Earn €7,500 with Automatic Labels

Writing by hand on containers and vacuum bags may seem like a minor task.

In our restaurant, by switching from handwritten labeling to automatic labeling, we save €7,500 every year.

You can do it too.

Read the article and discover how we achieved this result.

A marker. A bag. A few words: “ragù”, “cream”, “stock”, “sous-vide chicken”, and, at best, the preparation date. Rarely the expiry date.

It is quick, familiar and apparently practical.

It seems free.

But in a professional kitchen, and in a foodservice business, everything has a cost.

Especially repetitive tasks.

Perhaps in your restaurant too, every time a member of the kitchen brigade picks up a vacuum bag, writes the contents by hand, checks the date, adds notes, or corrects unclear handwriting, they are spending working time.

How much does it cost to keep handwriting labels on your prepared ingredients?

In the kitchen, work rhythms are intense: products to blast chill, store, regenerate, move and use across multiple services. Vacuum bags often look the same, and handwritten notes are made in a hurry, with dates that are difficult to read.

How often do you hear these questions in a restaurant kitchen?

“When was this made?”

“What does this label say?”

“How many portions are inside?”

“Why did we make the sauce again if it was already in the refrigerator?”

“Where are the carrots? Who used them all?”

Handwritten labeling can cause errors, wasted time, unexpected issues and stress.

In a kitchen operating with increasingly tight margins, even a few minutes repeated every day turn into hours. And hours become labor costs that could be dedicated to more important activities.

How We Save €7,500 Every Year

At the TNK restaurant, every day, for 300 working days a year, we spent more than one hour writing on bags containing prepared ingredients.

Multiply 300 hours by a labor cost of €25 per hour and you will discover that we were spending €7,500 every year just to write labels.

In a small kitchen. Can you imagine?

Automatic labeling of prepared ingredients has almost eliminated this time.

With the 300 hours saved, we avoided many overtime hours that our chefs would otherwise have had to work.

It was a major advantage, and not only from a financial perspective.

Now every label clearly displays:

• Product description
• Production date
• Shelf life
• Storage location inside the refrigerator

Each vacuum bag is immediately identifiable. Information no longer depends on handwriting, haste or the memory of the person on duty.

Much more convenient, much safer, much better organized.

A significant gain.

Managing Data in the Professional Kitchen

Do you know why we were able to achieve all this?

Because we developed an automatic system that prints labels, uses the data already stored in the recipe sheet and even alerts us when stocks of a prepared ingredient are running low.

This, and much more, is Qadra.

Qadra creates value from business data by connecting POS, orders and kitchen operations.

Prepared ingredient management no longer remains confined to the back kitchen. It becomes part of a broader operational logic involving sales, orders, production, availability, costs and organization.

Now every vacuum bag speaks the same language. Every container is recognizable. Every preparation includes clear information. Every member of the brigade can read and understand it, even if they did not take part in production or have just joined the team.

Why make your staff rewrite the same information every day when it only needs to be entered once into a simple software system?

This saves time and creates order. Two essential elements for efficient business management.

Saving Means Earning

When we opened our restaurant, we tried to reduce expenses, seeing savings only as costs that did not appear on an invoice.

But the real savings are often generated through daily operations: within the processes we can improve and the activities we perform automatically without questioning whether they could be done better, faster and more economically.

The advantage of automatic labels is exactly this: they eliminate part of the repetitive work.

We should take advantage of every available tool to eliminate inefficiencies.

Saving time means reducing costs, and reducing costs means generating indirect profit.

TNK professional kitchen equipment and technologies have been developed precisely with this objective in mind.

Printing a label is useful.

But printing a label within an integrated Ecosystem is far more powerful: it becomes part of the process.

Dimensional consistency, shared design, common technology and integration across every piece of kitchen equipment help make a foodservice business sustainable and profitable.

Would you like to increase your profits with the TNK Ecosystem?

Contact us