Pocket-Friendly Marketing For New Restaurants in Malaysia.

Every restaurant owner knows they have to invest both time and money in marketing if they want their business to grow. Big restaurants and cafes don’t have an issue with spending a lot on marketing, because they have entire marketing departments at their disposal and can afford to spend thousands to launch a campaign. Small F&B businesses, on the other hand, have limited time and a tight budget, so enhancing their brand image can sometimes be extremely challenging.

Marketing on a small budget is possible, as long as you are strategic about what you spend your money on. Instead of waiting for more capital to flow into your business, build an effective marketing strategy from the ground up. Several low-cost marketing methods will help you build your company image up and give you a chance to promote it effectively.

We’ve compiled a list of the few things you can do to help your F&B business stand out from the crowd, make it memorable and get your customers’ attention without breaking your budget.

Engage In Email Marketing Campaigns

Marketing is as much about retaining the customers you have, as it is about attracting new ones. Use your small business software like your POS system if it is equipped with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) feature to build a database of customers to be included on an email distribution list. This is a great way to build a community, keep your brand relevant and keep customers coming back for more.

Picture Credit: Inside Scoop

The trick to creating a successful newsletter is to make sure there is a mix of engaging, original content, and exclusive offers. For instance, you can offer a mini free scoop of ice-cream with any purchase of a normal scoop of ice-cream.  This would be an offer exclusive to your email subscribers. Or customers on your mailing list get special previews to new promotions and bonus gifts for early purchases. 

Cash in on coupons

Coupons are an inexpensive way to reach out to customers, who are always looking for ways to get a better deal. Even cheaper, are coupons created online and emailed to customers. You can offer coupon such as “buy-one-get-one-free” because customers are more willing to spend to receive rewards. You can also hand out coupons the first few months of opening, to encourage your customers to come back.

Picture Credit: Oh Cha Matcha

Join social media

According to Broadband Search, people spend 144 minutes on social media on average per day. The amount of time people spends on social media each day continues to increase since 2012. Since Instagram launched advertising on its platform in 2015, Instagram ads have driven more than one billion user actions. And just last year, it more than doubled its advertiser base in six months to 500,000 advertisers. By doing targeted ads on Instagram it can help minimize wasted advertising by using detailed information about individuals who are intended for a product. Instagram ads use Facebook’s advertising system, which has probably the most powerful targeting ability. You can specify your target audience’s location, demographics, interests, behaviours, and more. You can even target people who have bought from you or interacted with you and others like them.

Marketing guru Neil Patel says he believes in the rule of seven. The rule of seven quite simply states that it takes an average of seven interactions with your brand before a purchase will take place. Meaning the average consumer would need to see your brand 7 times before they go ahead and make a purchase as people may not remember your brand after seeing it for the first time. This means that you need to be consistent with your social media ads, perhaps promoting your post or page for a longer period of time because Instagram will display your ads to your target audience multiple times.

You can also try different ad copy and visuals for the same campaign to introduce more variety and reinforce your brand at the same time. An advanced way to allow your target audience to see your brand minimally 7 times is to use retargeting. The more consistent you are with your post the more likely for customers to remember you. Your Target audience will not see your post unless they are following your page or unless you promote your post. Therefore for you to get a post engagement, you must first have content so that people will have a reason to follow your profile. You can also do retargeting, so ads are shown to people who have visited your page or profile, It allows you to reach out to users with who you already have a relationship within any capacity and try to get them to purchase or re-engage with your brand. A lot of new businesses gain followers by running promotion giveaways, for example, run a promotion giveaway contest by following your page and tag friends to win dinner for 2 for free. Social media advertising can be tailored for small budgets as the advertiser can set limits to prevent overspending. you can run multiple versions of an ad to find out what works and reduce their spending.

Picture Credit: MyBurgerLab Instagram.

This also means that you need to be consistent with your social media. You can’t just post once and wait for another 7 days to publish another post. The more consistent you are with your post the more likely for customers to remember you. Your target audience will not see your post unless they are following your page or unless you promote your post. Which mean you should promote your post or page for a longer period of time because Instagram will display your ads to your target audience multiple times with different ad copy and visuals. You can also do retargeting so ads are shown to people who have visited your page or profile. A lot of new business gain followers by running promotion giveaways, for example, run a promotion giveaway contest by following your page and tag friends to win dinner for 2. This will get the tagged friends to see the promotional post that you are running subsequently allows them to check out your profile. social media advertising can be tailored for small budgets as the advertiser can set limits to prevent overspending. you can run multiple versions of an ad to find out what works and reduce their spending.

Industry Partnership

As the popular saying goes, there’s strength in numbers. Another great and inexpensive way to garner publicity is by teaming up with another small company or cafe for a cross-promotional marketing campaign.

A burger joint and a yoghurt drink can use cross-promotional marketing to reach out to each other’s customers. For example, if your brand has a smaller following then your brand should be featured on the bigger brand’s page. You will need to include a call-to-action such as following your page. For example, a burger restaurant can be suggested to customers that their burger will go hand in hand with the yoghurt drink, and people ordering any type of their burger will receive a bottle of the yoghurt drink for free! Such a cross-promotional strategy works best when you select a complementary business.

When running an industry partnership you need to make sure that your partner is not your direct competitor, but they can share the same target audience. If you are introducing chicken burger to the menu, the best industry partnership to go with would be Nandos. You can partner up with Nandos team to use their sauce to go along with your chicken burger. Nandos share the same target audience without being in direct competition with you. Industry partnerships are a great marketing tactic because they allow small business owners access to marketing know-how, technology, and customer bases that they could not have achieved on their own.

Picture Credit: MyBurgerLab Instagram

You Don’t Have to Break the Bank to Increase Your Brand’s Exposure.

Your restaurant and marketing go hand in hand in today’s world, and a good marketing strategy can help any restaurant become a success. Although it’s very easy to be amazed by enormous, well-positioned billboards, or expensive ad campaigns, not every business has a big budget to promote their brand. Fortunately, you don’t have to lavish more than you can afford to create a big marketing impact. These pocket-friendly marketing ideas will give any business a chance to compete with brands that have bigger marketing budgets.

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Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.

Guideline to restaurant kitchen design in Malaysia.

Guideline to restaurant kitchen design in Malaysia.

You are opening a restaurant, and as we all know the kitchen is the heart of it. Designing a kitchen restaurant is not the same as designing your own home kitchen. There are requirements needed by the city council, which will result in a fine if they are not met. Often, your building management will have certain criteria as well. So how do you go about it? What requirements do the building management and the city council need? In this article, you will find all the important information that you need to consider when designing a restaurant kitchen as well as practical tips and ideas for maximum utilization of the kitchen space and its functionality.

The general rule for kitchen design

Determine your menu

Before you start calling the contractor and start hammering away, the most important thing is you need to decide is your menu. This is important because from there you’ll know what kind of equipment and how many of them you need to make your menu. For example, If you are a bread bakery, and you will be able to narrow down the equipment needed based on the types of bread you are planning to sell. From there, you can begin to plan out the layout of your kitchen.

Determine kitchen requirements

Building management requirements

Now that you’ve signed the lease for your dream outlet and you have your layout for your kitchen, you’re ready to go! Not quite. Depending on where you sign your lease, each landlord/building management has a different set of requirements. 

