Hickory Tavern Lowers Food Inventory Level, Improves Costs

CrunchTime! Information Systems, Inc., a leading back-of-house operations platform provider, announced that Hickory Tavern has lowered its food inventory level by 25 percent for a sustained 3 percent improvement in costs across its 34 southeastern U.S. locations. Hickory Tavern deployed CrunchTime to streamline its back-office food and labor operations and to capture the data and insights necessary to make sound operational decisions.

“CrunchTime helps Hickory Tavern improve operations and save money,” says Dan McKeon, Software and Operations Analyst/Regional Manager at Hickory Tavern. “With its real time inventory visibility and the invaluable data intelligence extracted from the system, CrunchTime helps Hickory Tavern make better decisions based on information and insights, and 99 percent of those decisions have worked in our favor.”

Hickory Tavern implemented CrunchTime to establish a more efficient and systematic back-of-house operation. With CrunchTime’s Suggested Order food cost management, the brand quickly began to optimize inventory, pricing, ordering, recipes, and back-end operations.

• Simplified Daily Inventory – Each restaurant can monitor consumption and food waste on a day-to-day basis and then use that information to help improve operations.
• Global Data Visibility – The management team tracks sales and inventory across all restaurants and uses CrunchTime’s advanced reporting to determine everything from menu design and menu implementation to flavor models and flavor tracking.
• Lower COGS – Hickory Tavern lowered its Cost of Goods Sold by three percent company wide since implementing CrunchTime, and continues to lower overall food costs.

“With CrunchTime we’ve maintained that improvement in COGS, and continue to chip away at the actual vs theoretical gap, lowering food costs without the use of broad menu price increases or product manipulation. The improvement was entirely based on the insights we extracted from CrunchTime,” McKeon says. “We’ve lowered our inventory level by 25 percent across the entire brand, and as we become even more sophisticated CrunchTime users, we expect to reduce inventory by another five to ten percent.”

Recently, Hickory Tavern expanded its use of CrunchTime to optimize the labor management side of its back-office operations. Using CrunchTime’s BizIQ business intelligence, Hickory Tavern was able to streamline the entire staffing process.

“Before CrunchTime, we had to wait two to three weeks after our payroll cycle ended to get the data from payroll reports,” adds McKeon. “With BizIQ reporting, we can extract data immediately and make smarter scheduling decisions based on our findings.”

“In the restaurant industry, profit margins can be incredibly thin, especially if your food and labor cost variances are not optimized,” says Jean Fogarty, VP of client services at CrunchTime. “Our platform and mobile solutions will continue to help Hickory Tavern elevate their back of house operations while increasing team member satisfaction across all of their locations. We’re thrilled with the direction of our partnership.”