Salade all-day eateries enjoy the taste of new EPoS

Published 24th July 2008

In the world of fast food, Salade is a clever concept, as refreshing as its ingredients. This dynamic chain of all-day eateries sprung onto the City scene five years ago and has since become an oasis of taste and quality. Premises in London’s Stratton Street, Old Bailey and Fetter Lane have been joined recently by a store in Paddington station, and the company’s ambitions don’t stop there. Chairman Karim Lalani has set his sights on a 20-store estate within the next two years...

“Ours is a very hectic, complex environment where both speed of operation and an ability to look up multiple variables are absolutely crucial to daily sales. J2 tills have certainly met these challenges well and we are happy to recommend them.” Karim Lalani, Chairman of Salade Retail Limited

Salade is the ideal destination for shoppers and office-workers looking for quick, nutritious and personalised food at any time. Breakfast juices, bespoke porridge and a fruit bar make for a healthy start to the day. The company’s trademark salad creations, composed from a choice of 57 items, are a feast for the eye and the palate, whether eaten on the premises or taken to a nearby bench or desk. Plus there are afternoon treats to enjoy.

The company prides itself on offering something to suit every taste. With its focus on well-being, it has plenty to tempt. Premium ingredients satisfy the health-food fiend, whilst comforting soups and smoothies provide succour for those seeking respite from corporate stress.

The Solution

The young company started out with very basic stand-alone tills that generated only simple day-end reports. However, once it was firmly established and had entrepreneur Karim Lalani at the helm, it was motivated to upgrade its technology.

Salade turned to Wedderburn EPoS Systems, a specialist supplier of solutions for the leisure and hospitality trades. Wedderburn recommended J2 Retail Systems for point-of-sale hardware. Tim Smith, Wedderburn’s Managing Director, explains his reasons: “J2’s 560 PC-based touchscreen till was ideal for Salade. Because it has all the ports built into the screen, we were able to meet Salade’s requirement for both pole and standard mounting.”

Forty J2 560s are installed across the four stores, spread between the salad bars, the coffee areas and the till points. For space-efficiency and to create a hygienic and ergonomic environment, screens are pole-mounted in the servery areas. At the pay points, Salade has opted for traditional counter-mounting.

The Benefits

· The J2 560 gives Salade the flexibility of pole-mounting and counter-mounting
· The result is good use of space and a hygienic and practical environment
· The touchscreens tills are delivering reliable performance
· Staff find the displays of products fast and simple to navigate around, even at the busiest times
· Built-in swipe card technology has helped Salade to evolve a new, customer-friendly check-out process
· Improved analysis and reporting capabilities have allowed the company to refine its product range and accurately calculate operating costs
· The J2 tills are the perfect foil for Wedderburn’s specialist point-of-sale software

The Process

Salade makes very particular demands of its technology, due to its huge range of ingredients and the pressures of the fast-food trade that calls for slick and faultless service.

Wedderburn bore this in mind when it equipped each of the Salade premises with a complete solution: the J2 touchscreen tills, on which was installed a version of Fidelity’s G-POS software that Wedderburn had customised to Salade’s operating model.

Tim Smith continues: “The J2 560 also had aesthetics in its favour. Salade found it both stylish and practical. Importantly too, for a young business with high volumes of customers during peak trading periods, it was essential to keep the tills up and running. We knew that the J2s came with a 3-year parts & labour warranty.”

The Results

Salade’s Business Director, Clare Sykes, is responsible for monitoring and improving food costs. She explains: “Prior to running this system, the process was quite slow and we could only record how many individual ingredients we had sold each day.”

Things are now quite different. The customer selects items at a salad bar where a server combines them. Each item put into the bowl is recorded on a swipe card. This is taken to a till point where extras such as drinks are added. The card is then swiped through the till and produces a bill in seconds. Adds Clare Sykes: “Having had to queue at the salad bar, we did not want customers to have to queue again to pay.”

The new system is not only good news for customers, but it also provides a wealth of accurate operating data that helps Salade to analyse its trade. It can now identify how much of each of its 100-plus ingredients and products are being bought each day, and what the process costs. Management intelligence even enables the team to tailor the composition of its ready-made salad bowls, by basing them upon the most popular ingredients and combinations.

Staff naturally find themselves under great pressure at lunchtime when the stores fill with hungry, clock-watching office-workers. They need to deliver quick service with a smile, and they have reacted very well to the new system. Each of Salade’s many ingredients is itemised on the touchscreen and staff navigate their way around the displays at speed and with confidence.

Looking forward, Salade is continuing to build on its new platform, to get the maximum value from its investment. Its latest purchase is a web-based stock ordering system that will integrate with the J2/Wedderburn solution, and will remove a layer of manual activity from store managers.