Top five benefits of moving your school canteen online
Managing a school canteen takes time, effort, and resources. From managing inventory to preparing meals to counting change, many time-consuming tasks need to be completed daily.
If you want to save time, you could consider getting your services organised with an online canteen ordering system like Flexischools.
Here are five ways an online canteen system can benefit your school:
1. Less wastage
With Flexischools, parents can pre-order food from your school canteen via the Flexischools app, so you get lunch orders in advance.
This means you will know exactly:
Which groceries to buy, and
How many of each meal to prepare.
If fresh produce is bought in the right quantities, there’s less food, if any, to throw away, which can save money and reduce wastage.
2. More control for your canteen
It can be difficult for canteens to track which meals and days are popular.
But with an online canteen ordering system, you can see:
On which days kids buy more meals,
On which days hot meals are more popular,
Which menu items are popular, and
Which menu items need to be replaced.
This data will help your canteen convenor better manage and promote the canteen.
3. Faster check-out
An online tuckshop lets parents order and pay for their child’s lunch in advance. This speeds up school canteen queues because canteens can prepare the food in the morning and have it ready to distribute to students at lunch.
Shorter canteen queues could potentially minimise staffing requirements as you won’t need extra staff to monitor kids in the queue.
4. Less admin
A manual system requires a lot of extra work, like monitoring:
Special dietary requirements,
Menus and pricing,
Recording the transactions, and
Counting change and managing payments.
With Flexischools’ secure online canteen ordering system:
It’s easy to add dietary classifications such as ‘gluten free’ ‘dairy free’ or ‘vegan’ to menu items so you can accommodate kids’ dietary requirements,
You can make edits to your canteen menu, operating days, and special food services, via Flexischools’ Service Management Portal.
You can communicate changes to menu items and prices to parents via the Flexischools communications feature,
There is no need to count change, and
Canteens can view daily reporting, historical data, future orders, and financials at the click of a button.
5. More control for the parents
With Flexischools, parents can choose what their kids eat from your canteen because they can order the meals themselves.
School canteens can use Flexischools’ healthy eating feature to assign a traffic light rating (green, amber, red) to each menu item. This allows parents to easily select healthy meals when ordering their child’s lunch or recess through the Flexischools app.
Flexischools also lets parents securely pay for their transactions, so they don’t have to send money with their kids. This prevents problems like kids forgetting or losing their money.
Flexischools is trusted by over 1,600 schools in Australia. Isn’t it time you made the switch too? Complete this quick form to get started.
Want to learn more about Flexischools? Click here.