Margaritaville

Introduction

Margaritaville approached us with a major problem - managing their extensive library of cocktail recipes across all their venues. They have a huge portfolio of franchised locations: boutique hotels, resorts, cruise ships, restaurants, and more. However, all the bars from their +100 locations relied on an offline spreadsheet file that lived on a single computer, only accessible to one person. 

Anytime recipes needed to be updated or new ones added, that unlucky employee had to painstakingly make the changes, and then email the revised file out to each location repeatedly. They desperately needed a modern solution to centralize all the recipes, update them, and distribute them to ensure every location stayed on the same page.

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Challenge

The team at Margaritaville faced several challenges with their current approach: Recipes were stored in a confusing spreadsheet that only a few people really understood. Whenever new recipes or changes were added, that updated spreadsheet had to be manually emailed out to every single franchised location - a nightmare for version control. Then, the bartenders had to print out the recipes and flip through pages during their shifts to find the recipes.

Margaritaville offers a unique experience at each location, sometimes featuring different names for the drinks and using various glassware sizes. This presented a challenge for recipe management: ensuring consistency in taste and quality across all locations. An app was the ideal answer – for recipe management, to keep the information up-to-date everywhere, and ultimately provide a better workflow for everyone involved.

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Solution

Using Glide, we developed a cocktail recipe manager app tailored to Margaritaville's specific needs. It includes a centralized recipe management system where an administrator can easily add, update, and categorize recipes while assigning them to specific locations.

For the bartenders, we created a user-friendly mobile app that allows them to access the most current recipes at each location. A standout feature is the dynamic recipe calculations - bartenders can adjust the glass size for a cocktail, and the app automatically recalculates measurements, calories, costs, and allergen information accordingly. We also integrated PDF Monkey, a handy plugin available for Glide apps that allows bartenders to directly print recipes from the app itself.