Fresh Foods / Butchery ยท South Africa
FreshBlock Butcheries
FreshBlock Butcheries cut perishable waste by 31% across 15 stores and brought field service response time under 24 hours.
The challenge
FreshBlock Butcheries runs 15 stores across Gauteng and the Western Cape. Fresh meat has a short shelf life, and the margin between selling profitably and writing off expired stock is a few days. Each store manager ordered independently, estimated demand from experience, and over-ordered to avoid running out. The waste showed up at month-end: 9 to 14% of perishable stock was discarded before it sold.
The company also relied on three field technicians to maintain cold-chain equipment, scales and slicers across all 15 sites. Calls came in by phone, jobs were tracked on a shared spreadsheet, and there was no way to know whether a refrigeration unit at one store had been serviced or was still waiting. A compressor failure at one site went unaddressed for four days because the job fell off the spreadsheet.
Head office had limited sight of what was happening in each store. Daily sales reports arrived by email, often late, and stock counts were done monthly on paper. The business was running, but nobody had a complete picture until the accountant closed the books.
The solution
Connected all 15 tills to a central system so head office could see sales, stock and wastage in real time instead of waiting for emailed reports.
Synced store-level stock with the central ordering system so procurement could see what each store actually had before placing supplier orders, cutting over-ordering at the source.
Replaced the phone-and-spreadsheet field service process. Technician jobs were logged, assigned, scheduled and tracked in one system, with time stamps on arrival, completion and parts used.
31%
Reduction in perishable waste
< 24 hrs
Average field service response, down from 3.2 days
Same day
Sales and stock data at head office, previously next-day
“We were throwing away one rand in seven of fresh stock. Tightening the ordering loop and fixing equipment faster brought that to one in ten.”
- Pieter van Wyk, Operations Director, FreshBlock Butcheries
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