For example, generally, every landlord/building management is very strict with water discharge, and as we all know when operating an eatery there will be a lot of cleaning. Thus to avoid reeking water discharge, most landlords/building management will expect you to install a grease trap. Grease trap tank acts as a reservoir holding the wastewater and food solids that enter the trap. As the wastewater cools, the fat, oil, and grease (FOG) harden and the food solids settle. The FOG, being lighter than water, floats to the top of the grease trap, they are usually installed underneath the 3 compartment sink or in the floor of the kitchen. They trap grease over time and need to be pumped frequently, sometimes even weekly.

Another common requirement from the building management is waterproofing your kitchen. The reason for this is to avoid any possible water seepage through the cement to the floor below or the next door unit when you wash the kitchen floor at the end of the day. 

City Council Requirements

City council requirements are aligned with the building management. Fire protection is the main prerequisite in city council requirements, these conditions are important to protect you as a business owner and your guest. 

Building management requirement for tiling the on the wall for backsplash is subjected to the city council. The city council will look at the wall of the premises base on the blueprint submitted to them before any renovations start whether the wall is a half-height or full-height wall. A backsplash is to protect the wall against water damage from inadvertent splashing when you are cleaning the kitchen. If the wall on the premise is a full-height wall, you’ll need the fire department’s approval to install the sprinkler point whether or not you are electric or gas base kitchen.

Wet chemical installation is mandatory for the kitchen that uses gas, in the event that your kitchen hob has a malfunction during operation. A fire suppression system such as the wet chemicals is crucial as it will activate automatically when there is a fire. The building management will usually inspect whether the installation has been completed before allowing you to operate for business. City council will do their inspection sporadically, and If you are caught without proper fire protection, you will be fine by the fire department amounted to RM10,000.

Gas Supply

If you plan to use gas in your kitchen, you will need to apply for a gas connection through Gas Malaysia. You have to submit the Gas Supply agreement form and pay the deposit.

The tariff and rates are as follows:

Usually, these requirements can eat up to 60 - 70% of your renovation budget.

If you are thinking about opening up your restaurant in a mall, bear in mind that big malls such as KLCC, Mid Valley, Pavilion and 1 Utama will have the highest standard requirement. Furthermore, the mall management will mandate the renovation to be done at night, after mall operation hours, which means that labour/wages will be doubled or tripled due to overtime.

Determine kitchen size VS seating pax

When the time comes to start planning the layout of your commercial kitchen, the goal is always to create a space that not only encourages efficient operations in the Back of House (BoH) but also maximizes areas in the Front of House (FOH). Achieving this requires a delicate balance: a kitchen big enough for your staff to work safely and comfortably to serve your guests, but not so large that it wastes space otherwise put to better use for other purposes.

So how do you get a more reliable sense of what kitchen size would work best for your restaurant?

A stronger metric is not to judge your kitchen by the average size of other kitchens, but by the number of guests you plan to serve at any given time. The rule of thumb for this is to allocate at least five square feet for every seat in your FoH. So, for a restaurant serving 30 people at a time, 150 square feet should suit your needs. Designing a kitchen for a large hotel dining room serving up to 400 guests per sitting? You may want to ensure you have at least 2,000 square feet for the kitchen, or else your staff might not be able to meet demand.

In primary space planning, the general rule of thumb for determining the area allotted is that the dining area should comprise most of the total restaurant area. The kitchen, storage and preparation area should take up the remaining space. These dimensions will have to be adjusted if you plan on having a waiting area or a bar. These should be the approximate percentages for the total area:

• Dining Room:  60% of Total Area

• Kitchen, Cooking, Storage, Preparation, etc:  40% of Total Area

A rule of thumb is just that, though. It should not be used as the final word. Every operation is different and will have unique needs. Working with a kitchen design expert can help you determine exactly what size commercial kitchen is right for you.

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Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.

Planning A Successful Soft Opening.

As a restaurant owner, you know you’re in a highly competitive industry. There are always up-and-coming new restaurants you see online with a new style of cooking, aesthetically-plated food or even a Michelin star chef. On top of that, it’s a consumer-driven industry, and with the amount of consumer-generated media available, news travels fast by word of mouth. Because of this, restaurant owners are under more pressure than ever to make a good first impression when they open their doors.

Considering the amount of pressure on a restaurant’s grand opening, many restaurateurs are adopting the soft-opening model. A soft opening allows you to test your concept, food, and service with a limited number of people before you open to the general public.

Why is a Soft Opening Important? 

From the front of the house to the back, a restaurant has a lot of moving parts. Which is why doing a soft opening for your restaurant before it officially opens is important to set you up for success.

A soft opening allows you to observe and train your staff in a live but controlled environment, so you can fine-tune your food, service, and operations. For example, it can determine whether your direction for the restaurant is realistic for the grand opening. A soft opening allows you to gauge customer reactions to your restaurant concept, menu, and service so you can make tweaks where necessary.

On your grand opening day, you want customers lining up. While there are various ways to market your restaurant (such as social media, email campaigns and more), word of mouth is one of the most efficient ways to drive traffic. If you have a successful soft opening, you can build hype for opening day.

Planning and hosting a soft opening

As part of a soft opening, there are three distinct phases to consider:

Planning: Your restaurant type should influence the optimal soft-opening format. For example, if you have a full-service restaurant, you may want to host a private party with a cocktail-style food service. Whereas with a quick-service restaurant, you may want to host a more casual soft opening with discounted food. Create a checklist to make sure you cover all key factors (such as cost, duration and guest list) when planning your event. 

Implementing: Create a timeline for execution and take the time to train your staff. Prioritize customer experience at your soft opening, as this is a critical opportunity to make a good first impression.

Adapting: Apply the learnings from your soft opening and make improvements before your grand opening. Review every aspect of your restaurant, from the menu to the wait times, and make adjustments where needed.

Soft Opening Menu

When thinking about what to serve at your soft opening, there are a few factors to consider. First, you should think of the menu as a preview of your larger menu and focus on a simple, limited menu. This also helps to conserve time and budget. And although you want to keep your menu limited, make sure it’s a diverse offering and includes some of your unique dishes; this will make your restaurant stand out and leave guests wanting to try more.

Picture Courtesy: Mad For Chicken

Invitation list:

When planning your soft opening you should first determine your objectives. Do you want to create a buzz? Do you want to get feedback? Or create revenue opportunities? 

Create a buzz: If you want to create a buzz, think of who you want to attract and who they tend to follow. Should you call the media? Tatler magazine? Food bloggers, or influencers? If your restaurant style is fine dining you might want to engage with magazines that report luxurious eats and lifestyle such as Tatler magazine or Prestige. They have more suitable readers that would appreciate your restaurant style. 

For something more casual, food bloggers would be a better form of engagement as the market is wide. This applies especially to cute or beautiful cafes that would attract social media influencers as they like being seen in the latest Insta-worthy venues. Note that creating a buzz would typically cost you some spending. While some magazines would do a write up on your restaurant for free, others, especially popular websites and influencers, expect payment. So before you engage with them, ask beforehand if they charge or they would do it for free. By creating a buzz it gives excitement for other people while waiting for your grand opening and If the soft opening went well, be prepared to receive a lot of customers the first few months of the official opening. So between the soft opening till the grand opening be sure to sort out the flaws.

