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Software for
Meal Prep/Assembly
Businesses
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See how care free meal prep software can be
Our expertise with web programming, databases, user
interfaces and the general needs and working environment found in
small/start-up companies has enabled us to create a first-class yet
affordable solution for your meal prep/meal assembly business. Although
you can have your operation up and running "out of the box", our software
is designed to be modified as needed to fit the way you want to do
business.
Our offering consists of a "public" web site and
ordering system used by your customers, and a "store manager" system used
by you and your employees to set menus and schedules, view orders, produce
reports and other day-to-day activities. Data is stored in Microsoft SQL
Server databases, providing excellent performance and reliability.
The ordering system is hosted on secure servers owned and maintained
by us, located in a secure facility with redundant power feeds and internet
connections providing a high level of availability for you and your
customers. We can also host your website for no additional charge.
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To contact us for more information or to schedule a free online demo, please email info@hostedkitchen.com or call
(919)342-3774.
Public Website
Home Page
Your website - and
especially the home page - is what customers see first, so it needs to
have the marketing appeal to get them to understand and want to try your
service. We handle the marketing appeal by allowing your homepage and
other "static" pages such as "About Us" to be independent of the ordering
system. This gives you total control over their look and feel, and even
though we'd love to create your home page for you, you are welcome to use
your own web designer or your existing site if you wish. All that's needed
are a few links to the ordering system.
Ease of Use
Even
more important than visual appeal is ease of use. A customer needs to know
how to do what they want to do without a lot of effort. If a potential
customer gets lost or confused using your web site, they might give up and
never come back.
Our system guides the customer through the entire ordering process
using an interactive combination of easy to understand text, colors and
highlighting, always letting them know where they are and what they need
to do next. If they run into something they can't get past, such as the
session they want is full, all they need to do is call and you can
intercept their order and complete it for them.
Beyond Just
Ordering
Once a customer places an order, they can change or cancel
it themselves up to how ever many days you specify prior to the scheduled
time, and you'll be automatically notified by email. In addition to
pending orders, customers can review details about all the orders they've
placed in the past. Customers may also change their registration profile
at any time. All these functions are secured by the customer's own user id
and password. If a customer prefers to have you make these changes, you
can perform all the same functions on their behalf using the Store Manager
system.
Flexible Payment Options
Hosted Kitchen provides secure
and fully integrated online credit card payment options for your customers.
We don't force you to use a specific credit card processor, and will use
whichever "gateway" your merchant account provider prefers. You also have the
option of allowing your customers to postpone payment for collection at your
store. This can option can be granted for a specific order, a specific
customer, or for everyone.
Private Parties Made Easy
Why should customers
have to browse through a calendar to find the party they were invited to?
With our system, they simply click the "party" button and are presented
with a list of scheduled parties. All they need to do is click and provide
a password, and then place their order.
Other features
Wide variety of coupon, "special offer" and fundraiser
options Gift certificates View current and future menus Newsletters
Guided Tour About Us Map and directions FAQs Link to as many
other pages as you like
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You may view the above
site at http://www.dinnersavvy.com/
Keep in mind that this is a "live" site, so please use the "Tour" or
enter only as a guest. Some of our other sites are shown at the bottom of
this page. |
Store Manager
The Store
Manager application is used within your business, and has three major
components: Customer, Kitchen and Management. Access is
controlled by user ids and passwords, and even though the system operates over
the internet, it can be restricted if you wish to only specific computers (such
as those in your store).
Customer component
The Customer component is used to manage
information about customers and orders. The "activity" page allows you to see
activity "at a glance" for a given week or day, and to optionally check
customers in and out resulting in a color-coded display of who's here and who's
not (which also allows you to discretely check that name you forgot!). Simply
clicking on a customer name will show details about them, any notes you've
added, and details on their specific order. Other functions include access to
customer historical information and flexible customer/order lookup by partial
name or phone number.
Kitchen component
The Kitchen component is used to generate items
such as shopping lists and kitchen prep instructions based on orders scheduled
for a specified date range or by simply selecting menu items and quantities
need. Providing this type of information requires the system to know exact
ingredients and measurements for a given recipe. To assist in this, we include a
proprietary recipe parser which can analyze a recipe and automatically
determine this information. This means if you find a recipe you want to use on
the web, you simply cut and paste it into to recipe parser and it will do the
rest. The recipe data is also used to generate nutritional data, assembly
instructions, an order summary to give to the customer, and labels for them to
stick to their "finished product" - all with a simple click.
Management component
The Management component includes a
sophisticated report generator which allows you to create and save the reports
you need instead of depending on someone else's "canned" reports (those are
available as well!). Almost all data stored in the system can be part of a
report - you decide what's important and what's not. Reports can be exported to
Excel for further analysis. Examples of reports you can create are "Revenue by
Week", "Repeat Customers", "Menu Item Popularity", "Revenue by Customer", and
even odd things like "All customers who ordered meals containing paprika". You
don't have to understand how the system stores this information - just pick the
data fields and values that interest you and it does the rest.
This component also includes easy to use interfaces for scheduling, closing
or canceling sessions, setting or overriding store capacity, and for blocking
out days such as holidays. The Management component is also used to control
system access by your employees.
