Deputy makes scheduling a breeze for The Farmer & The Larder team

Located in Historic Downtown Brunswick, The Farmer & The Larder serves as an intensive hands-on cooking space, culinary retail and small event venue offering educational adventures in taste.

The Farmer & The Larder is owned and operated by CheFarmer Matthew Raiford and Food Alchemist Jovan Sage.

Before Deputy, The Farmer & Larder restaurant used paper transferred over to spreadsheets to create employee schedules. Jovan Sage, resident fermenter & owner, explains, “My staff would ask me to take pictures of the schedule and send it to them, and I thought, ‘Am I really spending all this time to make this really cute spreadsheet, color-coded and everything, for you to have me take a picture of it and send it to you?’ That’s not what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Sage ended the “madness” and found Deputy, a powerful employee scheduling and time tracking mobile app that worked well with her executive chef’s iPad Pro and her MacBook. More importantly, she needed an app for her iPhone so when she was on the go, she could quickly update the schedule or message her team on their smartphones.

Amanda Mincey, event coordinator at The Farmer & Larder, adds, “My favorite Deputy app feature is News Feed. I love being able to communicate with everybody through the app, so if we have a work-based question, suggestion or someone needs to talk to the whole group, instead of sending a mass group text on our phones, we just use the app.”

Further, Matthew Raiford, executive chef and owner, is now able to send his whole staff a list of orders that need to be made and tasks that must be completed before the end of the shift. All processes and requests are in Deputy, so nothing gets lost in translation. Even employee time off requests is tracked in Deputy to make scheduling a breeze. Raiford concludes, “In a chef’s life, we’re always busy, and Deputy takes fifty percent of what it would take to put a schedule together out of the picture.”