Feedback: Getting an opinion from people is important on your soft opening, so you can work out the kinks before the grand opening. Inviting friends and family would good for this purpose as they will give you their honest opinion. Bear in mind that when you are hosting you might want to circulate around and mingle with your other guests, so instead of asking them verbal feedback, it would be a lot easier if you provide them a feedback form. So when the event is over, you can go over the feedback form. Don’t forget to ask your staff for some comments too, on what they think how the soft opening went or how will can they improve.

Create revenue opportunities: By handing out coupons and other promotional offers at your soft opening, you can set up future revenue streams. If your soft opening goes well, chances are good your guests will return.

Whatever your objectives are, the best option is to be able to achieve all the above objectives because if the soft opening goes well, by the time it’s the grand opening, your restaurant would already be buzzing from all the reviews from either the magazines, food bloggers or influencers, and all the kinks would hopefully be worked on by then from family and friends’ feedback. 

Tips for success

To make sure your soft opening runs as smoothly as possible, we recommend the following tips:

Prep your staff: Before your event, talk your servers through the soft-opening menu. Have them do a tasting so they can speak intelligently about your offerings. This may seem insignificant because you would think that your staff should know what they are supposed to do, however it is best not to take it for granted. Making your staff taste the menu is also important because guests tend to ask “what’s good here?” or “what would you recommend?” and having your staff know the menu shows that you are well prepared. It is also important to brief the servers on who they should report to if anything were to happen. You don’t want your server to be coming up to you while you are busy talking and entertaining your guests. Let them know who is in charge that day.

Test your technology: Make sure to test your point of sale, card payment system, and printers during your soft opening to confirm everything’s working properly. We get it, planning a soft opening has a lot of moving parts. Sometimes we overlook things that are crucial to making the soft opening run smoothly. Treat it as a dry run of the opening, put an order in on your new POS to make sure the order entered into the POS system goes into the kitchen for the chefs to start prep, because you want to ensure operations are smooth on your official first day. 

Talk with your guests: Train your staff to chat with each table and thank your guests for being there. This gives you a chance to get honest feedback so you can make improvements before the grand opening. Making the guest feel important and welcome is a good way to create a good impression of your restaurant. This way, your guest will likely come back to your restaurant and bring friends or tell others about your restaurant. Having your staff trained like robots to only take orders and serve food doesn’t scream warm service. Give your servers some examples of small talk they can make with customers and questions they can ask. The let them practise with each other and take turns being the 'customer', so they are confident at the soft opening. Don’t expect guests to be more forgiving because it’s a soft opening. You only have one chance for a first impression, so make sure your customer service is on point. Take notes on anything that needs to be improved.

Limit the number of guests: Seat a number that your kitchen and staff can comfortably handle, so you can successfully execute your soft opening. Make a list of who you want to invite so everyone, from your staff to your guests are comfortable. Inviting too many people may overwhelm your new staff and it will also be more difficult to speak to each guest personally to get their feedback.

Keep your hours short: To ensure your event goes well, make sure it’s manageable. By keeping the hours short, you can stick to a budget but still give your guests a preview of what’s to come. Having shorter operating hours on the soft launch day also allows you to debrief all your staff and hear their take of how the day went so that you can make improvements. 

Now that your soft opening is out of the way, it’s time for your grand opening. Good luck! Along with other preparations for full operations, you might be wondering about the best way to schedule your staff's working hours. Click here to find out more on how to create your staff schedule

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Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.

How To Create Restaurant Schedule

Some may question the importance of creating a restaurant schedule for their employees, how it would affect the business if not done right and how to go about creating staff schedules.  Creating a restaurant staff schedule is tricky as Employers/Managers have to ensure that there is a balance of working hours for your staff (Full-timers and Part-timers) to ensure fairness, to minimize headcount needed (to reduce manpower costs) and to also take into account of the volume of customer in the F&B establishment. 

Getting ourselves warmed up, Employers/Managers must remember this key essence when creating schedules for the week.

Full-time employment: 6 days a week, no more than 48 hours per week
Part-time employment: No more than 35 hours per week

1. Why is there a need for a restaurant schedule?

The restaurant staff schedule, AKA Duty Roster is a MUST in F&B businesses. Your staff need to know ahead of time when they will be working and the establishment needs to be adequately staffed to meet customer demands. Ideally, it should balance out the different skills of each employee, and also manage employees' productivity. Poor scheduling of the duty roster may result in an increase in customer complaints, workplace stress, lower productivity, and reduced employee morale. 

You should also take into account peak and lull periods, and that weekends and public holidays usually mean more hands on deck. Orchestrating a restaurant staff schedule is usually the responsibility of the manager and head chef, but F&B owners should be aware of how they are making these scheduling decisions.

2. How do we ensure poor scheduling does not happen?

Most employers plan their restaurant schedule weekly to reduce the number of changes to be made.

Here are a few things Employer/ Managers have to consider when creating schedules:

1.  Peak Period Projections based on sales - Employers/Managers can look at the experience of their staff. Place experienced staff during peak hours like lunch periods to prevent workflow issues. Placing too many new staff on the same shift may result in the lack of coordination, especially during busy periods. A team leader, supervisor or manager should be present at every shift.

2. Time off request -  Malaysian Employment Act 1955 defines a workweek as 48 hours, with a maximum of eight hours per day and six working days a week. Employers can spread employee's time off over the week and they cannot compel employees to work on their rest day. Exceptions can be made when the restaurant is really understaffed and the staff on duty are unable to cope. In this case, the Employer has to provide employees another day off to make up for it.
   

3. Staff availability - Before creating schedules, Employers should consider staff’s requests for time off before allocating them working days. 

4. Send schedules before the start of the week - Send schedules in on Friday/ Saturday night so that employees can prepare themselves for the week ahead and make personal plans on their rest day.

3. Lunch/Dinner breaks

Typically, a full shift lasts 11 -12 hours a day, from opening to closing (It depends on the opening hours and closing hours of the F&B establishment) and Employers must provide a break time for employees who continuously work up to 5 hours a day entitled to a period of leisure of not less than 30 minutes duration. Any break of fewer than 30 minutes in the five consecutive hours shall not break the continuity of that five consecutive hours. The number of hours for break time differs from each individual F&B establishment as it depends on how much time the Employer/Manager allocates. In an F&B setting, meals (sometimes known as staff meals or family meals) are commonly provided for everyone working on that day and staff should inform chefs beforehand if they have any dietary restrictions. 

4. Full / Part - Time Employment 

Full-Time
Full-timers refers to employees working 48 hours per week. Employers can put in place the “Give and Take Basis” rule to ensure fairness to employees: there are times full-timers can get their requests 1 off days for the week, and times where their request cannot be granted.  Requested off days cannot be guaranteed as the manager has to take into account other staff’s schedules and preferences too.

Part - Time

A part-time employee is a person engaged under a contract of service with an employer, whose hours of work is between 30% - 70% of that of a full-time employee with that same employer. A part-time employee may be engaged permanently or on a fixed-term contract basis.

