Boy Meets Grill Meets Back-Office
Bold Food LLC, owner of six award-winning fine dining restaurant concepts including Mesa Grill, Bar Americain, and Bobby Flay Steak, as well as the fast casual chain Bobby’s Burger Palace, is known for its excellent food and hospitality; but even more so, for its owner and chef, Bobby Flay. Despite its celebrity status, however, the multi-concept company started where most new restaurants start: with a manual inventory management process that would eventually prove to be largely inefficient for its growth plans.
In 2008, Bold Food decided to expand on its fine dining concepts with the launch of a fast casual chain called Bobby’s Burger Palace. With a multi-unit roadmap for growth, management quickly realized that the company’s then-current procedures for back-office and inventory management (which included manual data entry and propriety spreadsheets used in conjunction with Microsoft Great Plains) presented administrative challenges and would not be able to keep pace with the growing enterprise’s needs.
To support its growth plans, Bold Food purchased Compeat Advantage in March of 2008 and installed the solution shortly thereafter across a number of its restaurant concepts, including all of its Bobby’s Burger Palace, Bar Americain and Bobby Flay Steak locations, as was well as one Mesa Grill site. The solution enables the company to better manage inventory including: ordering, receiving, use, cost variances and theoretical costs controls. Bold Food immediately realized benefits, from the POS-integrated daily polling, to the automated process for posting into the general ledger; from the polling of menu item sales for menu analysis, to menu engineering. Management deems the inter-store transfer tool to be an essential feature when running a multiple-unit concept like Bobby’s Burger Palace, which now has five locations across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Each location is able to run specific store or consolidated reports concurrently to view data in real-time.
The software also enables Mesa Grill and Bar Americain to easily manage and track their extensive wine inventories. Since Compeat polls information directly from the POS system, Bold Food is able to report on wine usage down to the glass. The company is also able to see patterns in wine trends to better fulfill guests’ preferences.
Bold Food plans to accelerate the growth of the Bobby’s Burger Palace chain beginning with several new openings this year. With the expansion, the company plans to take full advantage of the operating efficiencies of Compeat Advantage.