Capacity Management

Never sell more pizzas than your oven can bake.

MyFoodFast caps the orders, or the pizzas, your ordering website and app take in each time slot, so every customer gets a time your kitchen can keep.

Big Manny’s Pizza ordering site on a phone at a busy time: the order time reads “Earliest available — 18:01”, already selected

  • Times you can keep

    Customers only see slots your kitchen has room for, so every time you quote is one you can hit.

  • Count what slows you

    Limit the pizzas, not the tickets. Drinks and dips never use up oven space.

  • Big orders, honest times

    A 40-pizza office order is spread across enough slots, and the customer is told up front.

Set it once. Every busy night runs to plan.

The Capacity Management screen in the MyFoodFast back office: a switch to enable it, the time slot length, whether to limit by orders or products, and the limit per slot

  • Set what your kitchen can make

    Pick a slot length and a limit: six orders every 15 minutes, or twenty pizzas if the oven is the bottleneck.

  • Full slots quietly disappear

    When 7:00 and 7:15 are full, your site and app offer 7:30. ASAP becomes “Earliest available”, already selected.

  • The kitchen stays on the clock

    Orders arrive at a pace your team can cook, so tickets stop piling up and drivers leave on time.

Big Manny’s Pizza ordering site on a phone at a quiet time, offering ASAP or a scheduled time
Quiet night
Big Manny’s Pizza ordering site on a phone at a busy time: the order time reads “Earliest available — 18:01”, already selected
Busy night

What your customers see

An honest time beats a broken promise.

Without a limit, the site offers ASAP whatever the kitchen is doing. With Capacity Management it offers the earliest slot you can really serve, already selected, so ordering takes no extra taps.

Worked example

A conveyor oven that bakes twenty pizzas every 15 minutes.

  1. 1Set the time slot to 15 minutes.
  2. 2Limit by products, and set 20 products per slot.
  3. 3Choose your pizzas as the products that count.

Now the 7pm slot can never be sold more than twenty pizzas. Once it is full, the next customer is offered 7:15. A 100-pizza order needs five slots, so it is offered a time about 75 minutes out instead of your usual 30, and the rest of Friday stays on schedule.

The settings for this example

Time slot
15 minutes
Limit by
Products
Products per slot
20
Products that count
Pizzas

Friday, 6:55pm

Pizzas booked per slot

  • 19:00Full
  • 19:15Full
  • 19:30Earliest
  • 19:456 / 20
  • 20:002 / 20

What is capacity management for takeaway online ordering?

Capacity management, sometimes called order throttling or order pacing, limits how much your online ordering accepts in each time slot. MyFoodFast Capacity Management is a setting in MyFoodFast Online Ordering for UK takeaways: you choose a slot length and a limit, and your ordering website and app stop offering a slot once it reaches what your kitchen can really produce.

For pizza shops the bottleneck is usually the oven, so limiting by order count is too blunt: one order is a single margherita, the next is twelve large pizzas. MyFoodFast lets you limit by products and choose exactly which ones count, so the limit follows oven space rather than the number of tickets.

It works the same for any takeaway with a production limit, whether that is the fryer in a fish and chip shop, the grill in a burger kitchen or the wok station in a Chinese or Indian takeaway.

It is part of MyFoodFast Online Ordering and your branded ordering app, and pairs with the kitchen display so the orders you accept arrive in the order you will cook them.

Capacity Management — the questions owners ask

How do I stop getting more online orders than my kitchen can handle?

Turn on Capacity Management in your MyFoodFast back office and set a limit per time slot, for example six orders or twenty pizzas every 15 minutes. Once a slot is full, your website and app stop offering it and move customers to the next free time.

Should I limit by orders or by pizzas?

Orders, if most of your orders are a similar size. Products, if one part of the kitchen is the bottleneck, like the pizza oven: choose just the products that use it. Only the products limit gives very large orders a longer, realistic time.

What happens to the ASAP button?

It becomes “Earliest available”, with the first free slot already selected. On a quiet night that is effectively ASAP; on a busy one it is a time you can actually deliver.

What happens with a really big order?

It is spread across as many slots as it needs. A customer ordering 100 pizzas against a 20-per-slot limit is offered a time about 75 minutes out, with a message saying it is a large order.

Does it limit phone and walk-in orders on the POS?

Not yet. It applies to your ordering website and app, where the overbooking happens. POS support is on the way; until then, staff taking phone orders should check the kitchen before promising a time at peak.

Can I change the limit on the night?

Yes. Change the slot length or the limit in the back office at any time, for example when you are a chef down, and the next customer sees the new times.

How much does it cost?

Nothing extra. Capacity Management comes with MyFoodFast Online Ordering, which is included with a base plan from £20 a month. Rolling monthly, no minimum term.

See exactly how it’s set up

Step-by-step guides and features worth knowing.

Works with

Better together

Capacity Management sets the pace. These take the orders and get them cooked.

Take every order your kitchen can cook. Not one more.

Capacity Management comes with MyFoodFast Online Ordering, included with a base plan. Rolling monthly, no minimum term.

Start free trialBook a demo

7-day free trial. Card required; your plan starts after the trial unless you cancel.

  • No contracts
  • No aggregator commission
  • Cancel anytime