The challenge: the deceptive drain of ‘little jobs’

For Ellen MacGregor, co-owner of Beam Me Up Bagels, managing two busy stores in Dunedin meant balancing high-volume food production with a mountain of invisible tasks. One persistent headache was internal logistics. With one shop housing the laundry facilities, clean aprons, towels, and supplies had to be constantly shuttled between each store.

Initially, Ellen handled these runs herself. During the pandemic recovery and concurrent city roadworks, traffic was quiet enough that it felt manageable. However, as the city returned to normal and managers were hired to run the shops, this little job turned into a significant bottleneck. Shuttling laundry and ingredients three or four times a week quickly became a problematic task. When delegated to professional staff who were paid to be in the store serving customers, it drained valuable staff time. If a manager forgot a run or was on a day off, inventory shortages occurred. Ellen realised that these seemingly minor tasks– including hauling bulky boxes of empty Tetra Paks across town to be recycled – were sucking up mental bandwidth, creating friction, and the team into a loop of odd-job logistics.

The solution: building foundations on two wheels

Outsourcing a handful of small, frequent tasks initially felt unnecessary. They didn't want to engage a large, impersonal freight firm. The turning point came when they discovered Pedals Couriers. As an environmental, locally run e-cargo bike service, Pedals perfectly matched Beam Me Up Bagels’ local values and commitment to the environment.

The integration of Pedals into Beam Me Up Bagels’ weekly routine went far beyond simple shipping; it forced an operational evolution. To hand over the daily inventory and laundry runs, Ellen and her team formalised their internal processes, ensuring items were packed, checked, and ready for the couriers. The e-cargo bikes easily absorbed the inter-shop shuffling, slipped seamlessly through Dunedin’s one-way gridlock, and took over the irregular recycling runs. The Pedals team allowed the bakery staff the flexibility and confidence to rely on a completely hands-off logistics loop.

The impact: erasing mental admin and preventing the ‘sold-out menu’

Ellen outlines the single biggest hidden advantage as the removal of mental admin. Managers no longer have to continuously track, plan, and stress over small logistical pieces; they simply follow a checklist, put it in the box, and trust Pedals to deliver.

The operational benefits quickly translated into a better customer experience:

• Menu reliability: If one bakery location runs low on a specific item like their special chilli jam, Pedals can transfer stock across town, ensuring customers never face an unexpected sold-out menu.

• Building a foundation of trust: Using the low-stakes internal laundry runs allowed the kitchen team to build absolute confidence in Pedals' booking platform and courier reliability.

The future possibilities: exploring a catering expansion

With robust internal processes established and a deep trust built through daily operational runs, Beam Me Up Bagels is looking ahead at what their next phase of growth might look like. The team is currently considering ways to leverage this logistical foundation to expand their corporate and event catering offering.

Crucial to this potential expansion is a powerful capability of the Pedals booking platform: its robust, open API. To ensure any future customer-facing delivery model remains entirely frictionless, Beam Me Up Bagels is looking at leveraging this API to build a direct integration between their own online ordering system and Pedals’ dispatch engine. Rather than relying on a third-party aggregator, this custom integration would allow incoming catering orders to automatically create a delivery order behind the scenes. While still in the consideration phase, utilising the Pedals API presents an exciting pathway to fully automate client deliveries, allowing Beam Me Up Bagels to scale its revenue while maintaining complete data sovereignty and zero extra logistics stress for the management team.

Ready to take the mental admin out of multi-site logistics?

Stop juggling the deceptive, time-sucking little tasks that pull management away from growth. Streamline your internal logistics and lay the groundwork for a frictionless catering channel using the powerful Pedals API. Set up your business account in under two minutes.