goop kitchen launched a clean-eating, delivery-first concept in 2020 and quickly found their place in the market. Over the next 5 years, their footprint expanded to include more delivery and pickup locations, as well as a dine-in location. To support those ambitious growth goals, goop kitchen brought on Dylan Chase, a 20+ year veteran of the national restaurant industry, as Vice President of Operations.
Dylan knew growth was about more than just opening restaurants. It’s about preserving the culture that has defined your success from the start. But the data Dylan needed to protect that culture, guest experiences, and operating standards was scattered across systems and spreadsheets.
Each week, Dylan spent hours pulling labor, food cost, guest satisfaction, and other core performance data from separate systems, including Toast, guest-feedback tools, and COGS dashboards. He then combined it in Excel to create a recap for each location, highlighting the metrics managers needed to focus on to run their restaurants consistently.
Adding to the complexity, the operations, culinary, and training teams all prioritized different views of restaurant performance. For Director of Operations Innovation Meha Upadhyaya, that involved daily cross-restaurant data to spot opportunities to improve performance. Restaurant leaders, meanwhile, needed focused reports on how sales, labor hours, and food costs were trending relative to targets to make fast adjustments.
goop kitchen was using Ingest, a data management and insights platform, for leadership dashboards and daily sales reports. Luckily, Dylan was already familiar with Ingest from his previous mid-market organization. So when he started at goop kitchen, he saw an opportunity to go all in to support the next era of growth. It was clear that Ingest could give goop kitchen the visibility and flexibility to scale its operations while reinforcing the standards behind its success.
“We’re in hypergrowth mode, but growth can’t come at the expense of the culture, systems, and standards that got us here.”
To start, Ingest established additional integrations with goop kitchen’s sales, labor, food cost, ticket time, and guest sentiment tools and consolidated all of the data into a central reporting environment.
For Dylan, Ingest’s company-wide reports now show him which restaurants are on track and where teams may need support. The team built a labor matrix, forecasting system, and sales-per-labor-hour guidelines in Ingest to show how overtime, wages, and staffing during peak and off-peak periods affect performance. By comparing locations with similar sales, Dylan can help local leaders understand what’s driving results and apply effective practices across new restaurants.
At the restaurant level, managers receive targeted reports that translate those company-wide measures into priorities for their own location. They can see how they’re tracking against labor and food-cost targets, then compare results with similar restaurants to identify practices they can adopt.
Every day, Meha receives an automated report on the previous day’s performance across the company and by market, giving her an early view of which restaurants may need attention. Ahead of weekly performance meetings, she filters sales, labor, COGS, and productivity data by restaurant or market to identify cost and productivity trends and pinpoint where the team needs to focus. She can also export specific measures for analysis in external AI tools without pulling and combining reports from multiple systems.
“I’m not going to four different systems to pull a report anymore,” Meha says. “I’m going into Ingest to pull the three metrics I want to see.”
For example, Meha used historical sales and labor data from Ingest to build goop kitchen’s labor model, helping the company budget more accurately and set clear targets for restaurant operators as it grows.
As goop kitchen’s needs evolve, its reporting evolves with them. When Dylan needed a way to compare new restaurants with established locations, Ingest built a custom dashboard showing sales, labor, and food costs side by side.
“Ingest’s reports help us understand whether we’re continuing to build a durable business or moving in the wrong direction.”
With Ingest, goop kitchen has the visibility to scale with greater confidence. With a shared foundation for making informed decisions, goop kitchen teams are strengthening performance and carrying the company’s standards into each new restaurant.
The impact:
Looking forward, goop kitchen plans to build more custom dashboards with Ingest, helping its team track new openings and answer emerging questions as the business grows.
“With Ingest, we are able to see the numbers more clearly and solve problems much faster.”
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