A New Restaurant

One area that kills the success of many newer restaurants is controlling food cost. Although it is one of the biggest expense categories in the budget, a lot of owners don’t know how to get it under control. This is especially true of new owners that do not have a background in restaurant work.

While keeping customers happy and keeping your restaurant full of customers is critical, it’s only part of the picture. If your kitchen is making you lose money, more customers may not be the solution. It reminds me of the old joke, “I lose money on every order, but I’m hoping to make up for it in volume.”

There are really only two ways to increase your profits: increase income, or reduce your costs. Raising prices probably isn’t the answer for this problem. In fact, many times raising your prices will cause you to lose customers, and your income will decrease. That leave reducing expenses as your only other option.

The good news is, there are things you can do to get your food cost under control, and that will make an immediate impact on your bottom line.

1.) If you offer employee meals, make sure you have some way to track what was eaten. Require your staff to run their meal check through the register. As a general rule, no food should leave your kitchen without a check to account for it.

2.) Create a waste log. Every time a piece of food is thrown away it should be logged. If you cut your own meat, it should be weighed before and after it is trimmed so you know how much yield you are getting. If your kitchen staff knows that someone is tracking the amount of food that is being wasted, they will be more careful.

3.) Do not allow your staff to eat the mistakes. It’s not unusual for a cook to make a mistake just so they get the free food. You will see this especially if there is a limited employees menu. There will be a lot of mistakes made on items that the cooks wouldn’t normally be allowed to eat. Set up a bin where mistakes are thrown. When a mistake is made, it should be written into the waste log, and then thrown into the bin

4.) Control your portion sizes. Even if your cooks are over-portioning just a little bit, it can have major impact on your food budget. It amount may not seem like much when your looking at a single meal, but even a fraction of an ounce when multiplied by a full days service can become fairly significant. Proper utensils on the serving line are a must. If you have portioned ½ cup of rice, get a #8 scoop. Do not allow your cooks to estimate the proper portion size. Consistency is critical. One way to control portion sizes is to pre-portion food items. Invest in a quality digital scale, and then teach your cooks to use it.

5.) Teach your staff the proper way to handle, prepare, and portion the food. So much food is lost because cooks are left on their own to figure out the correct way to do things. They learn to do it wrong, then train someone else to do it wrong, and the problem starts to snowball. Pretty soon no one is controlling your costs, and the failure of your restaurant is almost guaranteed.

With good procedures and training, it really isn’t hard to reign in runaway food cost. It isn’t always easy to try to break bad habits and establish new ones, so at first you will need to be diligent in watching your staff in this area, but over time, as beeter habits and procedures are established, it gets easier. The great part is, controlling your food cost will have an immediate positive impact on your profits, Which will greatly increase the chances for your restaurants success.