How LoveKind Manages Their Hospitality Portfolio with MarketMan

LoveKind is an incubator for small businesses in the hospitality industry with a focus on wellness, helping brands in their portfolio scale, grow, and thrive. They manage four restaurants in Toronto: Calii Love, BFF, ELXR, and the newly opened Nava Social.

Each of these restaurants have their own supply chains, inventories, and business models. They adopted MarketMan as an inventory management tool to help manage their businesses as they scale.

Managing separate locations with separate workflows

For the operations team, managing different suppliers and workflows was inefficient and rife with complications. On the accounting side, analyzing costs from four different restaurants was labor-intensive and slow. And, within each restaurant, there was no standard process for inventory management. Dan Cooper, Director of Supply Chain Management at LoveKind described it as a “mess.”

They needed a way to bring their brands under one roof, to reduce the time spent and money lost trying to manage everything separately. LoveKind looked to MarketMan to oversee separate supply chains in one platform. “Being able to manage the supply chains for four restaurants in one place is super valuable,” said Dan Cooper.

MarketMan was attractive to LoveKind because “it seemed like the best all-encompassing tool out there.” They could use it to synergize their brands, improve visibility across teams, and cut down on the time spent counting inventory for all interested parties.

Improving inventory ordering for store managers

Managing four different restaurants from the top-down is no small feat. LoveKind needed a solution to not only improve their supply chain management, but the operations within each restaurant as well. Store managers did not have a consistent process to order and track their inventories: in fact, one restaurant would order from 26 different vendors, making inventory management a huge time sink for managers.

Beyond that, the restaurants were owned by different people, so dealing with suppliers from a top-down perspective was even more difficult. When LoveKind switched to MarketMan, they were able to immediately rein in their inventory ordering processes across their brands, which is crucial for LoveKind as they scale their portfolio. The result for store managers is one to two hours saved per week over what they otherwise had to do manually, like counting inventory and measuring food waste.

Streamlining operations across teams

The reporting functions of MarketMan had an immediate impact on operations, enabling different teams to work together from the same source of information. For example, menu development, operations, and accounting can all access the same information from the same platform, and use it to make effective, data-driven decisions.

According to Dan Cooper, “The Menu Development team can use the tool to come up with new items and ideas, and then the Supply Chain team can log into the same platform and discuss what parts are too expensive and what we need to source for it.” Having all this information in one place helps streamline operations and expedite problem solving.

“MarketMan helps different teams work together to solve problems. If one restaurant is having discussions as to why their food costs were so high, each team can go into the MarketMan platform and see why.”

Improved accounting practices that save money and time

MarketMan’s integration with LoveKind’s accounting team greatly improved their ordering and invoice scanning, while reducing up to five hours per week in labor. By consolidating information into one platform, the accounting team can measure profitability of each restaurant in one fell swoop.

“Our locations do bi-monthly inventories…multiple departments are able to have visibility on these inventories. Managers have an easy tool to enter their counts, their operations teams can track them from an easily accessible place, and our accounting department uses those inventory counts to create their profit/loss statements every month,” said Dan Cooper.

Saving time, combined with accurate inventory information, helps the accounting team better control the food costs, food waste, and the cost of goods sold. This is especially helpful during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which LoveKind (and many other restaurants) experienced skyrocketing costs due to lockdowns.

“It helps different teams work together to solve problems. If one restaurant is having discussions as to why their food costs were so high, each team can go into the MarketMan platform and see why.”

LoveKind is relying on MarketMan’s ease of use and accessibility to help them scale as their portfolio expands with more restaurants and retail brands. To learn more about how MarketMan can help you streamline your restaurant’s operations, request a demo today.