Case Study
86MISE: Turning Restaurant Data into Daily Operational Decisions
86MISE is an operations platform for independent Latino restaurants in the U.S. It connects kitchen and sales signals to practical daily outputs: what to cook, what to order, and what to count.
How might we
How might we help independent legacy restaurant owners minimize the tasks that drain them so they can focus on the craft and community that define them?
01 - The Challenge
Independent restaurants were managing critical workflows through disconnected tools and manual habits, making cost control, ordering precision, and expiry prevention harder than they needed to be.
- No single system connected forecasting, inventory, recipe costing, and supplier ordering.
- Back-office coordination consumed recurring weekly hours in manual routines.
- Teams lacked clear per-dish cost visibility for margin decisions.
- TCS-sensitive ingredients required tighter shelf-life control to avoid waste and compliance risk.
02 - The Strategy
Step 1
Build a focused operations core
Implemented a full-stack platform with FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and React to prioritize high-frequency kitchen workflows over generic ERP complexity.
Step 2
Translate demand patterns into daily decisions
Structured the product around three outputs each day: what to cook tomorrow, what to order by supplier, and what to count in inventory.
Step 3
Unify costing and purchasing execution
Connected recipes, ingredients, suppliers, and purchase orders to replace fragmented ordering via paper notes and chat threads.
Step 4
Embed TCS-aware safeguards
Added inventory expiry states aligned with the Texas 7-day TCS rule to support preventive daily controls.
03 - The Product
A cohesive product surface connecting dashboard visibility, demand forecasting, supplier purchasing, and inventory control in a single operating system.
04 - The Results
Business impact
86MISE shifts operations from reactive manual coordination to a repeatable decision cycle where forecasting, ordering, and inventory checks reinforce each other daily.
- Forecast-guided ordering improved purchasing confidence and reduced overbuying risk.
- A unified workflow reduced friction across inventory, suppliers, and purchase orders.
- Recipe-level costing improved pricing discipline and margin visibility.
- Expiry alerts strengthened waste prevention in TCS-sensitive inventory.
05 - Key Learnings
- 1. Forecast adoption rises when outputs are explicit daily actions, not abstract dashboards.
- 2. Independent restaurant tools need speed-first UX for tablet and mobile usage contexts.
- 3. Compliance-aware states (critical/warning/ok) drive trust faster than generic labels.
- 4. Insights only create value when tied directly to execution workflows like supplier orders.
Want to operationalize forecasting in your restaurant workflow?
Let's design a practical inventory and purchasing system your team can use every day without adding process overhead.