Learners & Businesses

Before, every time we launched a new dish, the R&D team tested by feel and then argued over which flavor was right. After the course, every recipe comes with numbers: sweetness, astringency, extraction rate. Whichever store makes it, the taste comes out the same.

We opened outlets on instinct, and by the third one every location had its own way of doing things. The course forced us to write our concept down in words, and only while writing did we discover the team had never agreed with each other.

The restaurant was busy, but quality depended on who was in the kitchen that shift. After the course, the shift checklist and process set mean the head chef is no longer the only one who can hold the standard.

Our problem was that a loaf at a faraway outlet is not the same as a loaf near the bakery. What we learned is to re-plan capacity and logistics before opening more, instead of opening first and fixing later.

Tourists come in seasons, but costs arrive every month. After the course, we added a delivery channel and learned to read the numbers on each app to fill the gap between two peak seasons.

Da Lat has no shortage of beautiful cafes. What the course changed was how we read our own P&L: it turned out the thing we were proudest of was not what was feeding the cafe.

We bake well, but the kitchen was laid out around the bakers' habits. Standard quantities, the bill of materials and the functional zone layout are the three most valuable things we took home, because they turn craftsmanship into process.

Roasting good coffee is one thing; building a business model around it is another. The process set and chain-level operations show how big the gap is between craft and business.