Deputy has helped this fast-growing online restaurant to standardise their processes and save time and money.

Instamaki is an online restaurant that’s putting a fresh spin on how restaurants approach home delivery. Targeting a Millennial customer base, they believe ‘dining at home is the new dining in’.

“The owners Albert Bonhomme and Jan Morell wanted to change the concept of food delivery by preparing food to be eaten at home,” says Pau Laporte, chief operating officer at Instamaki.

“Unlike restaurants that added delivery to their existing operation, they focused exclusively on food to be delivered and decided that Japanese food was ideal.”

The Spanish-based food start-up launched in Barcelona in September 2016, and have since expanded their services to include Sant Cugat, Valencia, and Madrid.

Social media (Facebook and Instagram) has been key to Instamaki’s growth. “Instagram has become a very important marketing channel for us,” says Laporte. “We have more than 60,000 subscribers. We send them special offers, invite them to participate in online competitions, and this is both fun and beneficial to our brand and business.”

Instamaki currently employs a team of 82 people. “Around 60% are employed to deliver food,” explains Laporte. “Then we have the sushi chefs and kitchen staff. At each location, we have a small team who organise the activities and processes so that everything works smoothly. Finally, there is a small group at head office.”

When Instamaki started, the team consisted of the two founders and a sushi chef working out of a co-working space, together with a small delivery team. Three months after launching, they opened their first outlet and Laporte joined the team.

In the early days of the business, rostering was a lengthy process done manually in Excel. “The delivery staff would enter details of the orders they had delivered and the time they finished on a worksheet and I would then have to enter this into Excel,” says Laporte.

Instamaki sought alternate systems, even trialling a shift planning platform but found it not to be the right fit. The business continued to explore alternatives.

“Then we found Deputy, which enabled us to do more things,” says Laporte. “One of the big advantages of Deputy is the way the delivery staff sign on and off. This is what we use most and what we value most. The riders can sign on and off themselves and the manager can change the timesheet if there is a mistake. This means that we have an exact record of the time worked and we pay our employees the correct amount.”

Efficiency is a high priority for Instamaki, who structure all the processes and operations within the business towards driving customer satisfaction.

“Innovation in our processes and improvements in the delivery time are core components for Instamaki,” says Laporte.

Instamaki predominantly uses Deputy for controlling time and scheduling work for the delivery team and the kitchen staff. They then export the information and analyse it, in combination with the order information they have from their field management software, Tookan.

“Firstly, by having a good time control function, people are paid exactly as they should be for the hours worked, so we don’t lose money there,” says Laporte on how Deputy saves Instamaki time and money. “Secondly, Deputy allows us to standardise the same processes in each location. We also save time in handling the information, as it is very easy to get the information we need.”

With streamlined processes and higher efficiency, Instamaki is able to focus on growing the business. This includes expanding their offering (such as Instapizzas, which they launched in January) and opening more locations.

Following the opening of their outlet in Valencia in April, Laporte says: “The next stop will be Zaragoza and progressively we plan to take Instamaki to different cities in Spain as quickly as we can.”