I came across this story on the NZ Herald site and it just makes so much sense to me.
Gavin Lovett is more used to dissecting recipes on screen than in the kitchen. The chef-turned-businessman has developed a tool to help restaurants cost their menus and discover the nutritional content of their recipes with the click of a button.
Inputting ingredients into Lovett's My Recipes website allows chefs to cost an entire menu within hours, as opposed to old pen-and-paper methods which could tie them up for days. It also breaks the recipe down into its nutritional components, comparing each against their recommended daily intake amounts.
After 10 years cheffing here and in Europe, Lovett decided he had hit on an area where the industry needed assistance. He estimates 90 per cent of restaurants do not cost their menus properly, despite the vital connection this has to running a profitable business.
Although menu-costing software isn't new, My Recipes provides ingredient costing and availability specific for New Zealand at market prices which are updated from suppliers daily. It is also thought to be the first to incorporate nutritional analysis, and Lovett believes food outlets will be required to provide this information more and more as consumers become more health-conscious.
The website can also help 10,000 food outlets track down their closest supplier for specific ingredients. Lovett is targeting the service at la carte restaurants, cafes, caterers, school lunch rooms, hospitals, rest homes and holiday camps.
The key to this is not the software, which you could just buy once and use forever, its the real-time market information being pumped in the back end to validate the results.
Now, all he needs is to automate the information gathering end by providing market auctioneers with some cool management tools that feed his price database while converting menus into ingredients multiplied by expected seatings to provide market signals back to the growers.
But notice too the way this thing goes; here's a guy who really knows the restaurant business who then applies networked tools to his knowledge instead of trying to shoehorn his knowledge into a programmer's idea of how it is supposed to work.
Then he can sit back, employ a techie to keep it running and dream up the next Pavlova.
Here's the chance for a bunch of web services to do better business for a whole industry. The fact that its a fellow Kiwi who has built it has nothing whatever to do with my admiration. Honest.
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