This trailblazing wellness brand saved over $200,000 per year with smart employee scheduling

In 2008, Juice Press launched a cafe in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a single goal in mind: to make healthy food both delicious and accessible. 

Since then, their success has been simply incredible: they’ve scaled their operations to employ over 350 shift workers at 85 locations, delivering fresh, healthy food across six states. 

To achieve that level of runaway growth, the business has expanded its product offering in-store and online to cover a wide range of nutritious meal types. They’ve also had to be nimble in their operations, adjusting their services over the years to respond to fluctuations in economic conditions and customer needs.

Ariana Korman, the Chief Operating Officer of Juice Press, says: 

The more we can operate in efficient ways, the more we can prove this is a scalable business, the more accessible it is for everyone in the country…That is the goal of Juice Press.”

Ariana knows that operational efficiency is critical to their success — but sometimes it’s been tricky to find the right digital tools to optimize their processes and support their ambitious growth.  

Like many other brands, Juice Press struggled to find employee scheduling technology that was not only efficient and user-friendly but also solved problems that came up organically in the course of business. 

“We were definitely more archaic in how we were managing scheduling and communication with employees. We had a lot of different platforms, which led to confusion on where to look and how to really reach as many employees as we can,” says Ariana.

Having started as a brick-and-mortar business, Juice Press was forced to reevaluate its business model after observing COVID-19’s unprecedented impact on the economy.

Labor shortages and a major shift in consumer habits inspired them to experiment with a hybrid online/in-store structure. But there were other new challenges that required smart software to tackle.

“In a market post-COVID where New York is still recovering, we're seeing our stores come back at different rates…being able to look at scheduling and labor allocation in a really easy way and compare that to sales is important, so we can be nimble and adjust quickly to what we need to do for the company.”

They needed to find a solution that would help them create cost-efficient schedules and streamline communication for 350 employees across 85 locations. When they began looking for new software, Deputy had exactly what they were looking for — and then some.

Turnover is one of the biggest issues businesses face in the shift work industry — and training new team members can be time-consuming and costly. Ariana knew their scheduling software had to be one that could handle their mass scheduling and reporting needs while being incredibly easy to implement at the employee level.

“One of the things that we love about Deputy is that it doesn't become another training point for us. It takes us a couple of minutes to teach employees how to use it. In a market where turnover is so high, it's important to be able to teach these technologies really quickly.”

Given that they had enough logistical plates spinning in the air, it was imperative that any new software needed to be reliable and error-free.

“Deputy is really seamless. It’s impressive for a relatively newer platform not to have those types of software issues that many do. That’s really important to us because if software goes down, that's critical to our business; that can create hours and hours of extra work.”

Ariana happily notes that the top-used feature in Deputy is Newsfeed. She is reassured by her phone buzzing with Newsfeed updates throughout the day because it means that her employees are taking ownership to find their own coverage, communicate about tasks, and build team culture.

From a business perspective, Juice Press uses every feature available to them in Deputy to maximize their cost-efficiency while delivering amazing service.

“Deputy really helps us with projecting where sales will be and where we should allocate labor to accommodate that…We've also been able to increase revenue at stores because we can reallocate labor.”

By observing labor and sales trends using Reporting, Juice Press can optimize their employee schedules.

"We have saved over $200,000 a year on front-of-house labor just by being able to manage it better and being able to put the right people in the right places."

On top of that, they use Deputy’s smart schedule templates to save over 25 hours a week on admin, empowering managers to redirect their energy and grow other areas of the business. 

Ariana reaffirms how much choosing the right technology has helped streamline operations at Juice Press and set up both managers and employees for success. 

“The benefit of using Deputy is really operational efficiency…it gives our employees a lot of empowerment in managing their own schedule and our managers a lot of empowerment in finding coverage and making sure that their stores are taken care of.”