Burger 21 franchises cut food costs by 2%Burger 21 franchises cut food costs by 2%

Despite having 4 corporate-owned and 15 franchise locations, the corporate team behind Burger 21 is small, requiring everyone to wear multiple hats including Director of Accounting and IT, Ryan Johnston. Ryan’s hats cover invoices, inventories from a macro level across storefronts, and on the IT side of things choosing systems and making sure they are functional and accepted by their operations teams.

While Burger 21 had the right recipes for their menu, they struggled finding the right restaurant management software to help as they open new locations and look to provide powerful insight into food cost data at both the corporate and operations teams' levels. 

Good for the Franchisee and the Franchisor

What Burger 21 found was a holistic software solution, MarginEdge, 

that maps invoice data by product, not by individual vendor item. This means everything is mapped correctly (regardless of vendor or region) for a new franchise from the day they start processing invoices through the platform. 

As a franchisor, Ryan’s team tracks that everything sold is rung up correctly by comparing invoices and food usage amounts to POS sales. Franchisees benefit from using the platform to empower their restaurants without having to completely onboard their store from scratch. 

With this technology, both the franchisor and franchisee can track and monitor food costs from the first invoice because MarginEdge’s PMIX mapping for existing stores carries over Burger 21’s recipes, and attributes them to their Revel POS menu item buttons. “You want to make sure you have a system that’s going to allow you to map a recipe to a point-of-sale button once and then not have to map it again. We get that with MarginEdge.” 

Once up and running, the corporate office has complete uniformity across recipes and menus from store to store, which in turn creates a clean system with accurate and meaningful data. Ryan says, “As long as the categories list is consistent, the profit and loss reports across locations are consistent. That gives us the best ability to have a true apples-to-apples comparison. It’s huge to be able to help your franchisees improve performance and know that the comparison is uniform.”  

Corporate-owned store managers benefit from the software too because they’re bonused based on variance from target costs, so their powerful reports give them key insight into where they need to make tweaks. They can also manage their own inventories and see their budgets in one place, giving them a hands-on way to optimize their store’s performance.  

Weekly Inventories Are Worthwhile

With MarginEdge, Burger 21 cut overall food costs by 2%. Being able to make such impactful changes with just one platform has changed the way Ryan’s teams tackle everyone in the restaurant business’ favorite back-office activity: inventories.  

“Since MarginEdge provides such meaningful data powered by inventories, we started taking them once a week. It is a huge pain, but if you do it, you’ll save a lot of money, so we do,” Ryan admits. You know that data must be seriously powerful to justify weekly inventories! And powerful it is.

Bet Your Bottomline They’re Tracking Food Costs

MarginEdge uses the weekly inventory data, continuous purchasing data from invoices, and daily POS sales data to create supercharged, up to date, food cost reports. With no extra effort, Ryan’s team can have instant visibility into any discrepancies between sales, purchases, and inventory counts. 

This means they can take immediate action, giving them a powerful control over costs, portioning, and theft prevention. They are also able to track store performance and can preemptively alert franchisees before issues occur.

Recipes, Two Ways 

Before MarginEdge, Ryan’s team was using two separate systems to tackle recipes: one for plate cost analysis and one for kitchen recipe displays. Any edits made in one system had to be manually updated in the other and they needed to communicate those changes with all 19 corporate and franchise locations, which wasn’t exactly a walk in the walk-in. As Ryan says, “The communication of changes to recipes were constantly getting lost.” 

Now, Ryan’s team can not only measure, track, and edit plate costs with recent product prices, but also communicate those changes to the kitchen teams with zero added effort or oversight. This is because the recipe module covers both food cost analysis per menu item and kitchen display functionality.

Today Ryan says, “The unification of our recipe changes, based on the cost tracking data, and kitchen recipe display functionality has been huge for us. It saves a lot of time communicating to our restaurants and prevents important changes from being lost in the noise.”  

Want to see how your operation can streamline processes, get real-time data, and cut costs? Visit marginedge.com to learn more.