Food cost is a constant challenge for managers and kitchen managers. Let your guard down and your throwing product away because it was improperly prepared, stored, portioned, over ordered, or rotated.
All menu items should have recipes that have been costed out so you know the food cost of each menu item.
Recipe adherence is a very important aspect of food cost as improperly prepared food can result in an inferior product that must be discarded.
Following proper sanitation and storage procedures must be followed to avoid any unnecessary contamination that can shorten the shelf life of a product.
It is also important that recipe portion sizes are followed. Under portioning affects the quality therefore, you are not giving the guests what they are paying for and over portioning will have a negative impact on your food cost.
Using your product mix history and following sales trends when ordering food is a very important tool to help prevent over ordering. Over ordering can result in product spoilage and also increases the chances of miscounts when doing inventory.
It is important to set expectations at the hiring process as well as during the training process. Most employees these days do not take the responsibility to focus on costs. Therefore, it is very important that management is constantly following up on product labeling and dating to ensure proper rotation of product.
Tag Archive: Training
Having a good training program in place is a critical part of the business. This is where we ensure new employees know exactly what our steps of service are and the point at which they learn our menu. Menu knowledge is very important to both the new employee as well as the restaurant. If we fail to teach them proper menu knowledge two things happen. First, they make a lot of unnecessary mistakes that cost the restaurant money and second, they are very uncomfortable answering guest questions regarding the menu and their delivery is not smooth. The guests pick up on this and believe it or not, it affects their tips. It also affects the overall impression the guests get of our establishment. There are many steps to a good training program, but I will save them for another day.
