Practical guides on cost control, suppliers, orders and waste. Written for whoever decides what to buy and from whom, every week.Practical guides on costs, suppliers, orders and waste.
What you throw away in the kitchen costs you three different things, each with a different degree of certainty, and none of it shows up in your accounts because it hides inside food cost. To see it, you have to separate ordered, sold and binned.
Writing five orders on five different channels is tedious, but that isn't where the real time goes. It goes when something doesn't add up and you have to work out what you actually ordered, from whom, and where you wrote it down. That is where a unified cart saves time: one order history instead of five places to search.
Why keeping your supplier records and your order flow in two different tools adds work instead of removing it, and what to ask of a tool that holds them together.
The 28-35% food cost band everyone repeats describes full-service restaurants and nobody else. A pizzeria and a bar are measured wrong by it, in opposite directions.
A savings percentage is a ratio, and most case studies never print the two numbers behind it. Four questions tell you whether there is a measurement under the headline — and give you the shape of measuring your own.
Rotation, portioning and trim reuse all work on product you have already paid for. The quantity that created the waste was chosen days earlier, at the order — and that is the only place the number really moves.
An ordering module bundled into a POS or inventory platform can't hold your suppliers' rules — order cutoff, price list, delivery days. Here's what can.
The number of suppliers you carry is a cost line nobody negotiates. Here is how to work out, from your own purchasing data, when one more stops paying for itself.
The food cost formula was never the problem. The problem is when the number shows up — thirty to forty-five days after the price that produced it changed.
