East and West Gourmet Afghan Food, based in Concord, CA, sells Afghan flatbreads
called bolanis, stuffed with a variety of ingredients. The company first launched in
farmer’s markets throughout northern California, and soon expanded into Whole
Foods, Mollie Stone’s and Andronico’s grocery stores.
In 2010, the company’s products were also picked up by Costco, which requires
that its vendors implement a food traceability program. “The idea is to be able to
trace all of your raw materials that come in to the work in progress, the work in
progress to the finished good, and where the finished good ends up,” explains East
and West operations manager Matin Sayed.
To collect and manage that data, East and West turned to Intermec partner
MSA Systems, Inc. The deployment was launched with four Intermec CK3 rugged
handhelds and MSA’s QStock Inventory software, which manages inventory and
deliveries as well as the data required for food traceability, and syncs directly
with QuickBooks.
Sayed says the deployment has greatly simplified East and West’s delivery
process. “We do our own distribution – we have four drivers that go out Monday
through Friday to 82 stores,” he says. “They used to come back with paper receipts
and fill everything out, and they used to do the calculations by themselves. Now
they have much more time to tackle more stores, and the paperwork that they do
is much smoother.”
The fact that the data syncs automatically with QuickBooks, Sayed says, has also
been a great benefit. “That’s helped our managerial accounting in that we’re able
to quickly determine how our products are doing in each of the stores,” he says.
“Before, it would take a long time to manually enter that information. Now, data
entry has gone down, and that has freed up some time for our workers to be occupied
with other things.”
