Hazlnut’s apps and online ordering has features to help both restaurants and their customers with prep time and ticket printing.
“Awesome, my fries were delivered cold” is a phrase said by nobody. Most people like their food nice and fresh. Unfortunately, with the heavy reliance on third-party delivery, a lot of people are having to settle for sub-par food temperatures. Nobody is satisfied when food is delivered in a way the restaurant would have never intended to serve it to the customer. Here at Hazlnut, we set out to eliminate the risk of customers receiving their food in a way that would result in a bad review. We have developed tools that influence the time quoted to customers and the timing of when the ticket prints to kitchen for prep.
Average Prep Time
Something our system relies on is what we call the “average prep time”, which is estimated by the restaurant to provide a baseline of how long it takes to prepare an order from the moment it prints to when it’s ready to leave the door. The first thing it affects is the time quoted to the customer as the earliest possible pick-up time during check-out. A customer won’t check out at 3:00 and expect their food at 3:01, that just isn’t realistic. The ticket will then print to the kitchen letting them know they can start working on the order… Thanks to the average prep time, the order will always be prepared on-time. The restaurant will never have to worry about time-managing a future order ticket (i.e. an order that was placed in advance that morning, but is expected to be picked up in the evening won’t print until it needs to). This system ensures that when the customer comes to pick up their food, it will be as hot and fresh as it can possibly be. This also helps timing when deliveries should go out; the system will quote the customer an expected delivery time range based on what zone they are in and the average time the restaurant has determined.
Ticket Size
A default prep time sounds great, but when a huge order comes in, that same prep time is no longer accurate. A large order is going to take longer than usual to prepare, luckily Hazlnut has thought of this already. From the Hazlnut Dashboard, the restaurant can set it up to add a few more minutes of prep time to account for the size of the order. It is designed to add x amount of minutes to the default prep time per every x dollars on an order. So, it could be setup to add 10 minutes of prep time for every $50 ordered. If the default prep time was 15 minutes, and someone placed a $100 order under these conditions, the system would quote the customer a 35-minute wait time. This gives the restaurant an extra 20 minutes to get the order ready on-time.
Volume Based Prep Time
The next feature that can adjust the prep time is the restaurant’s current order volume. A benefit of our Clover-integrated online ordering software is that we have the ability to read the restaurant’s order volume trends and identify when the restaurant is slammed with an unexpected rush of customers. When the system detects that the restaurant is experiencing a rush, it will dynamically add time to the quoted prep time. If there are any future orders it will also print the ticket earlier than usual to give the kitchen enough time to make it.
Information on how prep time can be set up and managed can be found here on our FAQ. For more information, please email sales@hazlnut.com or to see it in action schedule a demo here.
