How Pitango Gelato Built a Training Program in Two Weeks With 7shifts

 

Nearly 20 years ago, Founder and Owner Noah Dan set out to recreate the gelato of the summers he spent with his grandparents in Trieste, Italy. Rather than open a storefront and figure out sourcing later, he found the right cows and the right farm in Baltimore County and built a production plant first.

Pitango Gelato still imports most of its ingredients—nut paste, chocolate—directly from Italy, and makes traditional Italian-style gelato and sorbet with no artificial colors, no preservatives, and whole fruit. “We always like to say we don’t have sprinkles,” says Jim Freaney, Pitango’s Director of Operations. “We’re not that kind of ice cream shop.”

Pitango has since grown to nine locations: seven corporate stores, plus two franchises in Old Town and South Riding, Virginia. Base mixes are made at the farm and shipped to stores, where every location churns its own gelato and sorbet on-site alongside a full, Italian-leaning coffee program.

But standards that specific are only as good as the people executing them, and Pitango staffs up to 150 employees at peak across nine locations. For years, training them meant Dropbox files and printouts. We talked to Jim about how he built a new training program for Pitango in two weeks, and how 7shifts holds the rest of a lean operation together.

Meet Jim Freaney, Director of Operations

Jim’s first restaurant job was at 12 years old, at a drive-in up the street from his house in upstate New York. There, he would ride his bike to work, peel potatoes for the shift, and make just enough cash to splurge on a few baseball cards. “I thought it was the coolest thing ever.”

From there: waiting tables in high school, tending bar, and then eventually running a bar… “when I was way too young to run a bar.” A recruiter sent him to an interview for what turned out to be Panera Bread, newly arrived in Maryland. He stayed 15 years and watched it grow from four locations to 65. Then, after a year running his own place and a stint operating pizza concepts in college towns, he saw an ad for Pitango coming out of COVID.

At the interview with CEO Dina and Owner Noah, he realized this was the next stage for his career. “That commitment to great quality and great ingredients and no shortcuts, and all the things that I’m passionate about in this business, really drew me in,” he says.

 

 

Coming up on five years later, Jim oversees every location, coaches the general managers, and handles everything from importing ingredients to cold storage to––in his words––plunging toilets.

“Daily, I am pulled in many different directions,” Jim says. “And I think I enjoy the chaos of that. That’s what’s kept me in the restaurant business for all this time.”

Before 7shifts: Too many tools that didn’t talk to each other

When Jim arrived, the stores were scheduling on a different platform. And one pressing issue? It didn’t have a draft mode. 

“It published itself as you wrote it,” he says. “So everybody could see it as you wrote the schedule. There was no ‘I can build the schedule, then hit publish.’ Coming from 7shifts and coming into that, I was like, that’s insane.”

Forecasting was thin to nonexistent, and multi-location visibility was worse. “You had to log in separately to each one, so I, as director, couldn’t see everything in one app,” Jim says. Writing a schedule took “at least double the time, if not triple the time.”

Plus, everything else was scattered too:

• Communication in Slack: Messages lived in a separate app from the schedule, so nothing reached the team where they already were.
• Checklists in spreadsheets: Managers could tick a box, but there was no way to prove the work actually got done.
• Temp logs on paper: Every reading went into a filing cabinet, where it did nothing for anyone until an inspector asked.
• Shift coverage by phone call: Swaps happened verbally, so when someone didn’t show up, no one could say who was responsible.

Jim already knew what he wanted, because he’d brought 7shifts into a previous concept after comparing it against HotSchedules: “7shifts was able to beat HotSchedules on pricing, and they had a little more functionality,” he says. “It was great. There weren’t a lot of hiccups switching. Once you get everybody in there, you’re good.”

 

The training problem: A Google Classroom that never got finished

And then came the next problem: training at scale was still manual and time-consuming. And this was the issue Jim most wanted to fix: “Originally we had everything in Dropbox,” he says. “You would bring in new hires. You’d print stuff out. I didn’t like that.”

He started shopping for a dedicated training platform, but everything he looked at was out of the price range. “They were all very expensive,” he says. So he tried to build it himself in Google Classroom. He had a clear vision for it: everyone logs in, and the reports come back to him.

Only, like any restaurant operator, there was always something more urgent. “I was trying to build it out; then we get busy, and then I tried to get back to it,” Jim says.

It never got finished. Then 7shifts launched Employee Training… inside the platform, Pitango was already running every day.

The solution: 7shifts Employee Training, built in a matter of hours

Pitango joined the 7shifts Employee Training beta and was live in two weeks with a set of simple courses.

“It’s kind of what I envisioned my Google Classroom being, but I didn’t have the skill to do it,” Jim says. “So I’m very happy that someone else did, and it’s all in 7shifts now.”

AI-powered course builder for a head start

Instead of retyping years of material, Jim fed Pitango’s existing documents into 7shifts’ AI course builder and edited what came back. 

“The AI is really good. I plugged in all our materials, and it spit out stuff for me,” he says. “I didn’t have to spend three days typing it out. I could put it in the AI, proofread it, check it, make sure everything was right, and then make tweaks here and there.”

