problem area

While onboarding new brands on Kitopi platform, the Brand representatives (users) from Kitopi side complained about spending a lot of time working on excel sheets while modeling Food costs and on ERP to add products.

Manual working on excel sheets was inefficient and imprecise. This lead to inaccuracies in Food cost ratio (FCR) calculations and had potential revenue impact to the brand owners.


Time taken to onboard new brand:

28 days

Focus area

How to improve the recipe/product management for our users?
The main objective was to solve our users' problems by providing a tool which
• Avoids usage of excel sheets
• Reduces inaccuracies in Food cost estimations & eventually optimize Food cost ratio (FCR)
• Gives better visibility of recipes/products for all stakerholders

Success metrics

The success for this feature was measured as reduction in time taken for onboarding a new brand with all its products. The aim was to reduce this time taken from 28 days to 10 days

Discovery & Data



I coordinated & conducted various discussions with Brand managers and Customer success managers to understand their day to day activities. This led to understanding of certain pain points such as:

1. INCORRECT MAPPING & MISSING INFORMATION USING EXCEL SHEETS
a. Upto 15% of ingredients had incorrect quantity mesaurements
b. Upto 10% recipes had missing packaging information
c. The Brand menu was shared in a separate excel file. This led to inaccuracies like missing image, missing tags or other incorrect details
2. TIME CONSUMING PROCESSES
a. Lengthy ingredient validation time from brand owners (1-3 weeks)
b. Lot of back and forth communication with brand owners to get the complete set of documents & approvals

Proposed solution

Key solution elements

1. Managed approval process for ingredients through Supply chain team - Only approved ingredients can be used to build recipes. This leads to highly accurate recipes as only validated ingredients are used
2. Easy accessibility of viewing the ingredients list for stakeholders such as brand owners, brand managers and chefs
3. Ability to add or remove ingredients and vary the quantity to optimize the food cost ratio (FCR)

Design exploration

Business impact

Time taken to onboard a new brand has significantly reduced from 28 days to 11 days (End of Feb'22). Furthermore, more optimization is being currently developed to reduce it further to 10 days.