Taking Production Optimization from Buzzword to Buildout
- jennyext
- Apr 17
- 3 min read
It’s no secret that food waste is a costly burden in commercial kitchens — and one that’s largely avoidable with the right data and process improvements. But what’s often overlooked is the time cost of misjudging production needs. Every tray of uneaten burgers also represents wasted labor: hours spent prepping meals that never reached a diner’s plate.
At Topanga, we’re building solutions to help culinary teams work smarter, not harder — starting with better visibility into what’s produced, consumed, and left behind. By eliminating manual data entry across systems and speeding up the entire data collection process, we want to make it easy to hit the operational sweet spot where food produced is equal to food consumed. That balance is production optimization.
The Phases of Food: How We Evaluate Waste
Waste — whether in labor or edible ingredients — occurs at every stage of the food production lifecycle. We break down this lifecycle into the 'Phases of Food' to pinpoint inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement.
Inventory: Ingredients and assemblies held and ready for use.
Assembly: Intermediate prep (like filling or dough for a pie) that transforms ingredients into elements of menu items.
Production: Final culinary preparation, where assemblies and ingredients become ready-to-serve menu items.
Consumption: A menu item moved from the line onto a diner’s plate.
Waste: Includes plate waste (left behind after consumption), unconsumed menu items, spoilage, trimmings and cuttings
At each stage, there’s a difference between what’s planned and what’s observed. The greater the gap, the greater the risk — in both cost and operational strain. The most expensive waste happens at the production phase, where the investment of time, labor, and ingredients is highest. For example, strawberries in inventory can still be used in any number of dishes, but once they become an uneaten strawberry pie, their shelf life and utility plummet while the opportunity cost rises.
The key to tightening planned and observed? Reliable, automated, high-quality data.
The Operational Reality: Manual Doesn’t Scale
Even the most skilled culinary teams are stuck in a system that doesn’t serve them, swamped with worksheets and repeated data entry. Line cooks tally batches with pen and paper amidst hectic kitchen environments, resulting in errors. Chefs then spend hours chasing down missing information, checking calculations, and closing the loop by keying production results into their menu management system. The result? Burned-out staff and unreliable data. We heard those pain points, so are building a better way of working that harnesses machine automation to help chefs and line cooks utilize more of their true culinary skills.
Phase One: StreamLine’s Fast, Accurate Data Capture
The first step in building a more effective operation is making data capture effortless (without sacrificing accuracy). StreamLine, Topanga’s AI-powered scale for recording and analyzing overproduction, does exactly that.
One-Tap Data Capture: Line cooks record observations in seconds, 10x faster than other solutions in-market
Item Identification: With 90% accuracy, StreamLine’s AI models match the observation to the associated menu item from the menu management system (integrated with StreamLine)
Actionable Insights: Regular email reports surface key trends and opportunities for improvement, putting the most valuable takeaways front-and-center
This is a new type of fast, reliable data collection that actually works on the line. But as we know from worksheet world, smoother data capture is only the beginning.
Phase Two: A New Kind of Kitchen Sync
Even with a time-saving product like StreamLine, many chefs are still spending hours inputting data across disconnected systems. That’s why Topanga is working to give chefs and line cooks time back each day by eliminating the need for redundant, manual data entry. We're building long-term workflow solutions that integrate, not isolate.
When overproduction data automatically flows across systems, teams can more easily:
Spot problem areas and respond in real-time
Adjust planned quantities based on proven consumption patterns
Reduce cost per meal by maximizing ingredient utilization
Reinvest saved time in training, creativity, or service quality
And the true power of cross-system cohesion? All of this happens without any of the administrative effort currently required. What could your team achieve if they suddenly had hours of free time, every single day?
Building the Future of Foodservice Production Optimization
We’re leading the way towards culinary system cohesion, starting by automatically syncing StreamLine overproduction data directly into Prima for menu management. Our north star isn’t just cutting waste — it’s helping culinary teams be more inventive, focused on, and fulfilled by their work, all of which stems from saving time. For our team, production optimization is more than a buzzword: it’s a smarter, more sustainable way to run a kitchen. That’s what we’re bringing to life right now with our trusted dining partners, and we’d love to have you along for the ride.
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