Taiwanese Mazu Lifestyle Noodles, with 4 branches in Hong Kong currently, specialises in its signature “health and wellness-nuturing” noodles with herbal broth as well as individual hotpot. Its famous healthy broth is made with over ten kinds of health-preserving herbs, making it popular with health-conscious consumers. In recent years, Mazu has rapidly expanded its scales and business by offering individual hot pot with increased brand exposure. With the increase in the number of stores, Matsu has urgent needs in adopting a systematic and digital management approach to handle their daily operations including purchasing, cost management and central supply. It particularly requires a more centralised purchasing model with unified production and cost analysis approach to support the continued and rapid growth.
Each branch’s purchase and sales data is recorded independently and separately by the store, and the figures are manually consolidated by the purchasing team in spreadsheets to calculate the costs by using complex formulas. This time-consuming and error-prone processing not only delays reporting to the management, but also affects decision making’s accuracy and speed, making it difficult to respond swiftly to market changes. As the brand continues to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult for the management to monitor each branch’s operations and performance through frequent shop inspections alone. Instead, it relies more on data-driven insights to keep track of its branch activity, in particular, how much ingredients are purchased, used or overused so as to reduce food waste and strengthen cost control. That’s why the management hopes to implement an effective system to assist the team in tracking purchasing price trends and amount for making data-driven decisions on supplier selections and price negotiations for reduced food cost. Yet, without an integrated platform to integrate operational data, the production team, responsible for production and procurement, often struggles to identify the actual needs and cost structures of each store in a timely manner. This makes it difficult to not only effectively plan ingredient purchase and product delivery, but also prepare precise cost and supplier analysis reports, causing the brand’s medium to long term strategic planning full of uncertainty.
Working alongside Mazu, FOODIVAL drives digitalisation through the following key areas:
Replacing the traditional manual approach with a centralised system – FOODIVAL to manage day-to-day kitchen operations from purchasing planning to stock and supplier management, integrating fragmented data across various departments for easy access and in-depth comparison.
Consolidating purchasing data across different branches in FOODIVAL for auto-calculation of purchasing costs of each branch as well as central kitchen. Combined with sales data, FOODIVAL allows the management to have a complete picture of the actual performance of each branch, including the actual costs and profits, empowering them to make data-driven decisions on production, menu design and pricing.
FOODIVAL provides a management dashboard and dozens of reports, integrating and presenting data such as procurement costs, wastage, inventory value and usage in the form of reader-friendly charts and pivot tables. This makes key indicators such as revenue, cost and loss clear at a glance, supporting faster and data-driven operational decisions.
FOODIVAL’s built-in supplier rating and analysis system allows the team to compare and evaluate supplier performance based on monthly purchase amount, price trends and branch feedback. This assessment mechanism provides a clear visibility into the brand’s supplier control, helping you identify which supplier offers the most stable prices and supply the highest share of ingredients purchased. With these insights, Mazu is able to improve supplier selection and price negotiation ability for enhanced food cost control.
With FOODIVAL’s centralised platform and preset report templates, Mazu’s frontline staff can quickly generate all necessary reports for management via instant messaging tools. This significantly improves operational efficiency and data transmission speed from the front to back, effectively supporting the brand's continued expansion in prime locations.
FOODIVAL helps you take full control and gain complete visibility of your restaurant’s daily operations, from food cost to daily supply chain and stock management.
