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Quels sont les meilleurs logiciels pour la gestion de votre restaurant ?

Les vertus de la digitalisation pour optimiser une affaire ne sont plus à vanter. Que ce soit pour la gestion des ventes, des clients, de la cuisine... l'offre est de plus en plus large et il devient même difficile de s'y retrouver. Pour vous aider à y voir plus clair, voici une sélection des logiciels dédiés à la restauration sélectionnés par nos soins.

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Le blog de melba réunit de nombreux articles pour progresser dans le domaine de la restauration.

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Planning production means deciding before service starts

What planning removes

• Friday overproduction — producing generously "just in case" is the most common way to lose margin in a kitchen. A quantity computed from real orders removes the safety buffer taken out of caution.
• Running out mid-service — the same problem inverted. When the plan accounts for available stock, the shortage shows up the day before, while it can still be fixed.
• Double entry — a plan in a spreadsheet, a production sheet on paper and a separate stock count produce three different truths. One flow produces one.

In a kitchen, most of the expensive decisions are taken the day before: how much to produce, in what order, with which resources, and from what stock. A service that goes wrong is almost always a service that was badly prepared, not badly executed. Production planning turns a forecast of requirements into a dated, costed, achievable manufacturing plan.

That shift changes the nature of the work: you stop producing "what you think is needed" and start producing a quantity derived from customer orders, forecast sales and available stock. What stays with the chef is the organisation — not the arithmetic.

From requirement to production sheet

What a production task carries

• A calculated quantity — derived from orders and forecast sales, netted off the finished-goods stock already available.
• The ingredients to issue — from the recipe and real yield, not theoretical weight. Stock is issued when the task is validated.
• The section and the slot — who produces what, and when. That is what lets you level the load across sections instead of discovering the bottleneck on the morning itself.
• The batch produced — every production creates a batch linked to the batches of raw materials consumed. Without that link, downstream traceability does not hold.

The plan starts from requirements aggregated over a period — a service, a day, a week — and breaks them into tasks. Each task points at a recipe, and therefore at its ingredients, quantities and method. The production sheet printed in the kitchen is the same data in another form.

The breakdown matters more than it looks. An intermediate preparation — a stock, a mother sauce, a dough — is produced once for several dishes. Without sub-production handling it is either forgotten or made twice by two sections that never spoke.

Producing in a central kitchen: allocation

Constraints specific to multi-site production

Measure yields instead of estimating them

• Consolidated purchasing — aggregated production becomes a single purchasing requirement, handled in supplier orders.
• Weigh in and weigh out — once, on a real production run, is enough to fix a recipe for good. A measured yield replaces a coefficient copied out of a manual.
• Compare planned against actual — a systematic gap on one recipe points at a badly calibrated yield, not at carelessness in the kitchen.
• Track losses separately — breakage, unsold stock, production errors. Folding them into food cost hides their cause; isolating them lets you act on the right one.
• Different headcounts per site — total production is a sum, but each parcel has its own quantity. A split error only shows up on delivery.
• Regulatory labelling — product name, use-by date, allergens, batch number. These are generated from the recipe and the production run, not re-typed.
• Downstream traceability — knowing which batch went into which parcel to which site. That is what makes a targeted recall possible instead of a total one — see traceability and hygiene.

As soon as one site produces for others, a second problem joins the first: producing the right quantity is no longer enough, it has to be split. Allocation breaks a single production run into parcels per site, per customer or per delivery point, with the labels and paperwork that go with them.

This is the core of central kitchen and contract catering work, where one recipe travels to diners who share neither headcount, regulatory constraints nor dietary requirements.

Yield — what remains of a raw material after trimming, boning, cooking and chilling — is the most frequently estimated and most rarely measured parameter. A ten-point error on a product bought in volume moves the cost of every dish using it, and therefore the margin reported on each one.

These measurements feed stock tracking directly: a correct yield makes stock variance interpretable, a wrong one makes it unreadable.

Frequently asked questions about production management

Do we need a kitchen screen for this to work?

Do we need complete recipes before starting?

How are intermediate preparations handled?

Does the plan account for stock already produced?

What if actual production differs from the plan?

Can we plan several weeks ahead?

How are diets and allergens handled?

How does production connect to purchasing?

Yes, and it is the standard case in contract catering, where menus are set in cycles. The plan recalculates when headcounts or orders change, without re-entering anything.

Production variants are treated as distinct recipes attached to the same menu. Allergens come up from the recipes and appear on the labels generated at production time, with no re-keying.

The production plan is what makes the purchasing requirement computable. Once tasks are scheduled for the week, the sum of the ingredients needed, less available stock, gives the order to place. This is the reverse of common practice, where you order out of habit and then produce with whatever turned up.

No. Production sheets print, and many businesses start that way. A screen adds real-time validation and capture of the quantities actually produced, but it is not a prerequisite for getting value out of planning.

For the dishes you plan, yes: without a recipe no ingredient quantity can be computed and stock issue stays manual. But there is no point waiting for the whole catalogue — the dishes produced in volume are enough to start.

As products in their own right: they have a recipe, a production run and a stock. A stock made on Monday and used on Wednesday leaves stock when the final dish consumes it, not when it is made.

Yes. The quantity to produce is net of available finished-goods stock. That is exactly what stops you remaking what is already sitting in the walk-in.

You record the quantity actually produced at validation. The gap between planned and actual becomes an indicator: repeated on one recipe, it points at a badly calibrated recipe or an overestimated yield.