Custom Inventory Management App for Local Food Truck Restaurant
2025
Elephant Shack – Oahu, HI
Established in 2012, this Oahu food truck restaurant has two locations, one on Sunset Beach and one in Honolulu. If you are lucky enough to be local or planning a trip to Oahu, you can’t miss this delicious, fresh Thai food served with ocean views. They also sell some signature sauces on their website.
The Challenge:
In Hawaii, it is very common to try to order your favorite dish at a low-to-medium end restaurant only to hear, “We can’t make that because we ran out of X product”. Kevin, the owner of the Elephant Shack restaurant, had a vision for a more tech-savvy operation. Kevin noticed that a small restaurant business doesn’t have great options for inventory management apps. The simpler apps have poor usability, while the inventory apps with a good user experience integrate into a complex system, which can be overkill. Kevin has a background in architecture and had no problem envisioning what was needed: a “par sheet” app that is lightweight and user-friendly.
Where could he go from here? With two food trucks, he needed an inventory management app that could account for different storage spaces. His ideal inventory management app could integrate tried-and-true manual counting, while doing something his spreadsheets couldn’t: low stock alerts, profit and loss reports on individual items, and vendor ordering.
Tedious spreadsheet inventory "Par sheets"
No inventory insights
Existing Inventory apps didn't cut it
No budget for a built-from-scratch application
The Solution:
When we create custom software, it’s essential to take the time to get to know our clients’ business operations, along with their goals. After working with Kevin and multiple mockups, we came up with an inventory management app that can:
- Utilize simple physical counts
- Manage inventory in multiple locations
- Low stock alerts
- Give profit insights on an ingredient level
- Vendor management & ordering
First version of Count Control, the inventory management app originally created for the Elephant Shack restaurant.
The Results:
Elephant Shack is now able to do quick inventory counts at the end of the day. The app gives reorder suggestions, and Kevin can adjust and make vendor orders right from the app. Real-time reports show profit and inventory insights for future business decisions.
With the right software solution, inventory management has gone from a tedious chore to an easy system for improving the quality of service and business operations.