Summary:
Early Bird Cafe (Early Bird) was a popular breakfast and brunch restaurant in downtown London, Ontario. Early Bird was founded by brothers Justin and Greg Wolf, who also owned other London restaurants, including Los Lobos. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wolf brothers made the executive decision to shift their focus toward their other businesses and sell Early Bird to longtime employee of Los Lobos, Crystal Kendall. Kendall and her husband, Kyle Hough, established a strong customer base shortly after their acquisition, but struggled to meet demand for the most popular breakfast dishes with their current kitchen equipment and staff. To alleviate their capacity restrictions, they were considering the purchase of a new deep fryer or hiring a new line cook to prepare pre-made pancakes. Students will analyze Early Bird’s kitchen operations through process identification and perform process and trade-off analysis. They will determine operational bottlenecks through production capacity and conduct financial analysis to evaluate improvement options. This operational management case is designed for an introductory business course at the undergraduate level.
The Early Bird: Cracking the Capacity Conundrum
Author: Richard S. Bloomfield and Ruby McEvily
Category:
Operations
Preamble:
This case was written with the support of research assistants Heather McDougall and Ivey Ludwig, and was edited by Joe Gilvesy and Katie Oates. Final production of this note was made possible by Ryan Rabie from the Library and Learning Services team at Huron University. The authors' intent for this material is to be used in a classroom or other management learning settings. Names or other identifying information may be altered to protect confidentiality.
Published 07-25-2025
Copyright:
This content is freely available without charge to readers and their institutions. All content is published under the Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Readers are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of this case without seeking prior permission from the author(s).
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