Controlling Your Food Costs
You might produce the best food your city or even your country has ever seen, but if you don’t control the costs in your kitchen you’re quickly going to have to shut your doors because your business is just not profitable. We all design our menus to produce a profit yet the dynamic environment in which we work requires that we work constantly to maintain the margins we designed our food menu around. Here’re 4 points for you to consider when your food costs begin to fall off the track.
Keep Wastage Logs
Keeping wastage logs allows you to understand how much product you’re ordering and not using. This is lost money, and if you’re not closely monitoring this it can quickly spiral out of control. Use your wastage logs to help you adjust you orders. Ordering systems and seasonal pars are all good however kitchens are dynamic and if you see something that is off you should intervene and reduce your order size to suit.
Track Food Cost Variance
The costs of ingredients fluctuate with the seasons of the year. This especially applies to fresh ingredients like fruits and vegetables. Prices of these ingredients can spike at certain times of the year, often for long periods. In order to balance your food costs it is essential to price your menu items using an average cost for these ingredients. Doing this allows you to avoid surprises when the prices of these items do fluctuate.
Negotiate or Find New Vendors
If your current vendors cannot get you the product you want at the price you want then maybe it’s time to consider looking elsewhere for better prices on your produce. To ensure that you stay on good terms with your current representatives let them know of your intentions early on, they may still be able to negotiate you a better deal, and it’s always good to keep good ties.
Theft
This is one of the worst and easiest ways that your food costs can slide away from you. Thieves will often go for the most expensive items, such as meats, and If you suspect that there is a thief within your ranks there are a number of ways you can go about uncovering who they are. You could openly ask everyone in your staff about theft in order to discourage the thief. You could tighten your security, maybe add in some cameras. You could even resort to conducting your own private inventory every morning until you ascertain whom the thief is. If you suspect theft is your problem, find a solution quickly before it worsens, theft can be contagious.
In order to know that your food costs are accurate it is essential that you track them. If you use Foodsight by Bevsight then you’re already tracking your food costs and can see how your COGS are dynamically moving as the price of produce fluctuate. But there are outside factors which can affect your food costs that these systems do not know of. They can tell you when and where your food costs are off but not how. The above four points are reasons as to why your food costs can go out of whack and suggestions to enable you to get them back on track.
