Central kitchen, multiple outlets: how to organise dispatch

When production is centralised the bottleneck moves from the kitchen to communication: orders collected in chats, quantities changed verbally, shipments with no receipt confirmation. The outcome is always the same — stock that does not add up and arguments about shortages.

Four steps to keep separate

1. Internal order: what each outlet requests, and by when.
2. Production run: what is actually produced, with quantities and an owner.
3. Shipment: what leaves, to whom and when.
4. Receipt: what arrived, with discrepancies logged by whoever receives it.

Recurring orders and templates

Most internal orders repeat. Templates per outlet and weekday cut errors and save time: you adjust a quantity instead of rewriting the list.

Thresholds that prevent emergencies

• Minimum threshold per item and per outlet, not one global value.
• Critical-stock alerts on semi-finished items, not only finished products.
• A history of shortages, to see which thresholds are genuinely mis-set.

What to measure weekly

Delivery punctuality, shipped-versus-received differences and batch yield. Three numbers: if they degrade together, the problem is production planning, not the individual outlets.