A part-time employee must, therefore, have a proper contract of service. Merely asking them to fill up a form or contracting their services verbally, although having a legally-binding effect, may not be adequate if a dispute arises later.

5. Steps to creating a schedule

Below is an example that Employers/Managers can follow if done traditionally:

Step 1: Lay out the schedule format

Pull out an excel sheet, list down the dates for the week, names of employees according to their job scope at the side in alphabetical order. It is easier for staff to view their schedules when it is organized in columns.

Step 2: Identify staff count needed for each shift

Plan the schedule based on peak period projections, time-off requests of employees. 

Typically, staff would come in prior 30 minutes to 1 hour before the opening hours of the cafe/restaurant to prepare everything needed for lunch service. This must be made clear to all staff to ensure that they turn up for their work on time. The time listed in the staff schedule should include the preparation time. (E.g. OMONI cafe operating hours start at 9 am. The schedule should indicate that work begins at 8.30 am.) 

New staff have to be taught/trained in order to understand the operations of how the F&B establishment works. As such, Managers have to turn up 30 minutes before the time on schedule to teach the new staff on the ropes of the F&B business operations - Menu, Table arrangement, Greeting of customers, Serving of food etc. New staff can come in 30 minutes before the time on schedule to familiarize themselves, get to know the menu, how to serve the customers, understand table arrangements in the F&B outlet. 

Based on the size of the F&B business, different numbers of staff are required. One example we can use is a small cafe - Peak period: Lunch crowd. Employers/Manager planning schedules must ensure that there is at least 3 staff on duty for the opening - 2 back of house crew doing preparations in the kitchen, 1 front of house to set up tables and the POS system. For peak periods, it is recommended to have 6 staff on duty- 3 in the back of house, 3 in the front of house. For non-peak period, you can reduce your number of staff to 4 - 2 back of house, 2 front of house. This can help to minimize your manpower cost.

Step 3: Calculate the number of hours

Creating a schedule is important as it helps employers to manage the payroll process. Schedules are used to track and determine the number of hours an employee works and Employers/Managers use it to determine how much to pay the employee based on the number of hours logged in.

Employers/Managers have to check and calculate the number of days and hours set for the employees - Full-timers must not exceed more than 6 days, 48 hours and Part-timers must not exceed 35 hours per week. If a full-time staff’s working time exceeds 48 hours per week, Employers/Managers have to amend it as the extra hours will be counted as overtime and have to be paid at 1.5x. Since 30-40% of the restaurant revenue usually goes to manpower, it is important to ensure that the number of hours employees worked fits within the manpower budget. All salaries will have to fit within that range so it will provide the Employer/Manager an idea on how much they can set aside for part timers. If the budget is exceeded, the restaurant would not be making enough profits. 

To increase the efficiency of scheduling and payroll calculations, a Human Resource Software can be used. It will allow employers to monitor employee attendance, number of hours worked, off days and medical leave. Instead of putting in requests for days off on Whatsapp group chats, which can be messy when keeping track and open to dispute, and having to send the schedule to each individual, everything can be updated and accessed via an app so both the management and employees are on the same page. 

Below is an infographic that summarizes on how to create a restaurant schedule:

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Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.

How To Calculate Your Food Cost?

How you price your dishes on your menu can make or break your business. Price dishes too high, and customers won’t order them. Price dishes too low, and you won’t generate enough revenue to cover your expenses. By taking a deep dive into understanding your food costs, you can improve your chances for success. Lucky for you, we’ve got restaurant pricing down to a science. We’ll help you figure out how to set menu prices that will cover your expenses and ensure that your restaurant is financially healthy. 

Sounds boring and stressful, right?

Don’t worry, and we got you covered!

We will go through step by step on how to calculate your ideal and actual food costs so you can price your menu ideally and even identify where you might be able to save money.

What Is Food Cost?

Before we go into detail, let’s understand more about what food cost means. 

Food cost is the ratio of the cost of ingredients (food inventory) and the revenue that those ingredients generate when dishes are sold (food sales).  

What is Food Cost Per Serving? And How Do I Calculate It?

Before you decide the price of your menu, you need to find out how much your food costs to make one serving of each item in your menu. To calculate your food cost per serving, find the sum of the ingredient cost per serving. 

FOOD COST PER SERVING = TOTAL COST INGREDIENTS PER SERVING

Example:

Uncle Lim of Taste of Penang wants to figure out his famous Char Kway Teow’s cost per serving. The dish consists of 100 gm of kway teow, 20 gm of cockles, 25 gm of fish cakes, 30 gm of bean sprouts, 20 gm of kuchai leaves, 16 gm of light soy sauce, 10 gm of dark soy sauce and 1 egg.

Uncle Lim buys his ingredients in bulk and pays for RM 10 for 1 kg of kway teow. He calculates that 100 gm of kway teow for a single dish of Char Kway Teow costs RM 1. Uncle Lim does the same calculations to determine the cost per serving of the remaining ingredients in the kway teow.

Why Is Food Cost Percentage Important?

By monitoring your food cost percentage (typically between 28-35% of your total operating cost) a restauranteur can know when to change prices, products and purchase quantities to improve his or her percentage.

The slightest change in the price of goods and/or the number of sales can affect a restaurant’s profit significantly. 

Food Cost Percentage is Not a One-Size-Fits-All Number

A common misconception about food cost percentage is that every restaurant should aim for a perfect number. In reality, a healthy percentage can vary depending on the products you sell, food cost control, and the market you serve. For example, a steakhouse can run a food cost percentage close to 35 percent, because the cost of its ingredients is much higher. On the other hand, a restaurant that serves primarily kway teow like Uncle Lim, which is cheap to buy in bulk, might run somewhere around 28 percent. Both percentages are acceptable according to the context of the restaurant. 

First, you need to have values for the following things:

• Beginning inventory value: the Ringgit value of the inventory you purchased at the beginning of the month.

• Purchases: the Ringgit value of the inventory you purchase throughout the month and wasn’t part of your beginning inventory. 

• Ending inventory: the Ringgit value of the inventory left over at the end of the month. 

• Total food sales: the dollar value of your sales for the month, which you can find in your POS sales reports. 

To calculate your food cost percentage, first, add the value of your beginning inventory and your purchases, and subtract the value of your ending inventory from the total. Finally, divide the result by your total food sales.

Let’s see how Uncle Lim would calculate their food cost percentage using these values:

Uncle Lim’s food cost percentage is 33.33%, meaning that 33.33% of his revenue goes towards paying for ingredients. 

Average Restaurant Food Cost Percentages Can Vary by Meal

In the same way that food cost percentage targets can vary between restaurants, they can also vary within a restaurant. This is would usually happen if your restaurant serves both breakfast and dinner, or you have both a coffee bar and a sit-down restaurant, for example, breakfast foods, like eggs and bread, are much less expensive than the seafood and high-quality meats you might serve at dinner. It’s essential to take these variations into consideration when calculating overall food cost percentage and taking inventory of your ingredient costs. Now, do keep in mind that there are some ingredients that you can’t really measure and put that into your food costing system. For example, Uncle Lim’s famous Kuey Teow, dishes like that are made to order and things like soy sauce and salt are hard to measure. So, Uncle Lim has to estimate those ingredients into his food cost.

