Out of lamb at quarter past eight
The chef shouts that the lamb is gone. It is the busiest part of the night, and the lamb appears in a main, a mixed grill, two meal deals and a family box. On the counter, someone grabs the Deliveroo tablet and snoozes the main. They mean to do the others. Then the phone rings.
Twenty minutes later a Just Eat order arrives for a mixed grill. The counter calls the customer to offer a swap, the customer is annoyed and cancels, and the app records a cancellation against you. Another order arrives on Uber Eats for the family box, because nobody touched Uber Eats at all.
At closing, nobody remembers to switch the lamb back on. Tomorrow lunchtime it is still snoozed on one app, which costs you sales you never know about.
Why the snooze never reaches every channel
Each app has its own availability switch, usually buried two or three screens into its tablet or partner hub. Your website has another. Your till might have a third. None of them know about each other, so one kitchen fact, the lamb is gone, becomes four or five separate jobs for the busiest person in the building.
Combos are the trap. Snoozing a single item on one app does not always snooze the deals that contain it, and the relationships are set up differently on each platform. The person on the counter cannot hold that map in their head during a rush, and should not have to.
The kitchen, which knows first, usually has no way to act on it directly. It has to shout, and shouting is lossy.
What each missed switch costs
| Missed step | Result |
|---|---|
| One app not snoozed | Orders for a dish you cannot make |
| Combo left live | Box or meal deal ordered with a missing item |
| Customer called to swap | Counter time lost at peak, plus a cancellation |
| Item not switched back on | A day of lost sales on that channel |
| Substitution without asking | Complaints and refund claims |
Cancellations and refunds on the apps are rarely just the order value. They feed into your ratings and how the app treats you, and they turn a stock problem into a customer service one.
A single sold-out switch the kitchen can press
What we build puts availability in one place, close to where the stock actually runs out.
- A small screen or tablet in the kitchen shows your menu by ingredient and by dish. The chef taps the lamb, or the dish, and marks it gone.
- The tool knows every item and combo that uses it, from the master menu, and marks all of them unavailable.
- That change is sent to each delivery app and your own ordering site through their availability interfaces, or through an aggregation service where that is how you are connected.
- The counter screen shows a banner listing what is off, so staff know what to say on the phone.
- When you mark it back on, or at a time you choose such as the next opening, everything returns on every channel.
- A log shows what was snoozed, when and for how long, which is useful for ordering and prep planning.
Some apps limit how items can be switched through their interface. We test each channel with your real menu before relying on it, and we tell you if one of them still needs a manual tap.
The next time something runs out
The chef taps lamb on the kitchen screen. Within moments it is off every app, every combo containing it is off too, and the counter can see the banner. No orders arrive for it. At close, or at a time you set, it comes back without anyone remembering to do it. At the end of the week, you can see which dishes ran out most often and at what time, which feeds straight into how much you prep.
- One tap in the kitchen instead of several on the counter
- Combos and deals handled automatically
- Items that come back on by themselves
- A record of sell-outs to guide prep quantities
Are sold-out dishes still being ordered?
- You regularly phone customers to offer a swap for something that ran out.
- An item was snoozed on one app but not another.
- Meal deals get ordered with an item you no longer have.
- Something stayed switched off the next day by mistake.
- The kitchen has to shout to the counter to get an item removed.