5 key advantages of Pej for business developers in the food service industry

Are you working with business development or business strategy in contract catering? Then you are well aware of how fast the industry is changing. Your job is to follow trends, find new, exciting solutions that drive growth, and figure out how the digital canteen will look in the future. In this blog post, we share some advantages of using Pej technology in the food service industry as one step towards reaching your goals.

What are Pej food service solutions?

Contract catering is a complex industry requiring intelligent solutions. Pej empowers the digital canteen by automating and optimizing the B2B client and guest experience – from signed contracts and innovative customer journeys to invoicing. With Pej, you streamline and centralize subsidies, discounts, invoices, and reports. All with one simple and flexible food service solution. Built for contract catering. Used by industry giants.

Let us show you more in detail what advantages Pej can provide.

1.  Innovate in the digital canteen

Today’s canteen guests expect more than a hot meal during lunch. Unlock the full growth potential of contract catering by enabling new ways to utilize the digital canteen and allow your clients to actively work with creative employee benefits from your canteen. For example, your clients can offer employees cake on birthdays or a surprise breakfast if the team has performed exceptionally well. Why not treat the employees with ice cream on Fridays if it is more than 27 C outside? Pej’s food service solution is flexible and offers limitless possibilities to wow clients and guests. Invoicing, reports, and integrations to the POS and other digital solutions run smoothly.

2. Maximize profits

As you know, contract catering is a low-margin industry where small increases or decreases in profitability can make a large impact on the money you’re taking home. As an example, increasing a restaurant’s margins from 3 to 4 percent means a 33% increase in profit. But the question is, how can this be achieved?

Cutting costs without impacting guest experience is difficult in a well-run canteen, so you should instead focus on trying to increase the number of guests or the average spend per head. One of the easiest ways to do this is by activating new digital self-service channels to help increase turnover. 

As we’ve developed our platform together with Oracle, we have the full suite of food service solutions you would expect in the self-service canteen (QR-code ordering, web-ordering, self-checkout kiosk, order ready board and guest management tool). The solutions have a proven track record of increasing average ticket size, speed of order, orders per visit and guest satisfaction.

3. Attract and delight client employees

In recent years, primarily due to the pandemic, work has moved from the office to the home, and many employees demand increased flexibility. But socializing is still invaluable, and getting employees to want to come into the office more often needs to be prioritized and is something HR is actively working towards.

There are several ways to attract employees back to the offices. Creative employee benefits such as delicious food in the office canteen is, of course, attractive. If the canteen also uses different high-tech solutions, the restaurants are perceived as more appealing, and the employer as a modern and forward-looking player.

With our technology, you can offer creative employee benefits that were not provided before due to technical limitations. In the digital canteen, self-service solutions are key. The employees can pre-book lunch on their phones, order food or coffee for meeting rooms or use a digital system and order ready boards to check in and pay when they eat lunch.

4.  Reduce food waste and drive sustainability

The environmental aspect cannot be ignored; all companies must reduce their carbon footprint. Within contract catering, a vital part for restaurant operators is to reduce food waste. It’s undeniable that a lot of food is wasted in buffet restaurants where it’s challenging to plan for how much food is actually required.

But suppose it’s possible to get consumers to pre-order lunch in the morning. In that case, the restaurant operator receives an entirely different insight into how many ingredients must be purchased. And if there are leftovers from lunch, why not package and place them in a connected fridge for guests to pick up before they go home. Less food is wasted, and the restaurants get a better operation overview. This can be done with Pej.

5.  Operational efficiency and staff retention

It is a recognized problem in the industry that it’s hard to get hold of staff. There’s also a very high staff turnover; some restaurants may have to replace up to 40% of their staff yearly. One way to attract new employees and make the job more attractive is by innovating and finding solutions beneficial to the team working there.

By using Pej food service solutions, you can streamline your operation and let the staff focus on the most critical tasks and, for example, exclude tasks that can be automated. It’s important to find value in the restaurant and how staff can work specifically with more value-creating tasks and instead let the new technology handle more straight-forward tasks.

We are here to help!

Interested in trying out Pej technology for the food service industry? Get in touch with us to get access to our demo and see how our technology can help to take your business to the next level!