How Your POS can Help With Your Food Costing

Mapping your recipes to your POS system menu items helps you understand and control your food costs. Recipe costing breaks down menu items to the details of portion size and individual ingredients, calculated to the penny.

Manually calculating menu item costing is error-prone and time-consuming. The usage and yield of each food ingredient determine recipe costs, but tracking this by hand on an inventory list can be unreliable. With a restaurant inventory management system integrated with your accounting and POS system, you can automatically track the yield from each food item on your menu by mapping inventory against sales.

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Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.

Things to consider before opening up a restaurant.

The restaurant business is not for the faint of heart. They have a high failure rate but knowing why can help prospective owners avoid a similar fate.

We all know the damaging statistic that 60% of restaurants fail their first year and 80% fail after 4 years. So how do you avoid the pitfalls the vast majority of restaurants make that doom them to fail? Well, we’ve got you covered. The restaurants at the top of their game are all doing the same things to make their business successful.

Location, Location, Location.

We heard it all before, location plays a vital role in making it in the restaurant industry. The closer you are to consistent and heavy foot traffic, the easier it will be for business to come your way. Unfortunately, that busy new part of town with cool shops and lots of foot traffic also comes with a price tag. And while it might be nice to sell Nasi Lemak right in the heart of everything, those Nasi Lemak had better be spectacular that people are lining up outside to get their nasi lemak fix from your restaurant, because the landlord doesn’t care if it’s your grandmother’s recipe. The landlord cares about rent. 

Depending on how much money you have to invest in your F&B business, you can spend anywhere between RM 10,000 to RM 200,000 in rent if you are looking at a location with heavy foot traffic. Which is why you have to consider:

The rent-paying capacity of your business.

If you've done a sales-and-profit projection for your first year of operation, you will know approximately how much revenue you can expect to generate, and you can use that information to decide how much rent you can afford to pay. Calculating the percentage is simple enough: Divide your annual rent by your anticipated revenue. Suppose you're looking at a space that rents for RM 2,000 a month. That translates into RM 24,000 per year. If you expect to make RM 150,000 in the same year, the ratio is .16, or 16 %. The ratio doesn't outweigh your situation, though: If you can't afford the three month's rent, it doesn't matter how good the occupancy cost is. Likewise, if your income fluctuates wildly or you're not sure of your projections, it is wiser to be cautious. It also pays to think about what happens if things go wrong, like upcoming construction that could affect the visibility or accessibility of your restaurant.

Traffic density.

With careful consideration of foot traffic, you can determine the approximate sales potential of each person passing a given location. Two factors are especially important in this analysis: total foot traffic during business hours and the percentage of it that is likely to dine at your restaurant. This is when you should know who is your target market. For example, if you decide to open your restaurant in a mall, pay attention to how many people that go to the mall during lunch hour are the people who work or live near the mall. And depending on your restaurant concept, you can get an idea of how many people who are likely to dine at your restaurant during lunchtime? Bear in mind that people who work in the office only get 1 hour for a lunch break. So your restaurant has to be either quick service or grab and go.

Terms of the lease. 

Be sure you understand all the details of the lease, because an excellent site may have unacceptable leasing terms. For example, if your landlord gave you 5 months rent-free but you have to sign a 6 years lease, you might want to consider whether you want to commit to such a long term lease. You will also need to pay attention to full reinstatement of the property when giving up the lease, reinstatement can sometimes cost almost as much as renovation. And you might need to make sure that you have some cash saved up so that handing back the key to your landlord will be seamless. 

Hours of operation.

If your restaurant is in a mall you might be compelled by the operation hours of the mall. That goes the same with days of operation because you might be fined by the mall management if you don’t comply with their operating hours and day. Same goes If you’re thinking of opening your restaurant or cafe in an office building. You might get a lot of traffic during lunch hour, but you might not get a lot or at all traffic for dinner since the office hours are usually 9 pm-6 pm. And opening during the weekend would be tough since there will be no one at the office.

Marketing

Every business needs a marketing plan, and your F&B business is no exception. Marketing your restaurant creates a loyal following, you don’t necessarily have to hire a marketing team for this as you can do it yourself. 

Food Photography

Having a social media account for your F&B business such as Facebook and Instagram is also important so that your potential customers know what they can expect from your restaurant. By having a social media account you can update your customer on a promotion you want to run or a new menu that you would like to introduce. 

Picture Credit: Little Bourke

If you have an Instagram account, you would already know that #foodporn is well and alive. It’s pretty much an easy way to market your delicious food. If you can take a beautiful picture of your food you can do the marketing yourself. And say if you are a noob, you can always hire freelance photographers to take the pictures for you. Visual content is in high demand online these days, and having delicious looking photos on your website and across various social media outlets is essential for drawing hungry eyes.

Delivery Partner 

In today’s online-driven environment, ease of use is the name of the game. Many online delivery services streamline the ordering process, and internet-savvy patrons often love taking advantage of such delivery services. Consider partnering with Grabfood or FoodPanda. Some customers may even discover you for the first time through services such as these!

Register your business on Google My Business

The next thing you should do is register your restaurant on Google My Business. What is Google My Business? GMB is a tool designed by Google to support Small Business across the globe, by helping users easily spot the services provided in their area. by claiming your Google My Business page and giving Google all the info it needs to list your business online, you not only control the info that appears online, but you gain access to the first search result that people see on the page. Most people can easily get lost looking through the websites listed on the left side of the page – and end up on the website of another restaurant, with a similar name. However, no-one will miss the big business card listed on the right side of the screen. Google helps your business stand out by giving you a card of your own, in a non-competitive space (or real estate, like it’s called by field specialists).

Your GMB listing is like the fishing bait that helps you hook in new customers. Because by feeding Google with relevant, and helpful information you’re practically paving your way to gaining new customers. Even if they may not know the name of your restaurant, but they still search for an Indian restaurant in their area, Google will show them a list of Indian restaurants before listing the organic search results. So you still gain valuable real estate, without actually investing in ads.

Make technology work for your customers

There are so many ways that you can use technology to enhance your customer’s experience and encourage repeat visits. The most successful restaurants offer customer wifi as a matter of course, speed up waiting times with contactless takeaway and cashless payment options and utilise the latest POS technology for efficient service.

The truth is trends and technology change constantly. You have to stay current with these changes incorporating technology into your business or you’ll lose out to other businesses that embrace them and offer a better customer experience.

Customer Relationship Management

 If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the long term. You have targets for sales, business objectives, and profitability. But getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales, customer service, marketing, and social media monitoring into useful business information? Customer Relationship Management can help you monitor your customer spending habit. You will know when was the last time your customer visited your restaurant and how much they spent. CRM can give you a clear overview of your customers. You can see everything in one place. A simple customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of your orders and more.  This is a major advantage for a customer service team. With relevant data available in their dashboards and cases, there’s no need to dig for information, so a rep can get right down to what matters. It saves everyone time and makes your potential and current customers feel important when sales and customer service are proactive and knowledgeable — plus, it can improve your bottom line through higher customer satisfaction and reduced time to resolution.

