Stokd Founder Joseph Stock details why the hospitality industry needs to embrace automation and integration, and why this competitive edge will soon become a survival necessity.
In hospitality, time is currency – and most operators don’t have enough of it.
Running a café, restaurant, or bar means living in a world where margins are razor thin, staff are stretched, and every hour counts. Yet across the industry operators are still tied up in the same old ordering habits: text messages to suppliers, phone calls mid-service, emails at odd hours, and a messy stack of invoices that never seem to match up.
It’s a system that drains time, creates errors, and makes it nearly impossible to keep a clear picture of costs.
The industry lag
Other industries have already embraced automation and integration to solve similar problems they experience. Retail, e-commerce, and trades now rely on streamlined platforms to track orders, payments, and margins in real-time, but hospitality has been far slower to embrace this sort of change.
Why? Because most tools built for the industry are designed by outsiders. They miss the lived reality of running a kitchen, managing suppliers, and keeping service flowing when things get busy.
The cost of manual work
A typical venue juggles between 10 and 15 suppliers every week, with orders arriving through different channels, invoices piling up in inboxes, and managers spending hours cross-checking the numbers against stock and sales.
These inefficiencies tend to lead to missed or duplicated orders, errors in invoicing and payments, poor visibility of true cost of goods sold (COGS), and extra hours spent on paperwork instead of service.
Automation isn’t optional anymore
With staff shortages, rising costs, and increased competition, efficiency means survival in an industry that is being faced with so many challenges. Venues need systems that can cut manual work, reduce mistakes, and give operators real-time visibility on spend and stock.
Smart procurement tools can centralise ordering in one place, automatically generate invoices, sync with accounting software for clean reporting, and provide live visibility of spending.
It’s not about replacing relationships with suppliers, it’s about removing the friction that gets in the way of them.
By hospo, for hospo
That’s the philosophy behind Stokd – a new smart procurement platform that has been built by hospitality operators themselves, not outsiders. We know the frustrations of juggling phone calls, invoices, and supplier apps because we have lived it.
Stokd brings ordering, invoicing, and supplier management into one streamlined app that is built to feel intuitive on the floor and powerful behind the scenes.
By cutting manual admin and giving venues more clarity over COGS, Stokd aims to help operators focus on what matters most: running great venues, looking after their teams, and delivering hospitality to their customers.
The future of procurement
The hospitality industry can’t afford to stay stuck in the old ways of working. As margins tighten and staff shortages continue, smart procurement and automation will move from being a competitive edge to an operational necessity.
Stokd is the solution I needed in my own venues, and now we’re scaling it for the whole industry. The venues that embrace the change will be the ones that thrive tomorrow.
Joseph Stock is a Darwin-based venue operator and pastry chef with more than two decades of experience in the hospitality industry.
For more information, visit stokd.com
