5 Features You're Missing From Your Butcher Shop POS

Dec 07, 2023 • 5 min read

Food waste and lost profits.

These are direct results of not having the tools you need to manage your butcher shop. If you’re still using outdated or generic technology, you’re bleeding money daily.

Picture this: Your local butcher shop is ticking along nicely, but then a large chain supermarket opens. They have a deli section with smart scales, digital labels, and lavish loyalty programs. Your loyal customers start shopping there, because they know they’re getting accurate pricing and rewards.

That’s not a nice picture, right? It doesn’t have to become a reality. All you need is a purpose-built butcher shop point of sale (POS) system to compete with the big guns.

This article highlights the features that will help take your butcher shop from average to a cut above the rest, without sacrificing the community feel you pride yourself on.

What Do You Need From a Butcher Shop POS?

Running a successful butcher shop takes a lot more than having the best cuts of meat — you face unique challenges other retail stores don’t have to deal with. That’s why specialized inventory management software is crucial. And if that software integrates with a butcher shop POS system? Even better.

Perishable products, like meat, require precise inventory tracking. Without real-time visibility and tracking, you risk letting products expire before you sell them, leading to dreaded food waste and lost profits. Paper-based methods don’t cut it anymore.

With an advanced butcher shop POS, you can track all meat inventory down to the type of cut, grade, weight, and expiration date. Plus, a quality deli scale that integrates with your POS will help you prepare and sell variable-weight items.

Inventory management isn’t the only feature a purpose-built POS helps manage. With robust reporting, you can see metrics that matter, like waste percentages and popular cuts. Using this information, you can make better decisions about ordering and production.

Generic POS systems won’t provide the in-depth reporting, detailed inventory management, and product-level insights to confidently run your store. Let’s deep dive into the five features you’re missing.

#1: Complete Meat Inventory Management

You want to be known for excellent quality meat. To manage the freshness of your products, you need detailed inventory tracking. It’s best if you can have numerous custom fields in your POS software.

Your POS system should catalog inventory by cut, grade, farm source, butcher name, weight, date packaged, expiration date, and more. Granular tracking might not be possible with generic POS systems — yet tracking to this degree is essential for dialing in on purchasing.

Granular tracking helps ensure you sell the right stock at the right time. With proper rotation processes like FIFO (first in, first out), you limit spoilage and lost sales.

#2: Customized Menu and Label Printing

Your customers want to know exactly what they’re buying when it comes to grades, weights, pricing, and sourcing. Inaccurate information will cause customers to lose trust, and manual labeling slows down operations.

With preset label formats, you can print clear labels with all the information you need. Plus, with integrated inventory management, you can pull those details from your database.

Do you get your products from local farms? You want to be able to tell customers that! Your POS should allow you to tailor preset formats to include additional farm sourcing information and custom branding.

#3: Detailed Reporting

You can’t optimize operations without insights into sales trends, product margins, waste, inventory usage rates, and other key metrics.

Let’s look at sales, for example. You want reports by meat type, cut, grade, and product. What’s selling well? What isn’t? Tracking sales by specific cut and grade uncovers top performers. Other cuts might not sell well, and you might decide to create promotions to help move them.

Sales reports also help forecast demand. With historical sales data, you can see which cuts are most popular at different times of the year. For example, maybe you sell more burgers in the summer. Or perhaps you see a spike in demand for lamb at Easter time. Whatever the case, detailed reports help manage your inventory and improve your bottom line.

Other reports to look for:

Inventory reports to help minimize over or understocking
Employee sales data to track performance
Supplier reports to ensure the quality of their products and delivery statistics
Customer purchase information to help forecast demand and inform loyalty programs

#4: Integrated Customer Loyalty

Like any small business, your butcher shop relies on repeat customers and word-of-mouth recommendations to thrive.

Retaining customers may be more important than acquiring new ones! To help nurture customer loyalty, think of incentives and promotions like bulk pricing, members-only discounts, and points-based rewards.

Examples of loyalty options include:

Free custom orders for special occasions
Exclusive access to cooking classes
Complimentary gift wrapping
Early access to holiday meats

A robust POS system has loyalty features baked in. You can track individual purchases and buying behaviors to build customer profiles. Then, tailor rewards based on frequently purchased items and other insights.

Another thing to consider is that your butcher shop is a big part of the community. You’ll often reflect the cultural nuances of your neighborhood. Ideally, your POS system offers features that embrace culture, from language-specific interfaces to supporting local events through targeted promotions.

#5: Easy Hardware Compatibility

Your tools impact quality, efficiency, and even safety.

When it comes to equipment like scales, barcode scanners, and label printers, you need seamless integration with inventory systems and transactions. Manually tracking weights, inputting container tares, or struggling with incompatible printers are problems you can do without.

The best butcher shop POS systems let you handle bulk sales by weight, and offer tare weight management to automatically account for the weight of containers, ensuring every weight-based transaction is accurate and fair.

For variable-weight products, you need an integration with deli scales. As you weigh and package items, they should sync with your POS, making them easy to track. No more manual data entry and human error! You can also send accurate prices to your POS.

Last, your point of sale should be able to process partial tenders and various payment methods. Some customers will split payments between cash, credit, and gift cards. A POS with advanced sales processing capabilities speeds up checkout and builds customer loyalty.

The Best Butcher Shop POS: Feature-Rich and Affordable

A successful, modern butcher shop requires more than high-quality meats. You need point of sale technology that makes running your shop a breeze. Generic POS systems limit your potential — they lack precise tracking, scale integrations, and tailored customer loyalty features.

A purpose-built POS system helps manage perishable inventory, informs buying decisions, and removes friction from sales.

Markt POS is a point of sale solution for butchers and fishmongers. Besides providing deli scale integrations, custom label printing, and barcode integrations, we offer flexible discount management, offline transactions, automated inventory management, and customer loyalty programs.

Don’t settle for a generic POS system. Request a free software demo of Markt POS and experience the difference for yourself.

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