Contactless takeaway

With the pandemic, a lot of people are opting not to eat out. But that’s not a reason to lose your dine-in sales. You can still get customers to enjoy food from your restaurant by letting them use contactless takeaway. The contactless takeaway is a safe and hygienic online takeaway shop where customers can order their food via QR code and that order will go straight to your POS system, and when the order is ready you can simply call the order number and alert your customer. It saves time and also takes some of the load off from your servers.

Licensing and permits

Depending on your concept and the city or municipal council where you open your restaurant, the necessary licenses and permits you’ll need and the costs to acquire them will be different. Some licenses are required for every restaurant (i.e. business licenses), while others depend on your restaurant concept (i.e. liquor licenses). 

Licenses take time and money to acquire. If you're serious about opening a restaurant, get a jump start on obtaining them early on in the process. Some licenses take more time to get approved so be mindful of setting an opening date.

Here are some other licenses and permits you’ll most likely need:

Business Premise License & Signboard License: Business Premise and Signboard license can be applied together at the local municipal office like DBKL (Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur)  or MBPJ (Majlis Bandaraya Petaling Jaya). The requirements for the licenses may vary according to each local authority and the cost for the business premise and signboard license is RM500 DBKL and RM550 for MBPJ.

Music License: Playing music in the restaurant is probably what you want to do to set the mood, but it is not as easy as hitting the play button. In order for you to play music in your restaurant, you’ll need a license from Music Rights Malaysia, and you will have to apply under the restaurant & cafe license where the fee is subjected to the size of your establishment.

Liquor License: If you are planning to serve alcohol in your restaurant, you will need to apply for a liquor license via your local municipal authorities. The purpose of this license is to regulate all activity types involved in the sale of intoxicating liquor. There are a few things needed before you can apply for the license. We made a checklist to make it easier for you to apply.

Halal License: Having a halal license in your restaurant will give your Muslim customers confidence dining at your restaurant. It is of utmost importance for the restaurant owners to fully understand the concept of Halal Food. Using meat and ingredient vendors that are halal certified is of utmost importance to ensure complete Halal integrity. The authenticity of the certificate should also be checked out prior to deciding on a vendor. Application for the Halal Confirmation Certificate must be submitted directly to JAKIM (Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia) JAIN (Jabatan Agama Islam Negeri)  or MAIN ( Majlis Agama Islam Negeri), whichever one is relevant. Having a halal license in your restaurant can give your Muslims customers the confidence to dine at your restaurant but it can also be costly. To get your premise certified, every consumable ingredient that you have in your kitchen or in your restaurant must be halal certified. So if you are thinking about getting that oregano from Italy, you better make sure the supplier has a halal certification for that Oregano, or else your restaurant won’t be getting your certification. But what if your premises serve halal food but you serve alcoholic beverages? Your premises won’t be getting the halal certification, but what you can do is keep your halal meat/poultry certification in your premises so when people ask, you have the documentation ready.

Before opening a restaurant, there are many items to consider to assure its success. The main consideration is the amount of time that will be required to run the restaurant, as well as an ability to manage it successfully. Overall, it is important to gather as much information as possible before heading into this type of venture.

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Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.

How to bring your brick-and-mortar F&B business online without a website

A lot of F&B businesses are adapting new ways to connect and serve their customers. We see the sudden increase of 30% use of online food delivery during MCO and 79% increase of social media use. If you own a brick-and-mortar F&B business, you may have begun shifting online to continue to sell your food via food delivery. While the change to eCommerce can be a big change, there are a number of steps you can take, to shift your F&B business online without having a website. Here’s how to get started bringing your brick-and-mortar business online.

Setting up to selling online

Selling your food online can be a little intimidating if you are not a technical person, but you don’t need technical skills to get started and you don’t always need to set up a website to sell your food online. Here are a few options.

Sell over email:

You can send email to your customers if you already have CRM ( Customer Relation Management) in place. Email marketing is a classic, effective way to reach your customers. As you master how to sell food online, you can let your customers know the promotion that you are currently running.

Photo Credit: Starbucks

People love to buy, they also love to have a reason to buy. Promotions or discounts are that reason. If the goal of the email is to encourage someone to buy a single product, offer a discount that is front and centre to help close the deal. 

Give people a good reason to engage with your emails! Well, like Starbucks does. They know how to make you buy that half-off frappuccino.

Sell on Facebook: 

Create a Facebook page for your F&B business and post your product. Having a separate Business Page is crucial for creating a Facebook Shop. Having a Page also offers many marketing advantages over personal accounts, including:

• It gives your customers a way to find your business and follow your professional posts.

• It gives you a huge array of free marketing opportunities.

• It offers a wide variety of budget-minded advertising tools.

• It lets you sell your products directly to Facebook’s huge audience of more than 25 million users right from your Facebook page.

You’ll need to create a Facebook business page or makeover the one you have now. The reason for this is because most people will check out your business page to make sure your company is legitimate before making a purchase from you. You want these visitors to know, like, and trust your company, so take the time to polish your page.

alternatively, you can join local community F&B groups that allow you to sell your products on their Facebook group page. This is a much more easier way to sell your food on Facebook, with strong members like MY FOOD DIRECTORY & DELIVERY C19 , you don’t have to worry about targeting the wrong audience.

Sell on Instagram: 

30% of Millenials avoid a restaurant with a weak Instagram presence

Since the creation of Instagram, everyone’s been doing food photography. There are now over 327 million posts on Instagram tagged #food. If they’re all doing it, why shouldn’t you? If you’re cooking and selling the food yourself, you ought to get some of the credit by posting it on your own account.

Talk to your followers, You want to really reach out and engage your followers. Make descriptions of the image that are interesting.

Photo Credit: Copper by FAV

Running your own Instagram ad campaign isn’t that difficult, but it can be intimidating to many small business owners who haven’t done it before. Fortunately, it’s not as hard as you think. You need an Instagram business account. By using the Instagram business account you can tell your customer about your food, entice your customer on your upcoming new menu. You can take orders via Direct Message where customers can pay using bank transfer and pick up at your store or customers can arrange their own delivery via the third-party delivery such as Lalamove or Goget.  

Instagram also allows you to promote your post that you want to boost by promoting posts you’ve shared on Instagram. Just select the post you want to boost and hit the “promote” button.

Photo Credit: Butterdream Project

Once your business begins selling on Instagram, it’s important to keep experimenting with images, copy, shopping tags per post, or any other factors that may contribute to your Instagram sales success.

Delving into your Instagram analytics allows you to understand what your audience want, improves your content, and ultimately helps you drive more traffic and sales.

Food Delivery Partner:

Delivery platform has become key to give the customers what they crave the most: a fast, personalized and convenient food experience through delivery. 

If you haven’t already partnered up with either Foodpanda or Grabfood this the best time to look into it. Some delivery platform may have a lot more user than the other, therefore they may charge a higher commission. In exchange for commission fees, you’ll be able to benefit from a ready-made infrastructure, including a network of couriers and riders, a range of packaging materials, delivery tracking, secure payment methods, and so on.

We made pros and cons list on partnering up with a delivery partner. 

These are challenging times for everyone. Share your learnings and your current struggles with customers. The more open you are as a business, the more you can cultivate trust and confidence with your customers. Don’t be afraid to let customers know that you’re still learning, adapting, and changing, and you’re open to suggestions.

