In a year when the food and beverage industry has suffered incredible challenges, it has never been more critical to keep an eye on costs and adapt. While the latter was either covered in how you adapted during furlough or through clever pivots in delivery or collections, keeping an eye on costs now means maximising profits during the ‘al fresco dining boom.’ But the ring of the till from booked in customers isn’t the only way to do this.
If you’re at capacity for seats, you need to think differently about profit, and one of the most innovative ways to do this is through food inventory management.
Food inventory matters right now
We know that food inventory management isn’t the most fun side of the food and beverage industry. At best, it’s seen as a bit of do-able admin. At worst, it seems to go wrong each time and causes a headache for the front and back of the house alike. Â Is now really the time to be troubling your team with it?
We believe, yes. Many businesses are reporting higher numbers in bookings than during ‘Eat out to help out’.
If there are limits on how many people you can serve or when you can serve, then by understanding inventory purchasing, you can win back control.
Control how you buy (not too much or too little) and control inventory lost from spoilage or waste.
Food inventory management is a way of tracking how much inventory you are carrying at all times to maximise profits.
In short, it’s like getting new customers every single day, even if you aren’t working at the same capacity. Don’t make wastage or inventory stats something you glance at on the back of your POS. Take a closer look.
How much money are you leaving on the table?
FoodPrint reports that up to 10 per cent of the food inventory a restaurant purchases is wasted, meaning that 10 per cent of their food cost will not generate revenue.
In other stats, it is estimated that 97p from each meal served is wasted. According to data from How To Run A Pub, the average spend on a three-course pub meal is £14.48. That 97p represents 6% immediately taken away to account for avoidable food waste, and this is before overheads like wages, utilities and maintenance are removed.
Your waste could be coming from the places you wouldn’t expect. Perhaps your ingredients are too vast. Perhaps certain dishes sell poorly compared to others. Could you be piling plates too high? Consider that in a recent survey, 41 per cent of customers said that they left food because the portions were too big.
Let tech take over
You can already make changes to reduce waste, such as being flexible with your menus and offering ‘lighter’ meals, but this only scratches the surface of the returns you could get by really focusing on food inventory management.
So, as you work on your marketing, processes and plans for the changes ahead in the roadmap, ensure you improve profitability by reducing costs. If you also believe food inventory management has a place in your business, don’t go it alone. Let the tech do the heavy lifting so you keep your focus elsewhere.
The Orderly Inventory Management App is proven to reduce waste and increase profit and efficiency, all from your mobile phone, with a straightforward POS integration to schedule polling receipt of sales and waste data. Stock counts become a breeze that you can schedule in any way you see fit.
On top of that, you can get accurate recipe data that you can overwrite, access all the items to be sent for credit request and automate your PO receipting.  There’s nothing else like it.
Whether you are a small business or a global enterprise, getting hold of food inventory management will not only leave you more time to focus on the better parts of the job but will reap benefits in your overall profits.
Take a look at the solution today.
Interested to see how it can work for you? Please speak to us here.
