Food, Technology and Beverage Volume 11

Putting People in the First Place – Lei Garden Group

In 1973, the first Lei Garden Chinese Restaurant was opened. Neither did the owner have the knowledge in location selection, marketing strategies nor production skills. Worse still, the less educated chefs and service staffs were almost incommunicable. This resulted in a loss of over 2 million dollars in the first six years of operation……In early 2005, the empire has been expanded into 18 branches over thousand staff spanning across HK, Singapore and China. The perseverance, scientific approach and modern management mind set of Mr. Chan Shu Kit, the founder and chairman of Lei Garden Restaurant Group, is surely the key to success.

The Group spirit emphasizes "putting people in the first place" and believes that by treating customers as good as you can you are just doing the same thing to treat your business good. The Group stresses on the freshness and hygiene of food and clean restaurant environment. More than that, the staff is well educated to ensure the quality of food with balanced diet and reasonable pricing. Satisfied customers would bring continued business and the operator stands to gain in the end.

To meet changing time and expectations of customers, the Lei Garden Group has consistently pushed for innovation. Mr. Chan and his chefs and managers made it a rule to have food tasting session every afternoon. The purpose is to maintain standard and make improvements on the existing menu based on customer's feedbacks, and more importantly to demand each chef to create new dishes. Over the last 30 years, more than a thousand new dishes have been perfected that way. The ever so famous XO sauce on the market has indeed been created by Lei Garden in 1981 and the extremely popular Chilled Mango Sweetener with Grape Fruit and Sago in Hong Kong has made its debut in Singapore back in 1987. In recent years, Lei Garden has been infusing gourmet dishes from all over China and the World into our traditional Cantonese menu and has become one of the pioneers in Fusion Dishes in Hong Kong. Numerous awards won by the Group in these years reflects customers' prestigious image of the Group.

Mr. Chan has scientific approach and modern management mind set to manage the Group with great success. The Group strongly believes POS Management System is important to restaurant management and operation and thus in early stage of the development of the Group has adopted computer system in their restaurant. However, as the performance of the system was not satisfactory, the Group did not use the system in every restaurant and kept on searching a right system. In 1999, the Group selected Seito to implement Seito^® POS Management System to the restaurants .

In fact, apart from insisting the product quality, Seito emphasizes professional and reliable after-sales support. To the corporation which emphasizing long term business relationship, continuous product and service quality improvement is one of key elements in running the business. After years' of development and fine -tuning, Seito^® Wireless Solution was launched to the market. Lei Garden Group has adopted this in coordinating with the application of the current Seito^® POS Management System in their new restaurants. The operation efficiency was greatly enhanced and better customer service was resulted.

Seito Systems Ltd.     www.seito.com.hk