Messages at midnight and a production plan in someone's head
The central kitchen manager wakes up to a dozen messages. One site wants six tubs of ragu, another wants three more than yesterday, a third has sent a photo of a handwritten list. Two sites have not ordered at all, so the manager guesses from last week. The prep team starts on the ragu, then finds out halfway through the morning that one site has changed its mind.
At the sites, chefs complain that the brownies arrived short again. The central kitchen says the order said four trays. The message thread says both.
Why central production runs on guesswork
Central kitchens usually start small, supplying two or three sites informally, and the ordering never grows up with them.
- Orders arrive through personal messaging, with no fixed format or cut-off.
- Sites order from memory rather than from what they actually used.
- The production plan is rebuilt by hand every day from the messages.
- Dispatch is recorded on paper, if at all, so there is no costed record of what each site received.
- Shelf life and batch information does not travel with the product.
Where the guessing hurts
Overproduction becomes waste, because much of what a central kitchen makes has a short life. Underproduction leaves sites short in service, and they fill the gap with bought-in alternatives that cost more and are off-spec. The central kitchen's own costs are hard to charge back fairly, so its value to the group is argued about rather than known. And when a question about a batch comes up, finding which sites received it can take hours.
How we connect the sites to the central kitchen
- Each site gets an ordering screen with the central kitchen's product list, pack sizes and a daily cut-off time.
- Suggested quantities are shown, based on the site's recent usage and the day of the week, which the chef can accept or change.
- After cut-off, orders are combined into a production sheet grouped by recipe and batch, with quantities scaled to your batch sizes.
- The prep team works from the sheet on a kitchen tablet, and marks batches as made with a batch code and use-by date.
- Dispatch notes are produced per site and van run, listing items, batch codes and use-by dates, and the driver or site confirms delivery.
- Each dispatch is costed at the central kitchen's transfer price and posted to the site's stock and P&L.
| Stage | Who uses it | What it replaces |
|---|---|---|
| Site ordering | Head chef or sous | WhatsApp messages and phone calls |
| Production sheet | Central kitchen manager | A plan built from memory |
| Batch record | Prep team | Handwritten labels only |
| Dispatch note | Driver and receiving site | Paper notes or nothing |
A calmer morning in the unit
At cut-off, the central kitchen manager has a complete production sheet with no messages to read. Late orders are visible as late, and the manager decides whether to accept them. Sites receive what they ordered with batch and date information, and the dispatch shows on their stock without anyone typing it. Finance can see what each site took from the central kitchen and at what cost, which makes the case for the unit clearer.
When a batch question comes up, the answer is a search: this batch went to these three sites on these vans.
Is your central kitchen working like this?
- Site orders arrive by message at any time of day.
- The production plan is rebuilt by hand each morning.
- Sites and the central kitchen argue about what was ordered.
- Dispatch is not costed to each site.
- Tracing a batch to the sites that received it takes a long time.