07 Jun Back to School with CRH Catering
My absolute favorite part of my job is getting to visit customers. I really enjoy spending time in their operations and learning more about their challenges and how LightSpeed can make them more efficient and more profitable. But the best part of those site visits is learning tips and best practices and being able to share them with all our clients. Our YouTube channel is full of videos that share these best practices from the customer themselves!
CRH Catering in Dunbar PA has been a LightSpeed customer for a long time. In fact, their first branch is Client ID #15. We are honored to have played a small part in their growth over the years and have proudly watched them expand to 10 branches. They recently bought a closed elementary school and converted it to their corporate office, and I could not wait to get up there and see it. All I can say is WOW!
CRH is known for their fresh food. They use a central commissary to make the food for all their branches daily. And what better way is there to have a nice commercial kitchen than to buy a school that already has a kitchen. But they had a better idea. They actually converted the assembly hall to the kitchen. They took the stage and built a control central/supervisor office and enclosed the room, so it is climate controlled to the proper temperature and BAM, you have a very efficient commissary.
When you buy a school and have all these unique rooms – what would you do with the gymnasium? Make it a large breakroom for your employees complete with a one-on-one basketball game? Nope – they made it a pack out cooler. They enclosed the entire room and built a large walk-in cooler to pack out their fresh food. And yes, they use LightSpeed’s FastTrack to do that. Using LightSpeed they can get all the food prekitted by market, by route using minimal labor and getting it to all 10 branches overnight.
For their snack and beverage line they expanded the back of the building. Both lines are in the same area and because of their layout they can use the same crew to pick snacks and then move to the beverage line as a team. They were one of our first customers to see the value of adding lights to the beverage line and as a result has seen their labor costs remain stable as they’ve grown.
We were fortunate to have Michael Cordaro as our guide for the trip. He gave us a brief history of the school and what rooms got converted to which application.
If you ever find yourself traveling through Dunbar PA, I highly recommend you stop by and see the Cordaro family and see if you can get a passing grade (sorry – the pun was too easy)!