Are you keeping your food costs below the industry average of 30%?
If not, there are many ways to take back control of your food costs as a restaurant operator. Keeping them below 30% can be tricky, particularly now as the foodservice industry copes with a supply chain crisis. It’s crucial to keep your food cost as low as possible to ensure you’re running a successful and profitable operation.
If your food cost climbs above 30%, you are vulnerable to tighter profit margins.
Let’s take a look at a few ways to keep your food cost low:
Pay Attention to Food Waste
With a major shortage in the supply chain, no operation can afford to waste any food items. When you decrease your food cost, your profits increase. This is why it’s important to make sure each ingredient is used or repurposed, ensuring minimum to zero waste.
Know Accurate Recipe Costs
When you accurately price each of your dishes, you are guaranteed a profitable business. Keeping up with your food cost means you are also adjusting your selling prices or portion sizes. If your menu is accurately priced, you’ll hit the margins for which you’ve been aiming.
Keep Consistent Inventory Calculations
Calculating your inventory consistently results in low food costs whilst also avoiding any waste, spoilage, or theft. Your inventory is your biggest asset. It affects your COGS which thus determines your operation’s financial situation.
Maximize Profits
When you keep your food costs below 30%, you maximize your operation’s profits. All things recipe costing and inventory to how much product you order will play a role in the process. You’re in control of your COGS and your prime costs (which entails raw materials and labor).
How to Keep Your Food Cost Below 30% Without All The Hard Work!
As stated above, keeping your food cost below 30% is tough, especially now, when shortages are spewing left and right within the foodservice industry.
At times you may not have enough staff members to count inventory each day, or your food shipment for the week just isn’t up to par. Things happen unexpectedly and keeping up with these rapid changes in the industry may not always fit in with your occupied schedule.
We know how difficult and time-consuming taking control of your food cost is, that’s why we’ve created a food cost management technology that makes certain you’re below 30% and stay below 30%.
No more spending hours counting inventory only to realize you’ve made a mistake and are unable to correct it because you’re in too deep.
No more falling behind on recipe costing when your luck has failed on the quality of your product shipments.
Food Cost Management Technology
We understand how valuable time is to all operators. We’re here to put time back into your day.
Counting inventory has never been easier. If your food costs happen to rise above 30%, you’ll be able to identify where and why the increase occurred and correct the issue.
Simply take a photo of each of your invoices and input your sales and boom—technology takes over the rest.
Our food cost management technology allows you to build your recipes directly into the software. You’d only have to do this once for each recipe, which saves you time. It automatically updates your ingredient prices as each invoice comes in, thus giving the true cost of each recipe in real-time.
Not only will you be able to keep track of your inventory, COGs, and recipe costs—you’ll also be in control of everything else related to managing your back-of-house at the tip of your fingers. No more pen and paper, and no more searching through prehistoric filing cabinets.
How To Get Started
As a Dining Alliance member, you have access to thousands of dollars’ worth of savings and rebates while using the latest restaurant technology in the industry. Our goal is to help you keep your food cost as low as possible. We provide independently owned restaurants with data and analytics that are made to reduce your costs, improve your purchasing, and increase your profitability.
Between the 165,000 line items from over 350+ manufacturers that offer rebates and the labor-saving solutions that help maintain profits, you’ll also have access to our revolutionary food cost management technology that ensures you’ll keep your food costs below 30% and run a successful restaurant operation.
Get started by becoming a Dining Alliance member today!
