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Every business wants to grow its sales. But for restaurants, driving growth often requires more than just improving typical operations like food preparation and meal service. You might be confined by the size of your space, how many tables you have, and how quickly you can turn over those tables. Some tools, like reservation and table management systems, help with the day to day, but they don’t lift the ceiling on how many meals you can serve in total.
As a restaurant owner, you’re probably also looking for new ways to market yourself, reach more customers, better utilize your kitchen and staff, and increase sales when resources and real estate are limited. Delivery is a great answer to these challenges. But managing the logistics and a delivery staff can be a headache.
Caviar, Square’s restaurant delivery service, makes it easy. Take, for example, Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen in San Francisco. It opened as a pop-up in 2011, using Square Point of Sale at a food truck park for a few hours once a week. Soon, its popularity afforded it the chance to open a brick-and-mortar location. The restaurant quickly became a go-to destination in the city’s hip Mission district, with crowds forming at both lunch and dinner for one of the deli’s coveted 12 tables. Business was booming, but Wise Sons wasn’t ready to open another location — especially with San Francisco’s sky-high rents and limited space. Looking for another service to grow its sales, Wise Sons chose Caviar.
Since being on Caviar, Wise Sons has been able to bring in new customers and grow its sales — without increasing overhead. What are some of the key takeaways for managing a restaurant successfully? We caught up with owner Evan Bloom on what he’s learned.
Drive more sales.
“Our restaurant is constantly busy,” says Evan. “We don’t have the time to deal with the logistics nightmare that is delivery.”
Since Caviar takes care of the entire delivery process — dispatching a courier to pick up and deliver the food when ready — Wise Sons doesn’t have to navigate routes or send staff out for deliveries when the kitchen gets busy. An easy-to-use app notifies the kitchen of incoming orders, allowing the restaurant to simply add new orders to the existing queue.
“Since we started offering delivery through Caviar, we’ve seen a huge increase in sales. We’ve become better at our takeout ops as well since we’re now used to the increased volume of orders,” Evan says. “And something that sounds as simple as folding napkin rolls, for example, we never had the time to do that before Caviar. It’s great to get time back to do those essential tasks.”
Manage orders and operations.
Restaurant owners know that being prepared is paramount for operations. Unexpected large orders can throw a business owner for a loop and cause issues with staffing and stocking. “Caviar has helped us make better use of our staff,” says Evan. “We get a lot of large orders, and having a heads up on pre-orders gives my staff something to do for prep work during downtime.”
With Caviar, customers can place scheduled orders up to a week in advance, which enables restaurants to make efficient planning and inventory decisions. Whether restaurants need to prepare food for a large catering order or an individual meal, Caviar makes it easy for them to plan ahead and allocate resources accordingly.
Marketing matters.
Maintaining a website can take a lot of time and money — especially for businesses that have ever-changing menus. And most delivery services just provide the names of restaurant specials without giving customers a glimpse of what they can expect from each dish. When Caviar partners with a restaurant, it helps the restaurant market itself to new customers by creating a customized marketing page in the app and on the web.
Wise Sons’ menu pages on Caviar highlight beautiful pictures of every dish, from its legendary Reuben to the challah French toast and matzo ball soup. This helps Wise Sons market not only its business, but also each individual menu item — because we all know that people really eat with their eyes.
Whether you start as a pop-up or choose to open several locations, restaurants of all sizes can grow sales with Square and Caviar.
Learn how to offer delivery with Caviar from your restaurant today.
