Every week in the Hospo Reset Newsletter, we share a product or service that’s caught our eye – for kitchen & beverage management, staffing, facilities management, marketing and overall productivity. This is not an endorsement, please do your own assessment of suitability for your business. Here’s the list so far, and it’s updated every month.
Food, Menus and Kitchen Management
Restoke manages back of house functions like recipes, menus, ordering, work lists, staff training, plus health & safety.
Recipe Software – all the options, from free to expensive.
The Menu Company create stylish and robust menu covers for every type of business.
Great Wrap – the cling wrap that’s completely compostable. Eliminate the miles of plastic Gladwrap you use every year!
KBOX – add ghost kitchen menus to your existing facilities, using tested brands, recipes and delivery support.
Yume Food – buy surplus or near use-by-date food from wholesalers through an online marketplace. Cut waste and reduce costs.
Food Costing Scales, pay for themselves in weeks and only a few hundred dollars. Prepare for surprises, for you and the cooks.
Cutlery Polishers. Why have staff doing this for hours?
Sticky Dates, prints small low-cost date labels, using a phone app for the design work.
iAuditor system is brilliant for making them work (without paper) – kitchen ops, safety, hygiene, cleaning and more. They’ve just shared lots of ready-made hospitality systems – try them.
Jolt – software on smartphones & tablets for restaurants to create team accountability, digital food safety compliance, and boost employee performance.
SafeFoodPro combines temperature monitoring with checklists and workflow, run from your phone or laptop.
Spotlight App – real-time reporting of breakdowns, hazards or incidents.
Coffee and Beverage Management
Flow Coffee – tracking every cup you serve to ensure maximum quality, with an analytics dashboard to watch for improvement.
Eversys espresso machines – awesome equipment that grinds, tamps, preps milk and dispenses. Goodbye barista?
Design and Facility Management
Noise Reduction – treatments to reduce the noise in your venue. Check these products and also these.
Event Management & Booking Systems – for Restaurant and Function Venues
Reduction Revolution specialise in low-energy lighting and equipment, plus devices to measure consumption and identify saving points. Helpful people.
Staff Management
Rostering & Staff Management Systems – more than a dozen options.
Daily Planner for Hospitality Leaders, lots of value in a professionally-designed paper system.
JobAdder is recruitment software, to track applicants, manage resumes and handle communication. Many of you are larger than you realise with your HR needs – this makes management much more professional.
Free Safety Posters – excellent collection. easy to edit. Print or share online.
FoundU’s free Job Listing & Applicant Tracking service, part of their impressive staff management system.
Spoonfed – Set up Short Training & Operations Content In Your Venue, to Run Every Day. So simple and effective.
Kudoboard. – create online greeting, birthday and farewell cards, everyone can add comments and photos. Great for staff farewells or special occasions.
Glitterbug Liquid – safety training that will liven up your hygiene sessions. Video shows how it’s used…
Marketing and Promotion
BurstSMSfor years – group SMS messaging to lists of customers, staff, managers etc. Easy, cheap and 95% of texts are opened.
Third Place Rents Out your Rooms & Tables – got space for meetings? This clever service lists your venue and promotes it…
Gift Cards from NowBookIt – solve Christmas & Birthday problems + boost sales.
TalkBox – use your customer data to create targeted, personalised communications based on their behaviour, automatically.
WaitList.me – a good option if waitlisting & queue management is not in your booking app. Not cool when busy places don’t offer this…
Productivity, Tech and Online Tools
Linktree to add more than one link to your Instagram or social media profile – free and easy. Also good for email signatures – here’s how I use it: linktr.ee/KenBurgin
BackBlaze – continually backs up your hard drive to the cloud, ‘cos actual hard drives often fail. I’ve been using this for years.
Asana for managing shared projects like new menus, renovations, meeting agendas and event planning (good explainer).
GloriaFood – put online ordering on your own website, so you can avoid 3rd-party apps. Integrates with delivery and payment services.
Loom for recording your screen and adding voice-over. Eg how to fill out a daily report form, give menu training, explain important parts of the staff manual or daily systems.
JustWatch to find the streaming location of favourite movies and TV series.
TimeStamp Camera app – adds a time & location watermark when you take photos & videos. Useful for insurance claims and recording errors.
Calendly – share your calendar availability for people to meet or call you, and automatically confirm. Eliminate the hassle of back-and-forth messages – the free version will be all you need.
🤚 Check the weekly discoveries on Hospo Reset – information & inspiration for restaurant, cafe & foodservice operators.