The Two Most Controllable Costs No. 1 - Food
Every restaurant has two controllable costs that take precedence over all other costs – food and labor. In this post, I’m going to teach you how my experience has helped me conquer these two demons and save them from throwing away thousands of dollars.
Your food cost is what you pay to your commissary and/or vendors. What you spend on the product you sell is your food cost. This number goes up as you order more food and goes down as you order less food. The problem we face is that our sales may stay stagnant, but our food cost goes up. What that means is that the food is being used at a rate higher than necessary. Your employees are giving out portions that are too big, throwing away too much food at the end of the night, or, and this does happen often, employees are stealing. Instead of taking that as a loss, the key to success it to find why that food is actually disappearing so you can create a gameplan as to how to save it.
If you do an investigation and find that employees are giving too much food or cutting too large of portions, introduce the use of scales or give visual cues to remind the crew what the portion size should be. When I worked for Domino’s Pizza, we were required to weigh every topping on the pizza to ensure that we were not over-using or under-using any toppings.
If your investigation leads you to find that the kitchen is throwing away too much food at the end of the night, this is usually because employees are over-prepping food so as to avoid too much work during clean up during the late night. It may help to get people out on time, and it may even be worth it to save on your labor cost, but regardless of that, this area of food cost is still one that can damage the financial health of your restaurant. An experienced cook will be able to know how much or how little the restaurant will need with relative ease. The best thing for a manager to do in this situation is to communicate with the head cook or chef to determine what can be done about projecting how much ought to be used. If you work in a smaller QSR, employees may be using your food waste as their own grocery shopping. It’s nice to let employees take home food at the end of the night that would be otherwise thrown away, but all too often I’ve seen employees “accidentally” make too much of their favorite foods so as to take it home with them at night.
To fix this, a manager needs to be always watching. If the manager decides that the employees are making too much food, whether through malice or ignorance, correction needs to be placed quickly. Because the manager is the better and more keen eye to the late night food needs, a cook ought to check with the manager towards the later hours and ask how much ought to be made. This places the responsibility of the food cost on the manager, and if the manager is a responsible manager, it will keep the problem under control.
Finally, there is always the possibility of theft. Everywhere I’ve worked, there has been a problem with employees stealing food. When the manager isn’t looking, an employee will take a bag of whatever they like to their car, and suddenly, you have missing food when you do your nightly count. It’s important to decide what you will do in this situation, because it will happen to you. Cameras are a great tool, but rarely do you know when the food is stolen, so you have very little to work with. You may have suspicions as to who is the culprit, and you may want to start with noticing when they take trash to the dumpster or make a trip to their car or take a smoke break. Any time they leave the building, are they carrying a bag, whether it’s their own or just a trash bag? Employees are very innovative in their ways to steal, so it’s important to be innovative in finding it. Once the thief is found, you should find your food cost to be closer to being where you want it to be.
On a management level, it’s such a good practice to use nightly count sheets to keep the managers aware of how much is truly being used. If you do not have a regular practice of measurement in place, the store will not have any need to pay attention to how much is being used and the store will be hemorrhaging money through food cost. Many restaurants never do any sort of inventory, so how could they even know if someone is stealing or the employees are overusing.
Don’t just go by truck orders, go by actual inventory, and do it as often as possible. When I worked at Domino’s, cheese was our most-used item. Not only did we do an inventory count every night, but we did counts for just cheese four times a day to see how much we were using throughout the day. This helped us see which shifts used cheese the most incorrectly and helped us discover our areas of opportunity easier. A manager who knows that they cannot blame their misuse on anyone else is much more likely to use the most proper portions. All this to say – do your inventory counts and do them as often as possible.
Food is difficult to control, but once you get it (along with labor) under control, you will finally be able to take a sigh of relief knowing that you have taken care of the problems that will at least keep you from going out of business. Not only will you be much more relaxed, but your bosses or owners will be much more supportive of you. Therefore, keep those food costs under control.
In the next post, I’ll teach you how I conquered the other demon of restaurant costs – labor.