Case Study: Herschend Family Entertainment achieves lower food costs and faster inventory management with Crunchtime

Herschend Family Entertainment reduces costs and improves purchasing with Crunchtime

Herschend Family Entertainment, the world’s largest family-owned theme park company, needed better visibility and control across 180+ dining locations, where food purchasing, inventory, and menu management were spread across spreadsheets and outdated systems. The complexity of managing vendor pricing, contracts, recipes, and food costs made it difficult to scale efficiently and improve profitability, prompting the company to adopt Crunchtime Inventory Management.

Crunchtime implemented a consolidated inventory and purchasing platform that centralized vendor contracts, recipe documentation, menu costing, inventory transfers, and ordering. The result was faster, more accurate operations and clearer food-cost visibility: Dollywood cut cost of sales by 1%, saving more than $780,000 in one year, while inventory counts and audits became up to two hours faster per count. Crunchtime also helped uncover additional savings, including over $50,000 from correcting a simple overcharge.

Herschend Family Entertainment

Heather Barnhart

Revenue Systems Manager