With a new proprietary software in place, The Veggie Wagon has replaced paper print-outs and whiteboards with iPads and monitors in its Carolina Beach production kitchen.
The Veggie Wagon began beta testing the software earlier this year, said Max Sussman, who owns the Wilmington-area business with his wife, April Sussman. The new system has helped boost efficiency, improve time management and allow for more employee creativity, the Sussmans said.
The Veggie Wagon opened in 2009 in Carolina Beach and today employs around 40 people. Its commercial production kitchen supplies the company's two retail stores and provides its products to more than 30 retail partner locations across the Wilmington area and beyond.
While deploying the new software system was one of The Veggie Wagon’s 2025 goals, improving and streamlining processes in the company’s kitchen has been in the works for the last several years, Max Sussman said.
“It's kind of always been pen and paper and a recipe book and math that everybody's doing, and it never really changed,” Max Sussman said. “As we were scaling and growing, we really saw a need to try to remove human error and make everybody’s life easier.”
The process started with spreadsheets and formulas and evolved from there, with custom code and other back-end work, Max Sussman said. Data pulled in to streamline processes included things like the number of orders, batch sizes and recipe measurements.
Last year, the Sussmans and Alex Anderson, The Veggie Wagon’s director of operations, started to talk about what their “dream system” would look like. They wanted each station in The Veggie Wagon’s production facility to have its own iPad, with recipes and step-by-step instructions populating automatically.
“We had the end point set,” Anderson said, “and then we looked at all the data that we had at the beginning, and it was just finding the pathway to get from the start to the finish.”
They developed the new software system fully in-house. Max Sussman has a background in e-commerce and coding, while Anderson is skilled at working with spreadsheet formulas. The software also uses AI to help run some of the system’s more complicated formulas and coding, Anderson said.
“I'm fairly good at finding out where the numbers come from, where they need to go, and how to go and how to get them there,” Max Sussman said, “and then Alex is really good at the formulation and the tracking.”
Today, every station in The Veggie Wagon’s production facility has a digital production list that gives employees the information they need to complete their assigned tasks and help move the workflow forward.
“This went from a three-ring binder seven years ago with recipes in a clear plastic protector sheet and a whiteboard, and now everything's digitized,” Max Sussman said, “We've gone from our team having to spend an hour a day looking at recipes and finding stuff to now everything is at the end of their fingertip, and everything is immediately available to them.”
That’s led to improved time management and scheduling for the company’s employees, according to the Sussmans. Max Sussman said rising labor costs have made it even more important to know when employees are needed and to adjust schedules accordingly.
The new system also allows the business’s shipping, delivery and retail segments to stay informed about The Veggie Wagon’s production schedules. April Sussman said the improved time management gives employees more time to be creative, allowing them to develop recipes for new products.
“We've been able to provide the technology to them where they don't get drowned out with the mundane task of running a kitchen,” Max Sussman said, “they can now focus on what they love to do, which is create and cook.”
Anderson is currently working on improving the system's use in The Veggie Wagon’s operations, and Max Sussman said the system has the potential to be used by other restaurants, too.
“I think that this is such a game-changing thing in this industry that not only can we benefit from it, but I think that if we decided to take something like this … and worked with other restaurants to help them overcome the same challenges we had,” he said, “I think that this is a very scalable operation.”
