As Best Ugly Bagels has been expanding, they’ve been needing to cope with the increasingly complex logistics of getting their Montreal-style bagels between their main kitchens and 7 outlets across Wellington and Auckland, plus all their different cafe and supermarket customers. It was becoming painfully clear their systems were not up to the task, causing problems both internally and with customers, and it was getting pretty ugly.
Mike Lawrence, Brand Manager at Best Ugly, says constant mix-ups when transferring stock between stores was causing friction and wreaking havoc on its usually fun team vibe.
“We now do much more internal transfers between our stores because Upstock made that so much easier. It’s given staff complete visibility of what's been ordered, which has had a big improvement on staff relationships.”
Mike says in the past they used docket books and email, causing increasing problems keeping track of wholesale orders and deliveries. Writing off missing orders was costing the business time and money so they tried to tackle the problem by creating an in-house app, but it was clunky, very expensive and the uptake by staff was not great.
Upstock changed all that. Mike says “Upstock is really popular with all of the team because it’s so easy to use. Best of all, wholesale buyers now order more and try new products, because the process is easier for them too.”
Now with Upstock, they can see if an order has been received, and if something’s awry they can get onto sorting it out sooner, saving time and dough.
“Our accounts people love that the whole team enjoys using it because it means all the information they need is right there. So we now have proof when an order was received – saving hundreds if not thousands on smoothing over lost stock disputes.”
Mike says the staff are also huge fans of Foodstuffs Integration with Upstock.
“To use the Foodstuffs Exchange it's complex to learn and you almost need an expert doing the work in there. With Upstock connecting directly to Foodstuffs, it’s much better because all our staff can do everything so easily in Upstock. Plus, Upstock does so much more – it's not just for one task, and it works with all our customers.”
More from our Chat with Mike:
Describe your business and your brand. We are essentially a bagel and coffee shop. We do hand-rolled and woodfired Montreal-style bagels. Then we match them with a whole lot of great produce from around New Zealand and serve them up. We also have our own in-house coffee brand called Good Joe Coffee. And we serve it up in kind of a fun energetic way. That kind of creates a little moment for your day. We also supply to cafes around New Zealand and then we do retail packs as well through New Worlds, Farro, Moore Wilson's and a bunch of other specialty stores around the world.
What are the top 3 biggest benefits of using Upstock? So for us, it’s the better visibility of what's been ordered, and less paperwork for our teams, as well. And a better relationship for our staff. We use it when we do internal transfers between the stores, it's made that a lot easier as far as communicating what needs to be done and keeping track of it all.
How has Upstock saved you time? It saves on that ‘after the fact time’ like, “Oh, why didn't this get moved?” or, when we do stocktake at the end of every month, and then it's like, “How come, your food costs were super high?” And it's not only the staff in the stores who need to try and dig back through that, but then it brings in our accounts team because they're trying to reconcile everything. Upstock stops the ‘flow-on effect’ of queries and issues afterwards. Because there’s that transparency over what's happened.
In what ways have you seen your business grow thanks to Upstock? It’s a much more streamlined process for both us and for the customer. And so I think within that if you have a good supplier that you deal with, you tend to push more down that channel. For some of the out of town places that we supply bagels to directly because Upstock’s a really simple process, they've been able to build up their usage of bagels. Which is great for growth.
