Development of a Tool for Culinary Management

Gastro Ventures is a start-up that works with gastronomic innovation applied to the whole food industry, from products to hotels and restaurants. During the first semester of 2019, coinciding with the second semester of the MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship in ESADE, I have been working in the company as Business Operations Manager Junior. One of the projects in which the company is involved in is with a high-standing hotel in Spain. Gastro Ventures manages their whole gastronomic offering – from the formation of the chefs and the rest of the staff to the design of the different menus and elaborations. This project was born after the realization that the whole process involved in the management of the restaurant of the hotel – and all restaurants for that matter – is full of inefficiencies. These inefficiencies are mainly related to the design of the various products, the lack of a unified data base, and the inventory management. Additionally, Gastro Ventures has a special interest in Circular Cuisine, the application of Circular Economy to the food industry. That is why the aim of this project is not only to provide a solution to those inefficiencies but also to implement a system that is able to apply the Circular Cuisine model in Hotels and Restaurants. The first step to develop this project was to immerse ourselves in the current processes and understand how the system works in order to identify the already suspected inefficiencies. To carry out this step appropriately, the Hotel that we are working with provided us with all the necessary information. Secondly, to define the specifications that this program needs, an exercise of ideation was carried out by the CEO of the company – Jordi Gamez – and myself. Lastly, once the main ideas of the characteristics and functionalities of the program were clear, it was time to code using the VBA in Excel. The necessary knowledge to code such a complex tool was provided by a course in ESADE of Excel by Francesc Alcaide. The solution designed is a tool with the ambition of being a software that meets the needs mentioned in the lines above. In terms of realization a Pilot program was created with Excel, and even though it provided evidences that there is a need for a more powerful interface to code this complex program, the pilot has proved very useful to define the characteristics and functionalities of what might be the software in the future.