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Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.

iCHEF launches new $0 monthly fee for new small F&B businesses and contactless takeaway

iCHEF launches new $0 monthly fee for new small F&B businesses and contactless takeaway

Since MCO measures kicked in on March 18, F&B has been one of the hardest-hit industries. From not being able to open for dine-in to having to quickly establish an online presence and make food delivery available, many F&B outlets have even opted to close during this period to save on operational costs. 

The aftermath of MCO

With no foot traffic once the MCO was implemented, F&B owners suffered 80 - 100% drop in sales. Now that the MCO is relaxed, they are faced with having to recover from the loss in the past two months.

To cope with the drop in sales, many F&B owners have asked their employees to take unpaid leave or resorted to laying their employees off, which means the remaining employees have to take up more responsibilities now that restaurants are reopening. With less manpower, F&B owners have to strategise operations without compromising on their service. 

A second challenge is reduced capacity. During CMCO, only a certain number of people can be in an establishment to minimise chances of exposure to the virus. Thus, when a walk-in customer has to be turned down because the restaurant has reached its capacity, people might be frustrated and leave. Even customers ordering for takeaway have to queue up and find it difficult to practise social distancing. Most restaurants proactively implement their own safe-distancing measures, but this causes inconvenience to customers when ordering and waiting for their food.

Contactless takeaway



iCHEF, a leading cloud-based POS software company, has been working alongside F&B owners in managing their orders, customers, inventory and reporting with a single platform since 2015. 

Anticipating that many of their clients would be affected operationally because of tightened safety measures, iCHEF quickly upgraded their software with a contactless ordering feature, at no extra cost for new signups for the first 3 months and free for customers on iCHEF paid plans. A website link will be generated exclusively for each of their over 6,000 restaurant users, which can be converted to a QR code and displayed at the outlet.

Customers ordering for takeaway can simply scan the QR code with their mobile phones to order directly from the restaurant, without having to step into the outlet. Once confirmed, their orders will directly go into the system and straight to the kitchen to be prepared. Customers will not have to wait in line to order or collect their food.

This will lighten the burden of the servers – no more temperature-taking, signing in with contact details and extra sanitising required. When their order is ready, the restaurant staff can call out the order number and pass the packed food to the waiting customer.

Building a customer base for restaurants 

When placing an order using Contactless Takeaway, customers will need to register with their name a phone number. They will become members of the restaurant’s loyalty programme and earn points for their order (which can be customised by the restaurant). The points accumulated can be exchanged for a discount or perks like a free dessert, encouraging customers to return and order again.

With safe-distancing measures becoming the new normal even after the CMCO is lifted, restaurants can anticipate their dine-in capacity to be halved. They will have to increase their takeaway sales to make up for the loss in dine-in sales, and Contactless Takeaway will make this process much faster and easier to manage. As the country grapples with a recession, consumers will be more selective and cautious with their spending; so incentivising customers to return will help restaurants to ensure sustainable and repeated business.

To learn more about the contactless takeaway feature by iCHEF click on the button below

Challenging time for new restaurants

For new F&B businesses planning to open before MCO was announced, some have had to halt renovations and delay opening plans. They might already have sunk costs such as kitchen equipment, interior designer fees, furniture and POS system – with no idea how to project growth over the next few months, given the uncertain situation. Now that the government has allowed a relaxed MCO, renovation can finally resume after more than a month of delays. As a company that started out as a restaurant, iCHEF recognized the complications that new restaurateurs face. To support F&B entrepreneurs caught in this predicament, iCHEF launches a new initiative – free software for small F&B businesses – a first of cloud-based POS systems.

Zero payment software

In this difficult time, the challenges faced by new F&B businesses are greater than before.

iCHEF, having worked closely with new F&B businesses for close to a decade, understands that the need to conserve capital is paramount and as such, have reduced their pricing in an unconventional way to help more F&B businesses.

For the first time in Malaysia, small F&B businesses with revenue that is less than RM30,000 a month can now own a state-of-the-art cloud POS system with no software fee. This includes an inventory feature, which allows restaurants to automatically keep track of ingredient usage, CRM for running in-house loyalty programmes, cloud storage so all data is backed up, detailed reports and analytics. Perhaps most important, local support is available and iCHEF technicians will provide on-site installation and training for a one-time fee. 

Meanwhile, for growing F&B businesses with revenue more than RM30,000 a month, iCHEF’s usual monthly fee for software is RM 249 a month. On-site installation and training will be complimentary.

“iCHEF’s goal has always been to support small F&B businesses,” says company international director Jay Teo. “When the pandemic happened, we knew that these businesses would be the most affected because they don’t have large reserves to fall back on. At the same time, they need to be able to continue their business to have a fighting chance, so if we can lighten their load and allow them to manage their business more efficiently, we will do what we can.
”

To learn more about Zero Payment POS Software by iCHEF click on the button below

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Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.

Introducing iCHEF Contactless Takeaway Feature!

Since MCO measures kicked in on March 18, F&B has been one of the hardest-hit industries. From not being able to open for dine-in to having to quickly establish an online presence and make food delivery available, many F&B outlets have even opted to close during this period to save on operational costs. 

 The aftermath of MCO

With no foot traffic, once the MCO was implemented, F&B owners suffered 80 - 100% drop in sales. Now that the MCO is relaxed, they are faced with having to recover from the loss in the past two months.

To cope with the drop in sales, many F&B owners have asked their employees to take unpaid leave or resorted to laying their employees off, which means the remaining employees have to take up more responsibilities now that restaurants are reopening. With less manpower, F&B owners have to strategise operations without compromising on their service. 

A second challenge is reduced capacity. During CMCO, only a certain number of people can be in an establishment to minimise chances of exposure to the virus. Thus, when a walk-in customer has to be turned down because the restaurant has reached its capacity, people might be frustrated and leave. Even customers ordering for takeaway have to queue up and find it difficult to practise social distancing. Most restaurants proactively implement their own safe-distancing measures, but this causes inconvenience to customers when ordering and waiting for their food.

Contactless takeaway

iCHEF, a leading cloud-based POS software company, has been working alongside F&B owners in managing their orders, customers, inventory and reporting with a single platform since 2015. 

Anticipating that many of their clients would be affected operationally because of tightened safety measures, iCHEF quickly upgraded their software with a contactless ordering feature, at no extra cost for new signups for the first 3 months and free for customers on iCHEF paid plans.

A website link will be generated exclusively for each of their over 6,000 restaurant users, which can be converted to a QR code and displayed at the outlet. Customers ordering for takeaway can simply scan the QR code with their mobile phones to order directly from the restaurant, without having to step into the outlet. Once confirmed, their orders will directly go into the system and straight to the kitchen to be prepared. Customers will not have to wait in line to order or collect their food.

This will lighten the burden of the servers – no more temperature-taking, signing in with contact details and extra sanitising required. When their order is ready, the restaurant staff can call out the order number and pass the packed food to the waiting customer.

Building a customer base for restaurants 

When placing an order using Contactless Takeaway, customers will need to register with their name a phone number. They will become members of the restaurant’s loyalty programme and earn points for their order (which can be customised by the restaurant). The points accumulated can be exchanged for a discount or perks like a free dessert, encouraging customers to return and order again.

