Tablo Kitchen x Cafe

As a growing food and beverage industry business, Tablo Kitchen x Cafe strives to offer its clients comfort food, cozy interiors, and a vibrant community space for gathering. Aside from these, Tablo is passionate about ensuring food safety and providing top-notch customer service. While the journey hasn’t always been easy, Tablo’s passion drives them to continually elevate their clients’ dining experience.

With five operating branches around Metro Manila and two more incoming in the second half of 2024, communication and collaboration became crucial factors for their success. That’s why Tablo needed to up its game with quality assurance, safety protocols, and scheduled audits.

See how Tablo has overcome hindrances in its daily operations with the help of an all-in-one safety and inspection platform called SafetyCulture. We’ve touched base with Mia Dallo, Tablo Kitchen x Cafe’s System Compliance Manager, to share their journey to an efficient and better way of working.

Switching from pen and paper checklist to digital

Tablo’s first branch opened in 2019, but it wasn’t until 2021 that they started implementing a system of regular audits. These audits were performed three times a day in three different areas of a branch. Dining managers, bar supervisors, and kitchen managers oversaw the completion of opening, middle, and closing inspections.

“The recordkeeping process and the document control were very challenging at that time,” Mia says. There were over a thousand paper checklists to be printed, organized, transported, and stored monthly. Aside from this process incurring extra costs, it also added to the overall storage load because the audits must be archived for future reference.

Additionally, since paper-based inspections were not as interactive as they’d like, issues were not always addressed promptly, and concerns sometimes got lost along the way. It was in February 2023 that Tablo finally decided to get the help of a world-class and multi-functional platform.

With SafetyCulture, Tablo has converted all their paper checklists into digital forms. They also regularly make use of the Public Library to find ready-to-use relevant templates as guides when creating their custom checklists.

Challenges in transparency and visibility

Before SafetyCulture, branch managers manually calculated audit scores for each inspection. This approach increased the risk of error and impacted the accuracy of the data that Tablo received. Reports were also not processed in real time, leading to delays in addressing concerns and issues raised by the staff. Because of this, the teams were not getting the support they needed in a timely manner.

“Since it is pen and paper, the process is not that transparent up to the management level. There’s a delay in response if there are any concerns or reports that need to be addressed quickly,” Mia stated.

Due to limited visibility across all sites, there’s also minimal accountability for teams and their members at the time—reducing their ability to create a more efficient and foolproof process. This lack of oversight hampered the organization’s overall productivity and efficiency, potentially leading to missed opportunities for improvement and innovation.

This has been Tablo’s system for over two years. And for a business that is starting to expand and grow, efficiency and accuracy become critical.

Increased quality assurance and turnaround time

SafetyCulture was a game changer for Tablo.

“Working with SC for the first few months, we immediately saw the impact and intention of solving the challenges that [we had]. It already unfolded as early as the first three months of using SafetyCulture,” Mia reflected.

Around May 2023, Tablo started reviewing each branch’s compliance in implementing the operations checklist—something that they weren’t able to do before with pen and paper. Through the SafetyCulture platform, they started releasing monthly branch report cards where the team can see their performance based on checklist scores, completion rate, and most flagged items.

From initially facing challenges in complying with the required audits, branches now boast an almost 100% completion rate for daily audits, save for hectic months, particularly December.

“With SafetyCulture, we were [also] able to discuss the performance of teammates and managers during business reviews,” Mia commented on how SafetyCulture improved their internal transparency. “Usually, we don’t get to talk about the cost or finances, but SafetyCulture made that possible,” she continued.

The journey to data-driven decision-making

Managing a food and beverage business can sometimes get overwhelming, especially if an enterprise has multiple locations. This is where the assistance of a leading safety and inspection platform comes into play. Tablo utilizes the SafetyCulture platform in many different ways to facilitate a smooth workflow, keep processes efficient, and ensure top-notch customer service.

