Better service, happier customers: How home-grown F&B businesses boost bottom line with tech edge

When local bubble tea chain PlayMade was getting ready to launch its green grape and white peach oolong series last month, it turned to a powerful ally for help: its generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) tool.

With a few prompts from the marketing team, the tool produced tasty descriptions of the drinks, social media captions and other content, all in a few minutes.

This was a far cry from the past, when the team and co-founder Amanda Poo, 35, herself racked their brains over the marketing materials for its new products every four to six weeks.

She recalls: “I spent days every month doing research to brainstorm trendy catchphrases, checking the materials’ spelling and grammar, changing the images’ colour, and making sure everything fit our fun brand voice.

“Now, with the Gen AI software, the team can do all the work on their own, and quickly. I don’t worry that an employee might get our brand voice wrong when I’m on leave, and I have more time to focus on things like our customer service, and market insights and customer data to predict demand for new drinks.”

PlayMade adopted the solution with grant support from the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) through the Gen AI Sandbox initiative, which helps small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) leverage Gen AI in their businesses.

Gen AI is just one example of how Ms Poo and her cousin-in-law and co-founder Crystal Wee, 38, have used digital tools to solve problems and realise their dream of scaling their business.

It now spans 26 outlets in Singapore and three in Malaysia. 

When they set up PlayMade in 2017, their work was tedious. “We were dependent on manual processes,” Ms Poo says. 

With customers needing time to choose from many options, queues snaked, repelling people who were unwilling to wait.

Outlets reported their inventory via different platforms, requiring tedious compilation, and texted and called suppliers on their own to place orders. 

Ms Poo adds: “We didn’t have any oversight until we got the invoices.”

Moreover, finance managers took up to five days monthly to organise sales data from the different outlets for reports, slowing analyses.

“We couldn’t have scaled with these manual processes,” she says.

When PlayMade opened its fourth outlet in 2018, Ms Poo and Ms Wee decided it was time to digitalise. The firm purchased self-service kiosks to automate ordering, later switching to hybrid systems that both patrons and staff can use. 

During peak hours, customers can self-order through the hybrid system at the service counter while staff concentrate on making drinks. During non-peak periods, employees complete orders on their side of the system, maintaining customer engagement with a personal touch. 

The founders opted for this technology after careful market research. It was also a pre-approved solution found on IMDA’s Chief Technology Officer-as-a-Service (CTO-as-a-Service), so PlayMade received grant support for half the cost.

Without grant support, Ms Poo notes, it would have taken the team longer to roll out the kiosks, and they may not have been able to implement the kiosk at all outlets, as that would have been very costly.

“The grants also enabled us to customise much more,” she adds. “Otherwise, we would have taken up off-the-shelf solutions, which would not have solved the problems we had.”

The upgrade cut PlayMade’s ordering times by 25 per cent in two weeks and errors by 75 per cent. This helped them raise sales by 15 per cent to 20 per cent at each outlet, enabling PlayMade to recoup its cost in three to four months. 

Complementing the kiosks, PlayMade’s mobile app has also helped speed up service. The founders note that more orders are being placed via the app since they soft launched it in March this year. 

To improve backend processes, PlayMade invested in an inventory management solution. “Now, outlets order via the system, management approves, and the system alerts suppliers automatically. 

This gives us oversight and cuts out all the calls and texts, improving our supplier relationships. It can also forecast supply needs based on past sales and more,” Ms Poo says. 

The tools have also replaced the time-consuming task of manually tracking inventory and sales across outlets, says operations manager Darren Tan, 32, who has been with PlayMade for nearly two years and has witnessed significant changes since the new tools were implemented. 

With the business intelligence software synced to PlayMade's digital kiosks, digital ordering and inventory, Mr Tan explains that managers can make quicker decisions with real-time data and manage operations centrally.

He adds: “This centralised platform has also reduced our time spent on routine tasks and enhanced our ability to predict rather than having to react to real-time changes and needs across all outlets.”

With the software instantly producing sales reports across outlets and time, finance managers can now focus on analysis.

“Anyone can use the software, so we’re also no longer reliant on some managers to prepare reports to get insights even if people go on holiday or quit,” Ms Poo says.

The data analysis informs research and development and business decisions. She explains: “We can quickly see which drinks do well, put consistent bestsellers on the permanent menu, and work on flavours likely to be popular based on past data.”

Still, some ground staff resisted the systems. To motivate and incentivise them, Ms Wee designed mini challenges with rewards, like supermarket vouchers for the first five stores to finish stock-taking using the inventory system.

And if there are issues, employees can contact vendors directly for trouble-shooting via a hotline.

With such change management, employees were more motivated to give the systems a try and have now realised these solutions made their work much easier.

Like PlayMade, food firm QuantFood has thrived with digitalisation.

Its four founders, friends who moved from China to Singapore over a decade ago, sold poke-like Sichuan food bowls under an online food and beverage (F&B) brand, Chengdu Bowl, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

With a 60 per cent repeat purchase rate, they have since opened three physical outlets.

Digitalisation was always the plan, with the founders holding science and engineering degrees, and coming from e-commerce and other tech-heavy sectors. 

As they searched for the right tools, their problems reinforced the need for robust digital solutions.

“At our Chengdu Bowl outlets, the cashiers were taking orders one by one. It was slow, so if the queue was long, people would leave,” says co-founder Sabrina Deng, 34.

“We also didn’t have any easy way of consolidating sales data, so we weren’t able to analyse and make good use of it.”

This year, they installed self-service kiosks, on top of the inventory management and business intelligence systems implemented last year. 

As these solutions were part of the Connected Business Suite, a pre-approved solution offered on IMDA’s CTO-as-a-Service, the company received grant support covering most of the cost. 

Self-ordering addressed the difficulty of finding more service staff to take orders, especially during peak hours, and helped reduce manpower needs by 20 per cent, freeing up employees for tasks such as stock-taking.

It has also slashed ordering times by 40 per cent and raised revenue by 20 per cent. 

With sales, stock and other data centralised in the business intelligence and inventory management software, their firm improved its planning.

For example, if a certain topping or meat is chosen more often at a particular store, it can ensure enough supply to meet demand.

“With data analytics, we can easily see how new dishes perform and decide whether to keep them,” Ms Deng says. “We can even identify if a dish is popular at one outlet but not at another, which may indicate quality issues. It also helps us determine if we need to tweak our marketing, and act on other similar insights.”

With customer data from the outlets, including contact information collected from the kiosks and the firm’s mobile app, it has honed its customer relationship management by tailoring marketing campaigns, such as sending discount vouchers to encourage return visits.

QuantFood is exploring using Gen AI to write dish descriptions, notes Ms Deng. “In future, AI could also suggest fusion creations, healthy meals and weekly menus for customers, and even, with data from the F&B sector, predict the next trendy ingredient or food.”

PlayMade and QuantFood plan to digitalise further, for instance, to streamline staff training across outlets or use AI to determine new menu additions based on customer preferences. 

As Ms Deng says: “With digitalisation, you can save time and effort, see clearly how your business is doing and what to do to improve it, and power up your growth.”

Learn about CTO-as-a-Service here.