La Brigade De Véro - From 40% to 28% Food Cost in a Few Months
Take a look behind the scenes of the collaboration between La Brigade De Véro and Melba.
Romain Roques, Managing Director & Co-founder of La Brigade de Véro, gave us a few minutes of his precious time to recount on the history of the company, its offerings and the beginnings of its collaboration with Melba.
The creation of a new food offer
It all started when Véronique decided to lose weight. She started looking for a diet that suited her, with good products and few constraints, but she couldn't find anything!
She started cooking for herself, one thing led to another, and her friends asked her if she could also cook for them. At the end of 2016, Véro and her son Arthur thought it might be a good idea to launch a company offering healthy and balanced dishes. After much discussion, they launched the business in March of 2017 with Véro's husband and Romain.
At the very beginning, customers came to pick up their meals directly in Alès from her kitchen. After some time, the team started to deliver to the customers with their own cars.
With an explosion of requests and growing success La Brigade De Véro decided to use Chronofresh, a French national delivery service, to deliver to its customers all over France.
A healthy menu that changes regularly
The Brigade De Véro proposes diet rebalancing. Every week, they put together a balanced menu, which is then proposed to their customers. Each customer can personalize their menu (without meat, veggie, fish...) and then La Brigade de Véro sends them their meals of the week.
All the dishes are home-made and the products come from local produce. One of the great specificities of La Brigade De Véro: There's no recipe catalog and the dishes change regularly.
La Brigade De Véro positions itself as a traditional competitor to the "classic" box diets. The latter offer meals between 1200 and 1400 calories per day, whereas the menus proposed by La Brigade De Véro are around 1100 calories. The advantage of this is that you can still keep some small pleasures, such as a glass of wine or a square of chocolate!
An online restaurant management tool
Mid-2018, with an exponential growth, La Brigade De Véro had to manage all their supplies and to structure their recipe and food costs. The team were therefore looking for a solution to improve this part and accompany its development.
Romain chose Melba and proposed the tool to his team, who tested and adopted it immediately. From there, the team started to improve its margin. They had a more precise idea of what a menu costed and managed to simplify their order management.
La Brigade De Véro has gone from 40% to 28% material ratio, which has allowed the purchasing department to be radically re-structured. For Romain, whether with Melba or another tool, it is certain that the results would have improved. He knows, however, that Melba played a huge role in this.
Romain and his team utilize a specific feature on Melba: to be able to search directly in the application for the Ciqual food composition tables, as well as the nutritional values, and to be able to import them directly onto the ingredients list.
This traceability module is accessible through Melba's pro plan and can save you hours of work!