Youngs Brewery

Young and Co.'s Brewery, P.L.C. began life in 1890. Its principal activities comprise the management and operation of, and the selling of food and drink through, its pub estate. In 2008, it had 116 managed pubs and 103 tenanted or leased ones, principally located in London and the South East. It also has a 40% shareholding and interest in a brewing and distribution joint venture, Wells & Young's Brewing Company Limited. Driven by the Retail Director, Young's and Company realised a need for more accurate food cost measurement in their business as the emphasis moved more towards a food led operation.

Internal investment in people created an environment keen to explore the use of technology to assist the entire menu development process and to ensure it could provide the flexibility to accurately forecast centrally prepared menus and those created locally by each individual site.

Following a recommendation from a similar sized pub business, Young's chose to implement StarChef.NET as a food cost management system. The initial implementation saw the central team re cost all core menus to a tight deadline for a new menu launch and were able to achieve the objective of understanding and modelling the new core food offering.

Young's have a varied estate comprising "Unique Houses", who control their own menu content and "Core Houses" who operate with centrally produced menus. It was important to the business that these operations could be treated differently. Using the Group and Approval controls, StarChef has been implemented in a way that allows the Unique Houses to view the core ingredients and menus, but to also have the opportunity to create locally their own data that is seen only by each individual pub creating that data. As a sharing exercise, any recipe created can be submitted to become "Public" but this is subject to the approval of the central food development team. The core houses are able to view and use all central items, but in creating new recipes, they only have access to the Young's managed and approved supplier and product listings. This powerful control is a standard feature of StarChef and has been implemented through careful planning between the Young's team and Star Logic.

The final solution is planned to ensure no menu or dish is served in a Young's pub without first being commercially tested. In fact, StarChef is now so integral to the business that no dish is entered onto their EPoS systems until it has been subjected to testing through StarChef.