How to supply your branches from a central kitchen (commissary)

A commissary produces prepared food and ingredients for its branches. In Nori it is built from three pieces that already exist: production in the kitchen's warehouse, transfers to the branches and the point of sale at each branch.

1. Set up warehouses and items

• Have one warehouse for the central kitchen and one per branch (Inventory › Setup › Warehouses).
• The products the kitchen makes (sauces, dough, bread, sandwiches) are inventory items, batch-managed if you want expiry and traceability. See Batches, serial numbers and bin locations.
• Enter the item's shelf life so each batch produced gets its expiry on its own.

2. Enter the recipes

Create the bill of materials of each product in the kitchen's warehouse: components in kilos, liters or pieces, with their waste. If one recipe uses another (the marinade in the marinated chicken and that one in the tamale), each has its own bill of materials and the cost rolls up by level.

3. Produce

Every day (or every shift):

1. Use material planning (MRP) to see what to make from sales orders and the kitchen's minimum stock, or create the orders by hand.
2. Release the order, issue the components (Nori suggests the batches that expire first) and receive the product with its batch and expiry. See How to produce.
3. When done, close the order so the product's cost reflects its actual cost. See How to close a production order.

4. Supply the branches

1. The branch asks in Inventory › Transfer requests: what it needs, from the kitchen's warehouse to its own.
2. The kitchen opens the request and uses Copy to › Inventory transfer. It chooses the batches that go out.
3. When the transfer is saved, stock moves from the kitchen's warehouse to the branch's with its batch and cost.

5. Sell at the branch

At the point of sale, an inventory item that arrives ready-made leaves the branch's stock itself; its recipe isn't deducted again. If something is added at the counter (extra cheese), mark that extras group with Deduct even if the item is ready-made. See Recipes, modifiers and kitchen tickets.

What is put together on the spot at the branch (a coffee, a made-to-order sandwich) is still a non-inventory kit with its sales recipe.

If something goes wrong

• A component arrived bad: in Production › Reports › Batch traceability, find the batch and choose Where it went to see which product batches it ended up in. See Batch traceability and production reports.
• Higher waste than expected: check Consumption vs standard and adjust the recipe's waste.

If you don't see…

• The Production menu: you need the Production, Supervisor or Administrator role and a Supervisor license or higher.
• The branch can't make requests: its user needs permission to create transfer requests.
• With SAP connected as owner of the stock: produce in SAP; in Nori you can plan with recipes, orders and MRP.