Yatta Ramen

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

"This concept has been emerging with the general public for the past 3 or 4 years, and we were among the first to seize the opportunity to create a chain specializing in this dish, which is winning over more and more fans. We've just launched a franchise and are aiming to have around fifteen restaurants by 2025." 

Structure sourcing to guarantee cutting-edge Japanese cuisine and local produce

"The dishes we offer require a high level of 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 enables us to centralize our know-how and share it with our branches and future franchisees. This is a real strength of our concept, since franchisees operate an assembly kitchen and form teams that don't need any experience of Japanese catering. R&D is done in the laboratory with the chefs to invent tasty recipes and also facilitate operations in the field."

"As part of this quality approach, delivery and takeaway sales, which account for 60% of our sales, required special product development. We created specific packaging so that customers could enjoy a hot ramen with perfectly cooked noodles. To achieve this, we designed a noodle recipe that lasts the time of delivery."

"Ever since my two partners and I set up our business, we've been committed to offering local products. We select suppliers to guarantee quality and limit our impact on the environment. The choice of Inpulse is part of this approach, as 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."

Limit food waste and maximize profitability

From supplier orders to technical data sheets, everything at Yatta has been thought out with an anti-gaspi approach! Ramen : 

"Even though we're a young network, we've developed our CSR policy a lot. When we designed the Yatta! Ramen menu, we tried to minimize waste as much as possible. So all our restaurants offer ramen, donburi and onigiri. The onigiri recipe cards are made from leftover rice and salmon scraps, which are just too thin to be used in the other recipes but perfect for stuffing the onigiri. In the same vein, we use poultry carcasses for the broths..."

"From a business point of view, the more I waste, the less margin I make, so it's in our interest to take concrete action. We chose Inpulse to optimize our inventory management. We wanted to guarantee all our restaurants optimum management of raw materials, whatever the experience of our managers. Inpulse's forecasts enable the entire network to place the right supplier orders."

"As a result, we have significantly reduced our losses to below 1% of sales. And this can be seen concretely in the waste produced by the restaurants: we only need one skip, whereas a restaurant's sales exceed one million euros."

Steering margins more closely

"There are few tools you can rely on to make your business viable, and Inpulse is one of them. We can manage our gross margin more precisely, and optimize our operations. It's essential if you want 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 discrepancies noted at the end of the year between the monthly points and the final year-end margin were substantial, sometimes more than 3 points. Expanding to 4 restaurants and launching a franchise accelerated our need for an innovative, expert multi-site tool. With Inpulse, we act on several levels: the forecast guarantees the quantities to be ordered, the rate of inventories makes the data reliable, and the analysis of consumption discrepancies enables us to understand what's happening on the ground. "

Simplify the supplier order process to recruit inexperienced profiles

"With Inpulse, everything is centralized, so we can quickly duplicate our know-how: recipes, price lists... This makes it easier for us to train franchisees and new managers. And we no longer have orders placed on a hunch, we have real anticipation of needs thanks to Inpulse because forecasts are adapted to technical data sheets. "

"Teams quickly take inventories before placing orders with suppliers. These inventories are done easily, there are no more errors, it allows restaurant managers to see discrepancies, we order much better." 

"It's important for us to have tools that are easy to use. At Yatta! Ramen, all types of profile are welcome; we give priority to benevolence, management qualities and skills development. We do our utmost to retain and develop our talented staff, who have an average of 4 years' seniority. Our employees start out as Multi-skilled Employees with no experience (the assembly kitchen allows us to do this), then they move on to Team Leaders, supervising 2 or 3 people, then they progress to Managers with responsibilities for managing supplier orders via Inpulse and managing staff planning. And finally, managers are promoted to Directors as soon as an opportunity arises, such as the opening of a new restaurant. Our Director of the Chambery restaurant has just taken up the post of Franchisee Network Coordinator, and we're very proud of their achievements."

"What's also very important in encouraging teams to develop their skills is the introduction of incentives for managers and directors. We take into account reputation, average basket, sales and now profitability ratios thanks to Inpulse: food cost and loss rate."  

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