Refining the Good Old Taste
Words by Angie Koh & Andrew Koh

Find out how Good Old Taste reinvented itself by marrying taste with technology.

Formerly known as 108 Eating House, Good Old Taste is an establishment specialising in local cuisine that will be sure to whet your appetite. The eatery, which opened in 1997, has kept its old-school and cosy atmosphere although it is now located in bustling Collyer Quay. Their signatures: Pig Trotters Bee Hoon and Chicken Rice, have been enjoyed and praised by many for the authentic traditional recipes used in giving the dishes their unique flavours. It is therefore not surprising that long queues of customers are often seen at the stall, waiting to fill their tummies with these homely local dishes.

One of the crowd favourite dishes at Good Old Taste: Chicken Rice (Image courtesy of Good Old Taste)

The popularity of the stall among customers meant that older workers often find themselves overwhelmed during peak hours as multiple processes such as ordering, sales transaction, inventory tracking and reporting have to be done manually. As a result, Good Old Taste has been on the lookout for a solution to improve the productivity and well-being of workers in the workplace. Fortunately, Good Old Taste was able to enlist the help of NTUC’s Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) to redesign work processes by implementing the POS, Self-Ordering, Inventory, Kitchen and Queue Management Systems.

With the implementation of the system, older workers do not need to manually take orders and customers are able to order and pay for their food using the POS or Self-Ordering Kiosks. The orders are then sent to the kitchen directly for processing and order slips are generated in a timely fashion for the workers. This reduces incidents of wrong orders being delivered or miscommunication between workers due to illegible handwriting. The queue management system also aids in crowd management and the delivery of the correct dishes to the customers.

Staff operating the new POS System (Image courtesy of Good Old Taste)

Additionally, inventory data can be managed and updated automatically in the system, which streamlines the stock-taking and data retrieval processes as workers no longer need to retrieve the data from paper records or on Excel.

Overall, compared to previous operations, the introduction of automation has helped to raise productivity and contribute to a more conducive workplace environment for workers. After the implementation of the system, the manpower required has also decreased from five to three. And with the cost savings from these job design initiatives, the company rewarded two of its older workers with a pay raise.

Despite having an improvement in daily operations due to the introduction of automation, Good Old Taste face a new challenge – the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, the company has to learn to adapt to these unprecedented times. One of the actions taken was to increase sales through food delivery platforms such as Grab and Foodpanda. Moving forward, the company is looking to open more outlets in the near future.

For more information on Good Old Taste, visit https://goodoldtaste.wordpress.com/

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