But which SafetyCulture features does Tablo use in its daily operations to achieve such goals?

For Mia, Inspections is SafetyCulture’s number one capability they value the most. “SafetyCulture empowered branch managers since most of their decisions are now data-driven,” she commented on how this feature impacted the teams’ decision-making. “They [branch managers] feel empowered to cascade whatever action plans they were able to create through the reports generated in SafetyCulture,” she added.

The timestamps gathered through photos and videos during inspections also provide assurance that inspections are conducted within the timeframe that they need to be.

Meanwhile, they leverage the Heads Up feature mainly as a communication channel. This comes in handy when disseminating memorandums from different departments, particularly those that are from the human resources team. Additionally, it serves as a means to share new SOPs that must be followed across all teams.

As an F&B industry, there are periodic changes in Tablo’s menu and recipes, so they also use Heads Up to ensure that everyone is well informed about these updates.

As the Systems Compliance Manager, Analytics makes it easier for Mia to generate branch report cards to effectively monitor the safety compliance of each location. “Through the Analytics in SafetyCulture, we generate monthly performance in terms of the completion rate, average checklist scores, and average inspections done,” she explains.

In connection with this, Tablo uses the insights gathered from Analytics as a basis for employee promotion. With SafetyCulture, they have the visibility that they need to see which employees perform their jobs well, which ultimately helps them decide which among them are the best candidates for promotions.

To cascade urgent concerns that need to be addressed, Tablo termed the Issues feature their very own 911. This symbolizes urgent matters that require immediate action. Tablo limits its use only to tasks that are outside their daily operations, enabling the team to identify which concerns should be attended to as soon as possible.

“It’s a complete report already, similar to service reports because the teams can send videos and pictures that show the before and after,” Mia noted, referring to how their team uses the Issues feature to raise concerns.

Serving customers (literally and figuratively)

After a little over a year of using SafetyCulture, Tablo now has over 20,000 inspections and audits performed to ensure smooth operations. They also have more than 8,000 Actions created and almost a hundred Issues resolved.

With that, Tablo has been able to identify and focus on the things they need to improve on swiftly across all branches. As a result, service recovery incidents—may it be about food quality incidents or order delays—have decreased by around 30%.

“With the SC platform, branch managers are empowered to make sure that protocols are implemented up to the branch levels,” Mia says. “We’re also able to highlight their compliance in terms of food safety practices since most of the checklists are integrated with the best food safety practices,” she added.

After going digital, Tablo also saved $13,000 annually in the cost of printing, organizing, and transporting their paper checklists.

Aside from being passionate about their food quality and safety, Tablo sees a great opportunity for the Philippines’ food and beverage industry in general. And with how things are going, they are confident that SafetyCulture, with its commitment to safety and quality, can help raise the bar further for the F&B industry.

What’s next for Tablo Kitchen x Cafe?

Tablo’s passion for quality and safety is something that they want to share. For Mia, there are many more opportunities for Tablo and SafetyCulture. She’s excited for the team to further maximize the platform and its capabilities, including the ones below:

• Training – One of the most integral values of Tablo is that they value the training and education of teams across all branches. They plan to use the Training feature to streamline the dissemination of new protocols or additional recipes to be announced. With training, they can also ensure that members are properly educated on relevant changes, both internally and externally.
• Assets – In support of their new department called Facility Management, Tablo is also planning to explore the Assets feature. The new department will be responsible for managing Tablo’s assets—both equipment and non-food supplies or items—among their branches, so they also see opportunities in maximizing SC for that.
• Sensors – Although there are no set and concrete plans for it yet since their HACCP is under a different commissary, Sensors will be very helpful when it comes to their quality assurance.

Big things are on the horizon for Tablo, and with their upcoming additional branches, it’s exciting to see how SafetyCulture can further help them achieve their goals. “On behalf of the team, we also just want to take this opportunity to thank the SC team,” Mia declared, “because Tablo’s transformation was massive because of SafetyCulture.”