Other Features
There are
numerous other features in this product. Many of these are common to most meal
prep software packages such as flexibility in creating packages, calendar/session
management, multiple active menus, private parties, email confirmations and
reminders, etc.. Here are some of the features that are either unique to us or
not found frequently:
- Rules based scheduling. An easy to use interface lets you create
session rules instead of having to schedule every individual session
separately. For example, you can create a rule to have a session at 1 PM on
the first Tuesday of every month. Of course, if you'd prefer to schedule the
sessions one-at-a-time, you can do that as well, or even do a combination of
rules and single sessions.
- Rules based close/cancels. Scheduled sessions can be closed (i.e.
no more sign-ups unless they ask) or cancelled using rules. For example, with
one action you can cancel all the weekend sessions for the next month.
- Rules based capacity. The number of customers in your store at a
given time can be controlled using rules or on a session by session basis. For
example, if a problem occurs which results in your store temporarily having 4
fewer stations than normal, you can drop the capacity with a single rule and
then restore it when the problem is fixed.
- "Flex" sessions. Most systems only allow fixed sessions that have a
specific start and end time. This is typically preferred for in-store assembly,
but for special sessions like "customer pickup" you might want to give your
customers a time range to choose from. With flex sessions, they can for example
enter a pickup time at the start of any hour between 10 AM and 5 PM. Flex sessions
can also overlap with in-store assembly sessions without impacting store
capacity.
- Overlapping sessions. Most systems only allow exclusive sessions -
in other words, only 1 session can be scheduled for a given time slot. With
overlapping sessions, this restriction is removed. For example, you can have a
2 hour session starting at 10 A.M. and another 2 hour session starting at 11
A.M. The system will insure that your facility is not overbooked during any
given time period. This gives your customers more flexibility in scheduling
their visit.
- Non-exclusive parties.Parties are typically exclusive in that no
other sessions are allowed during that time. We optionally allow a party to be
non-exclusive so the facility can be shared with non-party customers.
Add-On and Custom FeaturesA Time
Clock feature is optionally available to keep track of your hourly
employees. They simply clock in and out using the system and their assigned
password, and managers have the ability to adjust hours as needed.
In general, the software is designed to be customized, so feel free to ask
for features you don't see and we will determine if they are possible and give
you a fixed price quote to add them.
Reliability, Security and Performance
We host both your Public Site and Store Manager on servers that we own
and operate. This means if any problems occur we can deal with them "hands on"
instead of depending on customer support at some remote third party
hosting service. Our goal is to prevent problems in the first place,
so we have redundant equipment located in a secure facility with duplicate
electrical systems and three independent high-speed internet connections. In the
event of an area power outage, the facility has two backup power generators
with 4 days of fuel on site. Your valuable data is simultaneously stored on multiple
disk drives, and is backed up on a regular basis.
All internet communications between your customers and the ordering system, as well
as your communications with the Store Manager, are secured and encrypted using SSL
technology. Access to the Store Manager is controlled using specially coded URLs
unique to your business,
as well as user ids and passwords. As an owner or manager, you can revoke access
to any user at any time. Sensitive data such as passwords are stored in an encrypted
format, and no credit card numbers are stored on our servers. Physical access to the
servers is strictly controlled and monitored.
Owning our own servers also allows us to provide excellent performance and
response time for your site. We know exactly what software
is running on the servers and why, and can tune, upgrade or reallocate resources as we
see fit. With "shared server" hosting schemes that are often used by other
meal prep software products, there are any number of totally unrelated websites running on
the exact same server as yours. That means you are not just sharing disk space, but also
the processor, memory and network connection. If one of those sites is extra busy or has
problems, it will impact your performance as well. Even worse, you are at the mercy of the
hosting provider to figure out the problem and maybe do something about it. The same
issues occur with database sharing schemes since almost all web pages used by you and your
customers require information stored in the database.
Next Steps
Call us today for a free trial of Hosted Kitchen and you will see how care free meal prep software can be.
When you buy a software solution, you enter a relationship that will affect the success or failure of your meal prep business. Does
the software work as promised? Is the vendor accessible and reliable? Does the vendor fix problems and add enhancements
in a timely manner? Does the vendor speak your language, or do they talk to you in technical terms and expect
you to understand? At Hosted Kitchen we encourage anyone looking at our software to compare us to all the competitors
in the market, try the system for yourself, and talk to our existing customers. We know that you will be happy with our
software and our service.
The Hosted Kitchen Buying Experience
- Preparation Make a checklist of the functions that are most important to you. Hosted Kitchen can provide a checklist
of important features, but the solution that you need is unique to your business model so we encourage you to make
a detailed list that corresponds to the functions that your business needs.
- Comparison Look at Hosted Kitchen and the other products on the market. We are happy to provide you with a
demonstration of the capabilities of our software. In our demo we will use a live system not a set of slides and
screenshots. Although we will show you some of the key product features, you are welcome to explore yourself
and change any attribute and see the affect on the system. By the end of the demo you will know exactly how
it will function in your environment. You may also visit some of our customer sites listed below.
- Purchase When you purchase the Hosted Kitchen solution we will work with you to customize the initial
parameters to your business model. We offer a 60 day satisfaction guarantee. If you are not pleased with the software
for any reason, we will return the entire purchase price.
Selected Hosted Kitchen Sites
