Restaurant Operator

In the high-pressure environment of a professional kitchen, communication is the invisible thread that prevents a service from unraveling into chaos. A "call and response" system ensures the front-of-house servers and the back-of-house line cooks remain perfectly synchronized; when a lead expeditor calls out an order, the collective "heard" from the kitchen staff confirms that every component, from the medium-rare steak to the allergy-sensitive salad, is being tracked in real-time. Beyond the verbal, non-verbal cues like a simple nod or the strategic placement of a physical ticket are essential for maintaining a rhythmic flow during the "rush," turning a group of individuals into a singular, cohesive unit. For QSR and fast casual employees, there's help in the communication department. Zenzap is an app allowing communication that can be controlled by management and works between staff members. In this podcast, Editor Mandy Detweiler talks to Guy Weiss, co-founder and CEO of Zenzap, and Shawn Walchef, owner of Cali BBQ in San Diego. Walchef uses Zenzap at Cali BBQ. "I think one of the most important things for a modern restaurateur, a modern business owner is to have tight communications with your teams, knowing that there's so many different apps that you need to be on. You have to make sure that the most important communication that you do with your management, that you do with your front of the house staff, back of the house staff happens seamlessly and preferably it happens in a secure environment," he shared during the podcast. Weiss points out that when an employee leaves the company, he or she can be removed from the app so as not to take proprietary information with him or her. "I think that onboarding and offboarding is a huge challenge," Weiss said. "And when using group chats, it's just impossible to onboard and offboard, as Shawn mentioned. And there is also risk from a business perspective. Think about one of your cooks, a chef, is leaving and going on his journey. And he's basically taking all of your IP, all of your recipes, all of your knowledge. "You can leverage it in somewhere else because he's still a part of the group chats. And even if you ask him nicely to leave those group chats, all the data until that point of time stays with him, back to his private cloud, and he's there forever. ... I think to top the productivity side of it is you will never open many group chats for different contexts, even with the same team, because it's already overwhelming." To learn more about Zenzap and how it can help your restaurant, listen to the podcast in its entirety.