Assessing food ordering demand is the art of balancing variables. It is the weather forecasting of the food industry, combining seasonal patterns with short-range predictions against a background of longer-term trends. And of course, the weather changes how people eat and how the industry orders. So if you can forecast the weather you’re already a step ahead.
Food ordering is about to get smarter, and not just because meteorologists are getting better at their jobs. At the moment the industry leans too heavily on boilerplate orders, static lists that take little or no account of the rhythms and dynamics of FTG demand. Imagine if there was someone on your team who could calculate a customer's optimum order based on order history, seasonality, bestsellers, promotions and, yes, the weather.
Anticipating your customers’ ordering needs allows them to perform better. Their gain is your gain. You could be nudging them towards better ordering practices, which frees up your customer service agents’ time to develop deeper relationships and talk about other ways to improve business. You could be pitching new products, soliciting feedback or exploring ways to improve your range. And your customer doesn’t have to worry about filling the fridge or running out of stock.
How can intelligent ordering help the food industry?
Intelligent ordering software isn’t a replacement for really great customer-facing staff, nor for your customers’ ordering teams. But it can nudge your customer not only to place orders on time, but also to order the right stock in the right quantities. That frees up time to focus on the nuances of your relationship and helps you work better together.
Making life less chaotic all round is just the baseline benefit of intelligent ordering. But the real magic is software’s ability to pool an array of generic data (like the weather and broader manufacturing trends) and individual company data (such as promotions and order history). That makes placing the right order – on time – a doddle for your customers.
Mezze’s food ordering platform is designed to take the stress out of your customer’s ordering processes. It’s an intelligent assistant that can manage data in an organised way and offer expert suggestions tailor-made for your customer’s location. It makes life easier for your customer by tracking upsells and promotions, offering suggestions and reminders and combining as much data as you can give it to estimate accurate orders with confidence. All of which makes life easier for you.
And Mezze is designed solely for the food industry, so it understands your needs and your market.
What to expect from intelligent data-driven ordering
Imagine a system that could send your customer a reminder that the order cut-off is in an hour’s time. It could generate a template order based on what day of the week it is. It would flag current upsells and promotions, weather patterns in relevant sales areas and events such as bank holidays or festivals. It might spot an anomaly in last year’s ordering data and raise it as a question for the ordering team.
The result is that your customer sees massive efficiency gains, a dramatic reduction in food and packaging waste and a less stressful ordering system. You get a happier customer, plus increased ordering efficiency and confidence. And customers are getting better choices from your brand.
Mezze needs no configuration or technical support to start helping your food manufacturing business move into a new era of efficiency.
To find out more about how Mezze can help deliver intelligent ordering based on your data, drop us an email: hello@mezze.io