HealthFoodCo was a health food manufacturer and at-home delivery service in operation for 5 years. The company delivers thousands of fully-prepared meals a day but was struggling with profitability, and operational difficulties preventing them from providing transparency for allergies, unique diet restrictions and complex medical conditions . Because they uniquely produce food in batch scale, off the shelf restaurant software only automated about 60% of their processes and was unable to communicate with other platforms. The company’s food cost was not visible, nor modifiable. Information retrieval was complex and HealthFoodCo’s labor cost was bloated in order to cover the inefficiencies. HealthFoodCo’s product suffered from inconsistency due to recipe scaling problems and manual production calculation errors. Management was unable to dedicate efforts to growth and investment capital due to the attention needed to manage the company’s complexity. This limited the company from expanding their food to complex patients.
Opportunity
HealthFoodCo needed to streamline its operations, reduce costs. The founders needed better business insight to make strategic decisions. Management needed to focus on mass production, quality and developing team culture instead of fulfilling tasks that proper systems should be able to perform. The company was starving for better visibility with inventory, labor costs and product consistency. The entire backend operations of the business were suffering from elevated cost levels of 10% that only increased as the company attempted to expand. HealthFoodCo engaged Zaazi to assess all operational processes, technology platforms and how information moved through the company.
Results
After extensive testing, HealthFoodCo’s new software platform was launched ahead of schedule. Zaazi performed all implementations and user training to bring the company to full usability within two weeks. After six months, HealthFoodCo realized a 16% overall cost savings (for reference, food companies often operate on 10% profit margins). Operational leaders instantly had the ability to manipulate product quality and scale up production with confidence. Management gained the confidence needed to discuss HealthFoodCo’s scalability with investors and the company realized 40% growth over the next eight months. Zaazi’s FlatBase Formation™ was critical to giving HealthFoodCo the ability realize the project’s full impact in a timely manner.