How to get the most out of Orders, Prep, and Pack

The orders section of the Hotplate portal is where chefs often spend most of their time. It’s divided into the Prep and Packing tab.

Prep

This tab consolidates all of the orders you’ve gotten from an Event and and calculates how much of each item you have left to prep.

If you’ve offered multiple pickup dates, the prep amounts for each item will be grouped by pickup date. This will help you only prep whats going to be picked up that day.

As you prep each item, you can click the green plus sign or the red minus sign to keep track of how many you’ve prepped.

Printing your prep list

Chefs love the ability to print out their prep list and display it in the kitchen. To do that, click the three dots in the top right of the screen. From the menu, select Print preplist.

Packing

In this tab, you’ll see each of your customer’s orders displayed as packing tickets. This makes it easy for you to see each order at a glance, including the chosen pickup window and location.

As you build each order, you can click the checkbox next to each item to mark it as packed. When the order is completely packed and picked up, you can click Mark as complete at the bottom to make the ticket disappear.

Printing packing tickets

Chefs also love the ability to print out their individual packing tickets so they can easily stick or staple them to order bags. To do that, click the three dots on the top right corner of your Packing tab, then click Print tickets.

The default way to print tickets arranges them on a standard 8.5” x 11” piece of printer paper.

If you want to get fancy with it, you can print to a label / thermal printer 😎 Save yourself all that time you spent handwriting on bags or tickets and simply print, then pack!