NCCO International The holiday season is one of the most profitable times of the year for restaurants and foodservice operators. It is also one of the most stressful: Guest counts spike, seasonal menus roll out, and staffing challenges become even more noticeable. Without the right systems in place, kitchens can fall behind, inventory issues can arise, and food safety risks can increase.
The right technology can help operators stay ahead of the holiday rush, equipping restaurants to work more efficiently, maintain consistent food safety standards, and prepare for increased demand.
Let’s discuss a few of the best ways to streamline foodservice operations this holiday season, and how NCCO can keep your teams organized, compliant, and fully stocked.
1. Optimize Holiday Prep With Automated Food Labeling
Holiday menus mean more prep, more ingredients, and more opportunities for labeling errors. DateCodeGenie®, NCCO’s automated food safety labeling and dating system, replaces handwritten labels that often smear, fall off, or become illegible during busy shifts with fast, accurate thermal-printed labels.
How DateCodeGenie Helps During the Holiday Rush
- Pre-set your seasonal labels – Set up custom templates in advance for holiday-specific items and LTOs. When the rush hits, staff simply select the label and print, eliminating illegible handwriting and guesswork.
- Implement bulk printing to save time – Kitchens often prep in large batches during busy seasons. With DateCodeGenie, staff can quickly print sheets of direct thermal labels, durable labels, blank labels, blank food labels, labels for food containers, or labels for food packaging with a single tap.
- Improve accuracy and compliance – Automated MRD (made, ready, discard) calculations help reduce waste and maintain food quality, while permanent adhesive labels ensure every item stays clearly marked through storage and handling.
- Support branded holiday items – For grab-and-go or retail offerings, operators can easily create professional labels that enhance merchandising and seasonal presentation. With holiday volume increasing, automated labeling streamlines workflows and helps maintain food safety at scale, especially when teams are stretched thin.
2. Keep Operations Running Smoothly With Task Manager
The holidays magnify every operational gap. Training new staff, managing cleaning schedules, and ensuring consistent food safety protocol becomes significantly harder during peak traffic. Task Manager is restaurant food safety software that simplifies these challenges by digitizing essential operational processes, consolidating checklists, and enabling real-time visibility across locations.
How Task Manager Supports Holiday Success
- Ensure food safety with digital checklists – It is critical for checklists to become more transparent, consistent, and accessible during the busiest season of the year. Create and schedule digital sanitation and cleaning checklists and health inspection checklists to ensure impeccable hygiene standards.
- Maintain HACCP compliance – Digital records make holiday inspections and audits significantly smoother. As a full HACCP food safety management system, Task Manager helps ensure consistent recordkeeping, even when staffing varies, and offers clear tracking of every critical control point.
- Automate temperature monitoring – Task Manager also offers remote temperature monitoring system for restaurants. As holiday prep often requires more refrigerated storage and more frequent temperature fluctuations from constant opening and closing, automated alerts help staff catch issues before they become emergencies.
Operators can prevent costly product losses with wireless temperature sensors for remote food temperature monitoring with Task Manager.
3. Prepare Ahead of Time With NCCO Brand Portals
NCCO is proud to offer a streamlined custom fulfillment solution to make life easier for restaurants of all types. Seasonal menus generally require new packaging, printed materials, signage, and limited-time-offer (LTO) items, and as these must be ready before the holiday rush begins. NCCO’s e-commerce fulfillment for restaurants has created customizable brand portals to make this preparation seamless.
How Brand Portals Streamline Holiday Operations
- Order holiday rollout materials in advance – Ensure every location receives updated menus, POP displays, signage, and promotional print on time.
- Ship directly to stores – Eliminate the need to warehouse large quantities of custom print. Each store can order exactly what it needs, when it needs it.
- Maintain brand consistency across locations – Templates ensure every custom print item, from labels to apparel to graphics, follows approved brand guidelines.
- Enable locations to self-order – Operators no longer need to coordinate multi-store orders manually. Each location can stock up independently for holiday specials, seasonal merchandise, and LTO packaging.
This centralized approach reduces stress, prevents supply shortages, and improves the effectiveness of holiday promotions.
Get Ready for the Holidays With Smarter, Safer, More Efficient Operations
The holiday season doesn’t have to overwhelm your team. With the right tools in place, including automated labeling, digital task management, and streamlined brand fulfillment, restaurants can maintain food safety standards, improve efficiency, and create a consistent, positive, and dynamic guest experience across every shift.
DateCodeGenie, Task Manager, and NCCO Brand Portals give operators the resources they need to stay organized, compliant, and well-stocked for the busiest months of the year.