Central kitchens hate “roughly”: putting every step from purchasing to dispatch into one system
A lot of Chinese restaurant chains in Singapore run their central kitchen like this: outlets place orders in a WeChat group, the storekeeper logs deliveries in a notebook, recipes live in the head chef's memory, and production and dispatch numbers sit in Excel.
On a normal day, that works. The trouble starts when the numbers don't add up. Maybe an ingredient runs out faster than expected, an outlet says it got one box short, or a batch left the kitchen at the wrong temperature. All you can do then is try to remember what happened. Usually someone says “I think that day we…” and that's as far as it goes.
Those “I think”s are exactly what we're trying to get rid of with the central kitchen module in MakanCloud.
1. People are working hard. The chain is what's broken
A central kitchen is a chain by nature: buy from suppliers, check deliveries, put stock away, produce according to recipes, portion out for each outlet, then dispatch and deliver.
Each step has its own owner and its own tool. Purchasing lives in chat history, receiving lives in a notebook, production lives in Excel. When one link goes off, the people downstream don't know about it, and the people upstream can't trace it. That's the real reason usage, wastage and quality checks can't be traced.
2. How MakanCloud connects the chain
In MakanCloud, the central kitchen workflow runs as one continuous flow:
- Suppliers → purchasing: who you bought from and what you bought is all on record;
- Receiving and stock-in: goods get checked before they're put away, so the inventory in the system is a number someone has actually verified;
- BOM recipes: every semi-finished product has a recipe listing which ingredients go in and how much of each;
- Production work orders: production follows work orders, and ingredient usage is tied to the order and the recipe;
- Portioning, weighing and double-checking: each outlet's share gets weighed and double-checked instead of eyeballed;
- Temperature check before dispatch: every dispatch gets a temperature check first, so the cold chain has a paper trail.
Each step builds on the data from the step before it. When something goes wrong, you can follow the chain backwards to the exact step where it happened.
3. Outlet orders on one end, delivery sign-off on the other
The central kitchen doesn't operate in a vacuum. In MakanCloud:
An outlet's head chef picks “today's outlet on duty” and places the order directly. When HQ confirms the order, the system checks stock automatically and rejects anything that's out of stock. No more accepting an order and only then discovering there's nothing to send.
After dispatch, one click turns the dispatch note into a delivery job. Delivery status updates all the way through, there's a delivery dashboard, and drivers get their own app. Where the truck is and whether the outlet has signed for the goods are both on record.
If you have cold-chain equipment, MakanCloud can also hook into cold-chain temperature sensors and send alerts automatically when things get too warm. Owners who like to dig into the numbers can use AI data analysis (your choice of Claude, OpenAI or Gemini) to look at inventory, wastage and supplier performance.
4. Built for multilingual teams
In Singapore kitchens, staff often speak more than one language. MakanCloud's whole interface switches between Chinese and English with one tap, and printouts are always bilingual, so front of house and the kitchen can both read them.
On pricing: MakanCloud starts at S$59/month (Starter), with Pro at S$129, Growth at S$199 and Enterprise at S$299. You pick based on how many outlets and terminals you have. The Pro plan comes with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed, and initial setup takes about 5 minutes after you sign up.
If your central kitchen still runs on WeChat, paper slips and Excel, try this: pick the one step that goes wrong most often and run it through MakanCloud during the trial.
Start your trial here: https://makancloud.com/register
Which step in your central kitchen is hardest to reconcile? Let us know in the comments.