There are only so many times restaurants can raise menu prices before they run out of customers willing to pay $50 for a steak or $18 for a cocktail, so chefs (and their suppliers) need to find efficiencies in their existing businesses if they want to increase their margins. One of the easiest –and most obvious – ways of doing this is, of course, to buy in bulk. The more you order, the more you save, and if you have the right setup for it, it just makes sense.
But buying massive vats of butter isn’t the only way to save time and money in the restaurant industry. New technologies are creating novel ways to get more out of less, and they’re doing it by taking advantage of something else restaurants can get in bulk: their own data. Knowledge is power, and businesses are starting to coax more and more dollar signs from the stacks of data that are only now becoming available.
