7.9.2019
Mary’s Pizza Shack is a family-owned and operated chain of 18 restaurants located in Northern California. This week, CrunchTime! Information Systems, the restaurant industry’s leading back-of-house operations platform provider, announced that the popular chain has increased profitability, simplified schedules, streamlined ordering, and achieved real-time inventory management with CrunchTime’s food and labor operations platform.
Mary’s Pizza Shack initially rolled out CrunchTime’s inventory, recipes, and daily prep functionality. This immediately gave operators real-time visibility into the products already in their restaurants, the quantities of those items needed for each recipe, and the ability to improve food production accuracy based on historical patterns.
Mary’s Pizza Shack was also able to identify cost variances at the product level. This ability to compare actual vs. theoretical food costs helps the restaurant better understand where wasteful spending is coming from so it can be eliminated to increase profitability.
“Cheese is our biggest inventory item. It’s used on pizzas, salads, and entrées. CrunchTime was able to expose our variance for each area. We realized that pizza was our main issue and were able to identify and improve waste through actual vs. theoretical reporting,” says Shanon Thompson, a technology operations specialist at Mary’s Pizza Shack. “Switching to CrunchTime was an immediate win. It’s much easier to use and gives us better data than our previous system.”
According to Thompson, locations that took full advantage of actual vs. theoretical reporting have seen variances of 2 percent or less.
With restaurants in California’s affluent Sonoma and Napa Valleys, Mary’s Pizza Shack is challenged to recruit, train, and retain employees while optimizing shifts. It made sense that the next CrunchTime component to be adopted was labor scheduling. By giving its general managers access to CrunchTime, Mary’s Pizza Shack was able to simplify scheduling across all its restaurants while also providing the executive team at their home office with visibility into how each restaurant was doing.
Since implementing the CrunchTime restaurant operations platform, Mary’s Pizza Shack has realized the following benefits:
Increased Profitability – The Actual vs Theoretical Variance Report lets Mary’s Pizza Shack compare how much of each and every inventory item is on hand vs. how much is actually needed based on historical data. By reducing variances, the restaurant has been able to increase profitability.
Simplified Scheduling – Labor Management functionality that allows managers to easily match schedules with sales forecasts has cut the amount of time dedicated to scheduling in every Mary’s Pizza Shack restaurant. It also allows managers to more accurately align schedules with sales forecasts and ensure each shift is optimized with the right number of team members.
Streamlined Ordering – With CrunchTime, the procurement director can schedule regular electronic orders for food, beverage, and supplies vendors. Restaurant managers can use iPads to order from the dining room or the back of house.
Improved COGS – CrunchTime provides weekly insights into food costs that can be evaluated and used to set goals at every location. Mary’s Pizza Shack can quickly identify problems in restaurants that are not performing well and improve their COGS by identifying high variance items and making necessary adjustments.
Real-Time Inventory Management – With full transparency into each and every product, Mary’s Pizza Shack’s executive team is confident that stores aren’t receiving a product they shouldn’t. At the same time, it gives the individual restaurant managers next-day updates and the ability to drill down into inventory data at their own pace.
Download the customer story: “CrunchTime! Helps Mary’s Pizza Shack Take a Bigger Bite From Every Pie”
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