Laminated vs. Synthetic Menus: Let Your Restaurant Decide
Learn More
Back to All Posts
Custom Kitting Solutions
Client Type
National restaurant concept with 1500+ locations
Challenge
For restaurant brands operating at a national scale, executing a promotional rollout involves much more than printing materials and shipping them to restaurants. Every location needs to receive the right materials, in the right quantities, at the right time-and ideally in a way that makes implementation as simple as possible for restaurant teams. For one national restaurant concept with more than 1,500 locations, the existing fulfillment process had become unnecessarily complicated. Promotional and Limited Time Offer (LTO) materials were arriving at restaurants in multiple shipments, creating challenges at both the corporate and restaurant level. Trabon developed a customized kitting and fulfillment solution designed to consolidate materials, reduce shipping complexity, control freight costs, and make each rollout easier for restaurant operators to execute. The Challenge Before transitioning fulfillment to Trabon, the client's promotional materials frequently arrived at restaurant locations in multiple packages. A single promotion could include a variety of Point-of-Purchase (POP) and LTO materials, ranging from smaller printed pieces to large-format and oversized components. Because these materials were produced and shipped separately, restaurants could receive several packages associated with the same promotion. That created a number of operational challenges. Packages could arrive on different days, making it difficult for restaurant teams to know whether they had received everything needed for an upcoming promotion. Individual packages were more likely to become misplaced within a busy restaurant environment. Missing materials resulted in replacement orders, additional freight costs and extra administrative work for both restaurant operators and the corporate support team. Multiple shipments also meant restaurant teams had to receive, identify, store and organize several packages before the promotion could be implemented. For a brand with more than 1,500 locations, even relatively small inefficiencies at the restaurant level could quickly become significant when multiplied across the entire system. During onboarding, the client identified a clear objective: whenever possible, all materials required for a restaurant's promotional rollout should arrive together in a single shipment. While the goal was straightforward, executing it required a more sophisticated fulfillment strategy. Promotional materials varied significantly in size and shape, including oversized components that could not simply be placed into a standard carton. Additionally, not every restaurant received the same combination or quantity of materials. Location-specific requirements meant kits needed to accommodate different configurations while maintaining consistency throughout the fulfillment process. The solution also needed to account for carrier dimensional requirements. Creating cartons large enough to accommodate every possible combination could have resulted in oversized packages and unnecessary freight surcharges. Trabon needed to find the right balance between consolidation, protection, flexibility and freight efficiency.
How We Solved
Our Fulfillment team began by evaluating the complete range of promotional materials and the different shipment configurations required across the restaurant system.
Rather than approaching the project simply as a packing exercise, the team evaluated how materials could be consolidated while considering carton dimensions, product protection, location-specific quantities, ease of packing and carrier shipping requirements.
Based on that analysis, Trabon designed two custom kit sizes capable of accommodating the different combinations of materials required by the restaurants.
This two-size strategy provided the flexibility needed to support location-specific variations without creating an unnecessarily large one-size-fits-all carton.
The custom kits allowed both standard and oversized promotional materials to travel together whenever possible, helping ensure that each restaurant received a complete promotional package rather than a series of individual shipments.
Just as importantly, the cartons were designed around carrier requirements. This helped keep shipments within appropriate dimensional parameters and reduced the risk of avoidable oversized-package fees or other freight surcharges.
Once the packaging strategy was established, the solution was integrated into Trabon’s broader fulfillment workflow.
Materials could be produced, received into inventory, organized for the rollout, picked according to each restaurant’s specific requirements, consolidated into the appropriate kit and shipped to the location as one coordinated package.
For restaurant operators, the process became much simpler: one promotion, one coordinated kit, one delivery.
Behind that simplicity was a fulfillment strategy capable of managing thousands of individual pieces and hundreds of location-specific configurations.
Outcome
The customized kitting program delivered improvements across both the corporate organization and restaurant system.
Consolidating promotional materials into a single shipment significantly reduced the opportunity for individual packages to become lost or misplaced. Fewer missing packages meant fewer replacement orders, reducing both reprint and reshipping costs.
The solution also simplified the experience at the restaurant level.
Instead of receiving multiple packages and determining which pieces belonged to an upcoming promotion, restaurant teams received their materials together in one coordinated kit. This made it easier to receive, store and prepare materials for implementation.
At the corporate level, the streamlined process reduced the administrative burden associated with tracking multiple shipments, responding to missing-material requests and coordinating replacements.
The custom carton strategy also helped control freight costs by balancing the client’s desire for consolidated shipments with carrier dimensional requirements.
Most importantly, the program created a fulfillment process that could scale across a national restaurant system of more than 1,500 locations while still accommodating variations at the individual restaurant level.
More Than Kitting-A Smarter Fulfillment Strategy
For large restaurant brands, effective fulfillment is not simply about getting boxes out the door. It requires understanding how materials are produced, stored, packed, shipped and ultimately used at the restaurant level.
Trabon’s solution transformed a fragmented shipping process into a coordinated national fulfillment program designed around the operational needs of the brand.
By combining custom kitting, location-level distribution logic, inventory management and fulfillment expertise, Trabon helped the client reduce unnecessary shipments, control costs and make promotional execution easier for restaurant operators.
The result was a simple but meaningful improvement:
The right materials. In the right quantities. Packed together. Delivered to the right restaurant at the right time.
For a restaurant organization with more than 1,500 locations, that simplicity creates value at scale.
