In communal catering, caterers of company or school canteens often face a variety of challenges: from long queues, manual ordering and billing processes to food waste. This is usually due to a lack of cross-system process digitalization.
Many people spend the majority of their time during the week in the office or in educational institutions and are therefore dependent on reliable meals in the canteens. A visit to the cafeteria often ends in great frustration and dissatisfaction: the credit on the employee/student ID card is used up again and has to be laboriously transferred or topped up at the vending machine, long queues form throughout the food counter and the most popular dishes are already sold out by the time it's your turn.
It is particularly difficult to plan meal quantities precisely if there are no options for pre-ordering. The menus are often only available as paper notices or as digital PDF documents, without interactive ordering options, which makes planning and organization more difficult. There is no overview of actual demand, which often leads to bottlenecks or overproduction, which in turn can have a negative impact on the quality and price of the food.
And even if pre-orders are already being worked with, these are often transmitted to the caterer via a variety of different channels - e.g. fax, telephone and email - and then have to be transferred manually to the canteen operator's ERP or cash register system, which is time-consuming. There is a high potential for errors, especially when changes are made at short notice.
A canteen app is a great way to overcome these challenges and make everyday work easier for everyone involved. This is precisely why we have adapted our sizzly ordering and payment solution for use in communal catering.
The canteen app enables digital pre-ordering in advance, making it easier to plan meal quantities. Desired menus and side dishes (also in the form of bulk orders) can be ordered for several days in advance.
Various digital payment methods such as PayPal, GooglePay and ApplePay are available for payment. The app can also be connected directly to (payroll) accounting via an interface in order to offset the costs via payroll accounting.
Employee/student accounts are easily managed by one or more administrators. Groups of people with different subsidy options can be taken into account and created, for example in the case of employee discounts for trainees.
Thanks to the integration of the sizzly app into existing cash register and merchandise management systems, pre-orders are fully automated and digitally transmitted to the caterer's systems. This information can be used to create precise plans and manage purchasing, which has a positive impact on the use of resources and food.
By introducing a canteen app, canteen operators can digitize, automate and optimize their processes to transform the lunch break into a pleasant experience for their employees/students.