Scaling in Practice: My Role in Pitaya’s Supply Chain, Openings & Product Development
When I joined Pitaya, a Thai restaurant chain, the challenge was both exciting and complex: support the brand’s rapid growth while making sure operations could keep up. Scaling a restaurant chain isn’t only about opening more locations, it’s about building the supply chain, systems, and processes that make consistent quality and profitability possible. My role was to design these improvements and, just as importantly, make sure they worked in practice.
Step 1: Building a Stronger Supply Chain
Margins in hospitality are super thin, so strengthening the supply chain should be a priotity. At Pitaya, I worked on supplier negotiations, improving and simplifying logistics for the restaurants. Additionnally, we continiously evaluated which preparations could have a potential for outsourcing. As in Belgium the cost of labour is so high, it is important to keep an eye on which preparations are repetitive, time-consuming and have a potential to be outsourced while keeping the same level of quality and freshness. Evaluating these opportunities can be tedious, but can highly benefit in the long run.
At Pitaya, we studied the potential to outsource the cutting of the chicken, and noticed the following effect:
better meat quality: as our outsourcing partner had access to better meat cuts
lower overall cost: by scaling, our partner provided us with better prices by the kg (food & labour)
more consistent cuts: by scaling, our partner’s teams were able to deliver more consistent cuts which allowed us to deliver a similar experience across all our restaurants
better food cost control: more consistent cuts meant we could portion our plates more easily
less waste: as the meat was used more optimally by our partner
freed up our kitchen staff: our staff was able to focuss on more complex tasks like cooking and making fresh preparations
easier training: cutting uncooked meats comes with hygiene precautions that need to be taught to the staff. Removing this task allowed us to simplify the training
easier hiring: simplifying the training and hiring requirements also meant we had access to a larger pool of applicants
Step 2: Smarter Systems to Support Growth
Scaling our restaurants brought more complexities. As each individual restaurant had its own system, our sales and revenue data was scattered, and launching new products or changing our prices became a very labour intensive task.
There was a high need for uniformity, which brought us to rethink our entire IT architecture and roll it out to 7 restaurants. This a what was included:
a unified cash register system: one configuration dashboard to manage products, prices and cash register screens accross all restaurants
a stock management system: an integrated solution to process supplier orders, monitor stock levels and track your total stock value
an online order processing system: a solution that automatically inputted all online orders (from UberEats, Deliveroo, …) into our cash register
a customer kiosk: for customers to “self-order” on a touchscreen
Rolling out this new complete new architecture comes with its challenges: staff system adoption and smooth operations at the launch. To prepare for this, it is important to communicate well on the benefits for all and to train the teams. An incentive can even be but in place for the managers to encourage his teams to use the systems. Because “a system is only as good as its users”.
The company largely benefitted from this roll-out, because it:
simplified every product launch and price change: everything could be done by one person, from one place
standardized all product names: which was important for reporting (a slight difference in naming e.g. “pad thai” and “pad Thaï” would mess up our reporting)
unified all data in one database: which meant an easier reporting and better overview of all our restaurants for group management
better overview of restaurant status for managers: easy and quick access to sales and stock levels
user-friendly cash register screens: better-looking cash register screens which made taking orders easier and faster for the staff and which also meant new staff training was easier
self-ordering devices for the customers: installing customer self-ordering devices lightened our service staff tasks which meant they could focus more on the service rather than taking orders
Step 3: New Products, Ready to Scale
To keep up with customer demand and attract new customers, restaurants should continue innovating: by changing up the menu, collaborating with other chefs and restaurants or simply including seasonal ingredients in your menu. For Pitaya this not only meant to follow-up with our master franchisor’s new launches, but also add our own Belgian twist.
For every new dish, I coordinated the full cycle:
taste & develop the recipe
set the price & quality levels
forecast sales
negotiate ingredient cost with supplier according to the forecast
create documentation and operational guidelines
communicate & train the restaurant staff
follow-up on operations and sales
Launching a new product isn’t just about adding something new to the menu, it is also making sure the whole flow works: from supply, to kitchen, to customer experience.
Step 4: Supporting New Openings
Working for a franchisor also meant participating in restaurant openings. During my time with Pitaya, I contributed to 7 restaurant openings with the following responsibilities:
restaurant opening planning
kitchen, service staff and restaurant manager training
full IT architecure roll-out for the restaurant: cash register, stock management system, online order processing system and customer self-ordering kiosk
actively participate in the opening week’s operations to ensure a smooth launch
Being present on the ground meant I wasn’t just behind a screen designing processes. I was in the restaurant making sure the processes actually worked: that the staff was familiar with them and that they ran smoothly for the launch.
Results
By the end of my mission, Pitaya had:
a stronger and more reliable supply chain,
integrated systems that made daily operations easier,
documented process from service to recipes
and seven new restaurants opened with fully trained teams.
→ Every company is unique, and scaling a restaurant chain requires both systems & processes, but also hands-on operational work to put these into action