After being in the United States for only 16 months, the platform is in 1,000 restaurant locations in America and 2,500 locations in 25 countries. Based on the simplicity of the tool, and the need for an efficient inventory solution, it won’t be surprising if SimpleOrder continues to be at the hands of hundreds more restaurateurs by the end of the year.