Zoined Case: Café Loetje

Client: Café Loetje

Over 30 years ago, Café Loetje was a pub for locals with a love of playing billiards. Its humble beginnings were rooted in offering hungry customers traditional fare from fried eggs through meatballs to cheese platters. Over time the menu evolved and contributed to the company rolling at more stores as it became famous for tenderloin steaks.

Loetje operates nine restaurants in the Netherlands today and the growth has prompted the need to manage the operations more efficiently, both across the group and at an individual restaurant level.

“To be successful and manage operations properly you need to know what is happening in every restaurant all the time. That’s not easy to do from a central office, but with Zoined, any one of our business or restaurant managers can get this insight in a heartbeat”, says Wim Pel, Financial Manager at Loetje.

“Zoined makes me happy. I open the daily email in my apartment lift in the morning, and by the time I get to my car I already know how my restaurants have performed.”

Cafe Loetje Wim Pel
Wim Pel at the restaurant Loetje aan de Amstel, in Amstelveen, The Netherlands.

“As a business owner, flexibility is important. The reports we use today might not be sufficient for tomorrow. This is where Zoined is very strong, as we can easily set up the reports to show us the details we need to run our business more efficiently and monitor the changes we make as a result of the insight Zoined provides. Zoined validates the business decisions I make. I think Zoined is useful for anyone with two or more restaurants, and although I am a numbers guy, you really don’t need to be to use Zoined. In fact that’s the powerful thing about it – it makes interpreting complex numerical information really straightforward so anyone in our business can use it and make changes and improvement with confidence.”

Mr. Pel was introduced to Zoined through his Point-of-Sale (PoS) provider Stroke Horeca Automatisering, which sells unTill software throughout the Netherlands. unTill’s PoS solution provides basic reporting capabilities necessary to run a business but there are limitations as Martin Limburg, Operations Director at Stroke Horeca Automatisering BV explains: “unTill is used in every one of Loetje’s stores and while its reporting capabilities are quite extensive, they are not designed to provide advanced analytics that allows you to run ad-hoc or comparative reports. We identified that Zoined bridged this gap perfectly and when combined with unTill offered Loetje a best of breed solution that was scalable from one restaurant upwards.”

Cafe Loetje

Crucially Zoined fulfilled the need to have a solution that could handle large amounts of detailed PoS data easily, and immediately produce the insights that accurately reflect how the business is doing without the business owner having to do anything. It also needed to be intuitive so that anyone could use it and make use of the analytics.

“Zoined makes it easy to get what you want, when you need it. For example, everyone can set up automated emails that contain the information they need to do their job using a very user-friendly web browser. Zoined also creates insights by combining different data feeds, showing you how everything is linked so the information that’s important to you can be blended to provide a complete tailor-made assessment of company performance.”

“The integration between our unTill PoS-system and Zoined was smooth. Zoined also customised the service so that they were an even better fit for the Dutch hospitality market. That now means anyone using unTill in the Netherlands can take advantage of the customisation and benefit from the insight immediately”, states Mr. Limburg.