Yatta Ramen

After opening 4 own restaurants, Boris Crey, founder of Yatta! Ramen, shares with us the strengths of its concept and the strategies for optimizing operations that make its network successful:

“This concept has emerged among the general public for 3 or 4 years, we were among the first to seize the opportunity to create a channel specializing in this dish that is attracting more and more followers. We have just launched a franchise and want to reach fifteen restaurants by 2025.”

Structuring supplies to guarantee cutting-edge Japanese cuisine and local products

“The dishes we offer require great expertise, broths, pasta, miso... the recipes are very demanding. Faced with this challenge and to support our growth, we have created a production laboratory dedicated to the most complex preparations. The lab makes it possible to centralize our know-how and to share it with our branches and future franchisees. It is a real strength of our concept, franchisees operate an assembly kitchen and form teams that do not need experience in Japanese catering. R&D is done in the laboratory with chefs to invent tasty recipes and also facilitate operations in the field.”

“In this quality approach, delivery and take-away sales, which represent 60% of our turnover, required specific product development. We have created specific packages so that the customer can enjoy hot ramen with perfect pasta cooking. To achieve this, we designed a noodle recipe that lasts the delivery time.”

“Since we started with my two partners, we have been committed to offering local products. We select suppliers in order to guarantee quality and to limit our impact on the environment. The choice of Inpulse is part of this approach, we centralize recipes, suppliers, restaurant orders and laboratory orders. We optimize the various flows, pass on our know-how and limit waste thanks to Inpulse's forecasts.”

Limiting food waste and maximizing profitability

From supplier orders to technical data sheets, everything has been designed in an anti-waste approach at Yatta! Ramen:

“Even though we are a young network, we have developed our CSR policy a lot. When we thought of the Yatta map! Ramen, we tried to minimize waste as much as possible. So all our restaurants offer ramen, donburis and onigiris. The onigiri recipe cards are made from leftover rice and salmon scraps, they are just too thin to be used in other recipes but perfect for onigiri stuffing. In the same logic, we use poultry carcasses for broths...”

“From a business point of view, the more I waste, the less margin I make, so we have every interest in taking concrete actions. We chose Inpulse to optimize our inventory management. We wanted to guarantee all our restaurants optimal management of raw materials, regardless of the experience of our managers. Inpulse's forecasts allow the entire network to place the right supplier orders.”

“We have thus limited our losses significantly, we are below 1% of turnover. And this can be seen in concrete terms in the waste that restaurants produce, we only need one dumpster when the turnover of a restaurant exceeds one million euros.”

Manage the margin as closely as possible

“There are few tools you can rely on for the viability of your business, Inpulse is one of them. We have finer management of our gross margin, we optimize our operations. It is essential to develop your network.”

“Before Inpulse, like many others, we waited for the accounting summary of supplier purchases to determine a margin that was never real... The differences observed at the end of the year between the monthly points and the final margin at the end of the year were significant, sometimes more than 3 points. The fact of moving to 4 restaurants and the launch of a franchise accelerated our need to have an innovative and expert multi-site tool. With Inpulse, we act at several levels: the forecast guarantees the quantities to be ordered, the inventory rate makes the data reliable and the analysis of consumption differences makes it possible to understand what is happening in the field. ”

Simplify the supplier order process to recruit inexperienced profiles

“With Inpulse, everything is centralized, we quickly duplicate our know-how: recipes, mercurial... This allows us to train franchisees and new managers more easily. And we no longer have orders placed by intuition, we can really anticipate needs thanks to Inpulse because the forecasts are adapted to the technical data sheets. ”

“The teams quickly carry out inventories before placing orders with suppliers. These inventories are carried out easily, there are no more errors, this allows restaurant managers to notice the differences, we order much better.”

“It's important for us to have tools that are easy to use. At Yatta! Ramen all types of profiles are welcome, we favor benevolence, management qualities and skills development. We try to do everything we can to retain our talents and develop them, they have an average of 4 years of experience. Our employees start as Multipurpose Employees with no experience (the assembly kitchen allows us to do so), then they move on to Team Leader with supervision of 2 to 3 people, then they evolve to the position of Manager with missions of managing supplier orders via Inpulse and managing personnel planning. And finally, managers switch to Directors as soon as an opportunity allows it, such as the opening of a new restaurant. Our director of the Chambery restaurant has just taken the position of coordinator of the franchisee network, we are proud of their career.”

“What is also very important to promote the development of teams' skills is the establishment of incentives for managers and directors. We take into account reputation, average basket, turnover and now profitability ratios thanks to Inpulse: material costs and loss rates.”

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