Hindkesari is a non-veg casual dining restaurant on FC Road, Pune — 9 years of operations, spreadsheet forecasts, and the same fasting-day surprise every Shravan. This is what changed in the first 30 days of the Forkcast pilot.
The outlet
60 covers, north-Indian and coastal mix, Petpooja POS since 2021. Weekday lunch is office traffic; weekends are families. Fasting windows (Ekadashi, Shravan Mondays) cut non-veg covers 35–45% — historically discovered at 11am when the tandoor was already fired.
Onboarding: 12 minutes
- Petpooja API — read-only credentials; no menu changes required.
- Recipe mapping — top 18 dishes by revenue; auto-suggest matched 14; four manual portion tweaks.
- Fixed costs — rent, four salary lines, utilities, EMI entered once.
- First sync — 90 days of order history overnight; forecast live next morning.
Outcomes at day 30
| Metric | Before | After | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily prep planning | 45–60 min | 10–12 min | −75% |
| Fasting-day waste | ₹4–6k / day | ₹500–900 / day | −85% |
| Forecast horizon | Same-day gut feel | 30 days, dish-level | +30 days |
Forkcast cut our daily prep planning time and surfaced fasting day demand drops we used to learn the hard way. Onboarding took 12 minutes from Petpooja credentials to live forecast.
What the owner actually does
The brief lands at 7pm with tomorrow's cover forecast, break-even check, and any calendar flags. The owner reads it on WhatsApp, adjusts prep quantities for flagged dishes, and occasionally shifts one server shift. No daily dashboard habit — the system pushes; he doesn't pull.
Fasting-calendar signal was the single highest-ROI feature for this outlet. Western forecasting tools don't model Ekadashi; Indian restaurants lose margin on the days they matter most.