Foodco Group

Foodco Group is the parent company for Muffin Break and Jamaica Blue franchises across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Asia and the United Arab Emirates. They have been operating for nearly 30 years in Australia and aim to provide fresh handmade food and coffee daily.

Shane Middleton, Food Development Specialist at Foodco (including Muffin Break and Jamaica Blue), is responsible for recipe development and testing, seasonal menu creation, food costings and maintaining nutritional data for all recipes including KJs & allergen information as per legislative requirements.

In this interview, he talks about how Foodco comply with legislation, reduce cost and increase customer loyalty!

With developing multiple recipes for each brand at a time, we needed an in-house solution to control our nutritional data that would streamline our processes and reduce both costs as well as time frames that come with having these outsourced externally.

We were looking for an in-house solution for our recipe nutritionals and had looked or trialled a few others. The Nutritics platform had the best usability of all that were trialled and was the easiest and clearest to navigate.

Nutritics information was passed onto our Jamaica Blue General Manager who in turn sent this onto us in the product team.

As mentioned previously, the ease of use was a major factor when evaluating our options. The system was easy to use with clear and intuitive dashboards. We needed something that we could all pick up very quickly and begin using with minimal exposure and training.

The ingredient database and system flexibility to create and add my own specific ingredients. Benefits from this are the time it saves me when looking up a generic ingredient like a banana or tomato, when inputting recipes and also the accuracy of entering my own specific ingredients like a specific brand of mayonnaise.

The software enables us to be nimbler when complying with Australian standards to have all nutritional information visible and available to customers. From turning around nutritionals on a new recipe fast to updating necessary changes to nutritionals that may arise from recipes changing due to product supply issues etc.

Firstly this has improved our efficiencies for recipe development by reducing time frames in the development process to outsource nutritionals which can add a great deal of time to the process.
Secondly it has reduced our cost in the same way as it can be quite costly to outsource multiple recipes to have nutritional data completed for each.

Very, the team always answer any queries we may have straight away. We also had a lot of training and support on the use of the system from the team at the start to ensure we were all up to speed.

It was great, really fast and simple, we received a lot of training and the team were very helpful.

I guess the length and functionality of the free trial period to test the system and freely investigate whether this was right for us was above my expectations.

Also, the ease of use of the software was above what I had expected.

We are aiming to initially finish fine tuning our processes using the system and then from there work toward building our own ingredients database further in the system and moving over to using Nutritics as our food cost database tool also.