Skopos Hospitality Group operates six full-service restaurants and two additional concepts in Northern New Jersey with about 200 employees. Director of Operations John Mazur describes the area, about 15 miles from Manhattan, as “a lot of different people living together in really diverse communities.”
Skopos prides itself on the perfect combination of food, drink, and atmosphere, and the company uses meez for both its culinary and beverage programs. CEO John Maroulakas became an early adopter of the recipe management system after connecting with meez CEO Josh Sharkey.
Mazur joined the company as Director of Operations in mid-2022 and hit the ground running with meez. Today, meez is an integral part of their operations and costing processes at all their locations. The group has imported and created more than 1,000 recipes in-house and with recipe upload services from the meez team.
“I was more or less the project manager making sure that the recipes were properly inputted and that I understood the syncing between meez and our inventory system called MarginEdge. It was a communal effort.”
Mazur describes different software “that was far less sophisticated and more manual at previous jobs,” and he recognized opportunities to expand the use of meez at Skopos.
“I think, like a lot of technologies, the more you sit down and think about how you can use meez, the better you’re going to be. It’s cool to dig deep into it and understand that it’s a really powerful tool and a really powerful resource for culinary and beverage teams.”
Skopos equally splits each concept’s recipe books between food and beverage.
“Some of our craft cocktails are quite complicated. We make all our syrups and spice mixtures and we need recipes. Maybe the preparation methods aren’t the most intense, but we need a place to record these recipes to make sure they’re accessible to bartenders, line cooks, prep cooks,” Mazur explains.
In meez, Mazur builds out recipes exactly how they want them, including delusion of the drink with specific types of ice, and certain cube sizes. Ingredients are as specific as possible and prep methods will indicate how they want the bartender to make the drink. The notes indicate how they want it served to a customer.
“Our meez recipe for a drink is the quintessential version of the drink. It even says to serve it immediately sometimes because we don’t want it to be served flat. We want it as cold or as whipped up or as stiff as possible.”
“Initially we were so creative as a company that we’d make these whacked-out, crazy craft cocktails. They might have had five or six alcohols in them or this or that, and it became very difficult to keep track of how much each glass of liquid cost us. You kind of did a rough estimate.”
Mazur explains even if the business identifies a profit margin goal, they need to accurately calculate it from the cost of the ingredients.
“The ultimate goal is to make something delicious that we can handle to make as a team that’s not too expensive for our guests so that we can continue serving our guests rather than going belly up. meez makes our costing process very precise.”
Now, whenever there is a recipe or a cocktail that needs to be made, the Skopos team writes down every aspect of it, specifically the ingredients and the amounts, and puts it into meez for an accurate cost per serving.
“Costing is a dry and painstaking process. It’s not creative, but it’s very, very important because if we do it right, it allows longevity and consistency in a recipe.”
According to Mazur, Skopos is renowned in the region for its Christmas-themed cocktail pop-up, Miracle. Due to the high volume of business during this hectic time of year, Skopos prepared pre-batched cocktails with meez, which involved using a base or a few ingredients that are built upon to create the final product.
“Customers were happy because we weren’t building all these drinks on the spot, from start to finish, and they were still delicious.
Previously, the only way to make a single drink into a batched quantity was to use multiplier software, like a calculator. But with meez, it’s easy to make 10 or 50 drinks at a time.
“meez would scale the ingredient quantities to match our desired, larger yield. It was a really great success — so much so that we continued that mentality on some of our really popular drinks after Miracle.”
The ease of scaling and costing for batch cocktails has increased efficiency and creativity.
“The more you make at once, the more efficient you are. Batching recipes has been a huge success, and it’s been easy with meez. Each of our bars and restaurants has an iPad and the teams can access it on phones, and they go in and start mixing and messing around. They can have fun.”
“The beverage side is responsive to it, which is cool. Not everything is memorized so they can instantly reference it,” Mazur reports. “It’s a great way to study our menu and to understand the cocktails.
meez’s search functionality, filters, photos, and videos have all proved useful.
“We have a recipe book of classic cocktails with our spin on them. Every bartender needs to know how we do it. Meez documents how we do it with prep methods and ingredients. It allows for greater consistency.”
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