Every order was a guess
Buns were the worst of it. Superdog needs enough fresh buns every day, and any we don't use by next week go in the trash. For a long time I kept the weather, the events in town and last week's numbers in my head and guessed. Some weeks that guess cost us 200 buns.
Buns were only the most obvious case. The sauces we make in house, and a good share of our other ingredients, were just as hard to predict. So every order and every prep list was a guess, and the guesses were wrong a lot. Some weeks we ordered too much and threw it out. Some weeks we ran out.
The numbers I needed were all there. They were on a clipboard, in a spreadsheet and in my head, and none of those talked to each other.
So I built the tool I wanted
Rinvy is the inventory and food cost app I wanted for my own kitchen. The whole team counts in one session from their phones. A supplier invoice gets photographed instead of typed. Every count, delivery, prep and waste log lands in one place, so I know what happened and who did it, even when I'm not there.
The demand forecast looks at the weather, the events in town and our own sales history, the things I used to carry in my head, and turns them into an order list and a prep list. I don't have to guess anymore. We're dialed in where we don't run out and almost never waste any.
Inventory was only the start
Counting was the problem I set out to fix. It turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. Once every count, delivery, prep shift and day of sales sat in one place, the tool could answer questions I used to answer by feel. Which menu items earn their spot, and which only look busy. Where food cost is drifting, and which ingredient is pushing it. What to pull from the freezer tonight for tomorrow's sales. How this week compares with the same week last year.
Today Rinvy runs the kitchen and the back office at Superdog: what we order, what we prep, what we throw out, and what the numbers say at the end of the month.
We use it every day
Superdog counts inventory with Rinvy every day. Every order and every prep list runs through it, and I run the demand forecast weekly. The numbers on the homepage come from our kitchen: 200 buns a week saved from the trash, 35 minutes saved per order cycle, and zero stockouts since we switched to demand forecasting. The homepage labels them as ours on purpose. You should know whose numbers you're reading.
What I believe about kitchen software
- Inventory is money. Every change in Rinvy carries a name and a time, and nothing gets rounded away. When a balance goes negative, Rinvy shows it, because that usually means something never got logged.
- It has to work on a phone at 7am. Staff count when counting is easier than the clipboard, so Rinvy is built for the phone first.
- Start free, with no contracts and no setup fees. Upgrade only if it earns a spot in your workflow.