 

 

A simple course takes him about 30 minutes to create. The technical ones—where the details matter most—take about an hour. Asked how much time the AI saved him, Jim didn’t hesitate: “Weeks.”

“When I tried to build that Google Classroom, I would give up. I’d be like, I can’t do it. If it didn’t have the AI tool […] it’d be like transcribing a book for every course. It would suck. Nobody’s in this business to be in front of their computer all day. It’s saving me literally work weeks of sitting down—and nobody’s got time for that.”

Ease of collaboration and assigning 

Employee training is also a collaborative process: “We built everything, sent it out to our GMs, had the GMs go through all the courses, give their feedback, and then we edited based on what they saw,” he says. “Like, is there enough of this subject? Is there too much of this subject? Is it repetitive anywhere?” The team has kept building and editing since.

New hires now get assigned the right courses with a due date attached. “Getting the information and having it automatically go to the role as they get hired, and giving them a deadline, has been great,” he says.

No separate platform for staff to log into

For Jim, another big win is the delivery of training: “They don’t have to have a separate app. They don’t have to log into a computer. It’s all right in their phone, which is in everyone’s pocket these days,” he says. 

“The best part is they have that information at their fingertips. They can use it as a resource as well as a training tool. If they’re not sure, they can go back into it—like, what is the spec on that?”

 

As a multi-unit operator, Jim adds, “Nobody can be in every store all at once for the training, and nobody’s going to hire a trainer for every store… I could go hire a company to do it, send them all my documents, and they charge me a fortune.”

“I’m already a user of 7shifts. I can add this quite easily and be up and running… We were up and running in two weeks with some simple courses.”

Beyond 7shifts Employee Training: The rest of the HR platform

Training landed on top of a stack Pitango was already running every day. Here’s how Jim’s team also uses 7shifts to make restaurant life easier:

Scheduling in as little as 20 minutes

GMs at Pitango write schedules at least two weeks out, working from sales goals, seasonality, and weather.

But 7shifts takes a lot of the work out: “Seasoned GMs, they can usually write the schedule within an hour, half hour—some of them, I’m sure, 20 minutes. Once you know your location and you know your workflows, it’s easy. It’s quick.”

“They spend more time following up on the checklist and log stuff than they do writing the schedule.” And all Jim has to do from the top is a quick review.

 

 

Accurate sales forecasts for labor cost savings

Staffing swings hard at Pitango. 10 to 20 people per location in summer can drop to about five in winter. And in the ice cream business, weather is most of the forecast. “Having weather in the log book is huge,” Jim says. “When it’s raining, when it’s cold, we’re not going to be busy. And then when it’s warm, we’re going to be busy.” 

The sales side comes straight from Toast. Live sales and labor data sync across all locations, so the forecast Jim’s GMs schedule against is built on real numbers. “The fact that they talk to each other is great,” he says. “I can go into 7shifts and get all the information that I can get from Toast.”

Between these and hourly projections, “we’ve been able to really dial in exactly what we need and when.” Jim plans labor weekly and controls it daily.

“Since we added 7shifts, we’ve improved our overall labor every year, year over year.”

 

 

Checklists that actually prove the work

Opening and closing checklists and temp logs run through Task Management, with photo and temperature inputs built in. “A lot of other scheduling apps, you can build a checklist, but it’s simply a checklist,” Jim says. “You can’t take a picture, you can’t write in a temperature.” 

His favorite trick: “I can say, okay, take a picture of the bathroom, but every time you take a picture you have to move the toilet bowl cleaner, so I know it’s a new picture. It’s been really effective.” 

A log book that doubles as a vibe check

Every shift lead and manager writes notes daily, and reading them is how Jim starts his day. Pitango added its own prompts: How did you make a guest feel great today? How did you make a fellow employee feel great today? “We’ve got some little stuff in there that really engages the staff,” he says. “It’s kind of a vibe check.” 

Plus, a few more use cases: “It helps me with maintenance, helps me with control of labor. It helps me with being in compliance for temp logs and health inspections. And I have it all in one spot, so I can check every location every day.”

 

 

Announcements with read receipts for accountability

And another one of Jim’s favorite features? Announcements. Pitango sends one recap announcement weekly and short daily updates—”quick hitters like, hey guys, we’re now putting the almond milk here, not here.” 

The read receipts are the point. “Using the announcement tool so you can see who’s read the announcement, who hasn’t, is so critical for everybody in the company.” It’s also how he holds the standard: “We try to say we’re only as good as what we allow.”

One app the team actually opens

Again, Jim stresses the importance of having only one platform for staff. Employees swap and drop shifts, pick up shifts, leave shift feedback, message each other, and now take their training in the same place.

“Especially now with the training, they only have one place to go,” Jim says. “You don’t have to have three different apps on your phone. You don’t have to come look at a piece of paper on a wall… If I didn’t see a lot of usage in it, I would think that they’re not liking it. But since they use it, I know that they’re liking it.”

The final word: “It’s consistent. And consistency wins every time”

As for Jim’s final verdict on 7shifts: 

“7shifts helps with the P’s: proper preparation prevents poor performance. If you are prepared and you have good numbers, and you put good information in, it gives good information out. It keeps everything in line: communication, scheduling, forecasting, training—all of it’s in one place, and it’s consistent. And consistency wins every time.”