Reducing Restaurant Waste to Lower Food Costs

In the restaurant world, inventory and recipe items are wasted for reasons like spillage or spoilage. This waste is known about to some extent, but isn't usually tracked or fully analyzed. As a result, operators are missing an opportunity to reduce costs and improve margins.

Restaurant inventory, recipe, and cost management systems like COGS-Well enable you to track and report the amount and cost of waste at an item detail level. This can help you optimize purchasing and better understand item usage (and usage variances if you track them).

The Importance of Tracking Waste

Consistently recording waste leads to higher accuracy of your calculated on-hand inventory. It also helps increase overall operational efficiency and uncovers some of the root causes of higher food costs. By keeping a close eye on your waste, your team can benefit from:

• More Accurate On-Hand Calculations: Ensuring your inventory database reflects what is actually sitting on your shelves. Features like suggested ordering or suggested preparation will be more accurate.

• Identifying Overordering and Overproduction: Spotting when overordering or excessive preparation of items leads directly to spoilage so you can order/produce the right items in the right quantities.

• Catching Inconsistent Quality: Identifying when you are receiving inconsistent yield or lower quality product from a vendor.

• Deterring Theft and Overportioning: Creating an added layer of accountability across shifts.

• Better Insight into Variances: Gaining additional visibility when tracking theoretical versus actual usage variances.

“With COGS-Well, you can count the critical items you need to keep an eye on daily. By utilizing a waste log, you can drill down and find the root cause of issues like your inventory showing an overusage of something. It's important because it affects all your other numbers, especially if you're a brand using theoretical costs and usage.” – Jeremy Lanni, Senior Director, Information Technology, &pizza

“Being able to measure our managers on actual versus theoretical inventory cost and usage has increased their knowledge of how COGS (cost of goods sold) works. It also increased their awareness of recipes, waste, and portioning.” – Jennifer Beougher, CFO, Ruby Slipper Restaurant Group

Recording Waste in COGS-Well

COGS-Well provides powerful tools designed to simplify and streamline how you log and analyze waste:

• Waste Templates: You can set up custom waste templates for the specific inventory and recipe items that you commonly waste to expedite daily tracking.

• Waste Types and Reasons: Waste types (such as "kitchen" or "meats") can be categorized, and specific waste reasons (such as "spoiled" or "spilled") can easily be included.

• Record Waste Daily: Staff can utilize a printed waste worksheet or enter items and quantities directly on a mobile device.

• Report Waste: The waste report displays the items, quantities, and total cost for a selected date range. Additionally, waste is automatically included on theoretical inventory usage reports if your team uses them.

“Our waste numbers were really high when we first switched to COGS-Well. The system has made it easy for us to track it, identify where the opportunities for improvement are, and clean it up. We also love how you can include or exclude waste on the usage variance reports.” – Emir Aydin, Director of Operations, Impact Kitchen

Summary

If there are items you know you commonly waste – or suspect are slipping away as hidden losses – your next best step is to track and record them to increase overall efficiency. COGS-Well offers built-in templates and reports to make this process simple and seamless.

In addition, tracking waste acts as a strong deterrent to theft and overportioning, helping your team reduce waste and improve accountability.

"COGS-Well has become an essential part of our operational toolkit, providing our team with the visibility and control needed to effectively manage food and beverage costs across the business. The platform's inventory, purchasing, and variance reporting tools help identify opportunities to reduce waste and improve accountability." – Craig Jordaan, Operations Supervisor, Prime Group