With safe-distancing measures becoming the new normal even after the CMCO is lifted, restaurants can anticipate their dine-in capacity to be halved. They will have to increase their takeaway sales to make up for the loss in dine-in sales, and Contactless Takeaway will make this process much faster and easier to manage. As the country grapples with a recession, consumers will be more selective and cautious with their spending; so incentivising customers to return will help restaurants to ensure sustainable and repeated business.

Easy Interface

iCHEF, having worked closely with F&B businesses for close to a decade understand how running a restaurant can be very demanding. They realize that having an easy to use interface is crucial to make F&B owners lives easier. With the new interface, iCHEF has made easy to delete a takeaway order that has been completed. Once the order is done restaurant staff can now drag the complete order to the trash bin or simply swipe left. 

“iCHEF’s goal has always been to support small F&B businesses,” says company international director Jay Teo. “When the pandemic happened, we knew that these businesses would be the most affected because they don’t have large reserves to fall back on. At the same time, they need to be able to continue their business to have a fighting chance, so if we can lighten their load and allow them to manage their business more efficiently, we will do what we can.”

---

Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.



Planning your F&B outlet reopening after the pandemic

The pandemic has caused many F&B businesses to close their doors, but there will be a day when you can fully reopen. The government is starting to explore what the new normal will look like and having a well-documented, thoughtful plan in place ahead of time can help bring customers in and let you start collecting revenue faster when the time comes. Here are steps to planning a reopening. 

1. Take account of what you’ve learned about your business.

During the MCO, you may have time to observe and review the new normal your business will reenter.

What did you learn about your business, your employees, and your customers during this pandemic? What did you learn from other F&B businesses that leverage on MCO? Are there new measures you could put in place to improve your business? New products you’d like to offer?

Take account of these learnings and find ways to improve when you reopen. You may come out of this quarantine with a new business model, or you may just make a few tweaks to your current one. Taking time to reflect and deciding how your business can evolve is important to do first as it will dictate your plan for reopening.

2. List your areas of focus.

Once you have considered some of the things you’ve learned and changes you might make, it’s time to organize your reopening more concretely. The easiest way to do this is by breaking it down into focus areas that are relevant to your business.

The area you pick should be specific to your business, such as:

1. Finances

2. Supply chain

3. Location

4. Delivery and logistics

5. Workforce

6. Customers

3. Create a reopening plan for each area of focus.

Your plan of focus should be determined by the way you plan to carry on your business going forward. Here is a format you can follow and questions you can ask yourself to get started.

Finances:

Detail what financial assets you have today, the business cash flow, and the total amount you have in the bank to restart your business. From there you can calculate how much money you need to reopen. You can also estimate into smaller line items (area of focus)  to show how much you will need to finance each area for your business to fully operate. If the numbers aren’t matching up, from there you can decide where you can potentially make cuts or changes or find funding that will work for your business.

Here are some questions about your finances you can ask yourself to guide you through:

1. Do I expect the cost of any of my line items to change due to MCO?

2. How will I document my expenses moving on if I need to report my finances to the bank?

3. If I decide to change my business model, what kind of revenue changes can I expect when reopening?

Supply Chain: 

You will need to prepare details on how much supply you’ll need for your business to reopen. Will you need new supplies? What are the logistics of getting those supplies? You might have to consider that your suppliers may have problems with production, resulting in a shortage You will have to have a backup plan just in case you can’t get all of the supplies you need in time for your business to reopen.

Here are some questions about the supply chain you can ask yourself to guide you through:

1. Do I have to change any suppliers for my stock when I reopen? 

2. What is the next best alternative if I can’t get the items?

3. How far in advance will I contact my supplier for orders of my stock?

4. Is there any new plan in getting stock that I should take into consideration?

Location:

If your business has multiple outlets, you will need to come up with a reopening plan specifically for each of your outlets, because different outlets might have different rules when it comes to reopening standard operating procedures. 

Here are some questions about your location you can ask yourself to guide you through:

1. Are there any changes to be made to the outlet or the way my outlet is set up to ensure the safety of my customers and employees?

2. Is there any refinement I want to make to my outlet to adapt to a new procedure or business model?

3. What signs or notices do I need to post in front of my outlet?

Delivery & Logistics: 

When you plan to reopen you would probably need to document any new plan of action moving forward. This is important if you are making changes to your business that will depend more heavily on delivery and takeaways to reach your customers when you reopen. 

Here are some questions about delivery & logistics you can ask yourself to guide you through:

1. Does reopening depend on allowing a new way to reach customers?

2. What change in revenue can I expect?

3. Are there new customer expectations I should set around the way we do delivery and takeaways?

Workforce:

During MCO you might have to lay off your employees or give them unpaid leave. Here you should plan for rehiring because it will take some time to hire or bring your employees back to your physical location. You’ll need to develop a plan and conduct training so that employees will be familiar with a new standard operating procedure moving forward with your reopening. When you create a plan around your workforce, take into consideration recommendations from Majlis Keselamatan Negara guidelines on safe reopening. 

Here are some questions about the workforce you can ask yourself to guide you through:

1. What equipment (e.g., masks, physical barriers, gloves, thermometers) do I need to provide to ensure my employees are safe?

2. What procedures and protocols (e.g., temperature taking, hand washing) will I have in place to make sure employees are safe?

3. If my employee doesn’t want to come back to work, or can’t due to illness, what will my policy be?

 Customers:

You will need to think about your customer’s safety and managing their expectations. The government has given a relaxed MCO last week that allows people to dine in with certain regulations. Following the regulation would be crucial when it comes to maintaining social distancing when you plan to reopen. Keep in mind what best practices make sense for your business beyond what is required. From there you can make a communication plan to tell your customers what to expect. You can also communicate with any changes in your business model such as new product offerings or new ways customers can engage with you.

Here are some questions about customers you can yourself to guide you through:

1. What new policies do I need to put in place to ensure customer and employee safety?

2. Are there new ways my customers can engage with my business under new regulations?

4. Team assembly to help you with the reopening.

It takes a village to make a successful opening. It is also the case for reopening and you don’t have to do it alone. Assemble your team members to manage each area of focus to carry out the plan successfully. You can schedule virtual meetings regularly to discuss progress to reopen your business.

Anticipate that some things will change once CMCO is completely lifted as the government learn more. The best you can do is pivot as you learn more and keep your business and your team agile. Having a well-documented, thoughtful plan in place ahead of time can help open your doors and start collecting revenue faster when the time comes.

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Our community understands because it's full of F&B owners just like you. You're welcome to be part of it.

To help the industry grow and flourish, we created a Whatsapp chat group for F&B owners in Malaysia.  
The only criteria to join is having an F&B outlet that is already opened and operational.

We will be sharing more ideas on how to tackle this situation, be the first to know! 

Dina Wan is the Content and Community Specialist at iCHEF Malaysia . She also manages Malaysia iCHEF Club a growing community of F&B owners in Malaysia- organising events and online newsletter. She has over 10 years of experience in the F&B industry as a Pastry chef and you can find her baking and cooking up a storm in her tiny kitchen making food and desserts for her friends when she is not working.

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