There are many things that should be considered in order to make sure that your restaurant business is a hit. Striking a healthy balance between your expenses and revenue is one of them.
Restaurant Food Cost (RFC) constitutes a major part of your overall expenditure. In simple words, RFC is the amount that you put in to purchase raw material required to prepare food. Preferably, the cost of food must be between 30 to 40% as that of the price mentioned on your menu. Nonetheless, your expense might increase or decrease on the basis of how much ingredients are being wasted.
Taking the wastage into consideration, we’ve prepared a detailed guide on how you can control Food and Beverage in order to give you an insight on how to manage your restaurant costs.
Must Read: 5 Tips to Maintain Proper Food Storage in Restaurants
Menu Design
The most important part of Restaurant Food Cost is its Menu Design. A menu is just not a card displaying various dishes and its prices; in fact, it is the very first step of selling your items. Restaurant owners can lure customers into putting in more money by stressing upon their high profit dishes with the help of relative pricing method.
A good menu is not constituted by variety alone. A menu is considered to be beneficial only when it allows owners to make use of the same ingredients in various dishes, avoid food wastage and lower their expenses caused due to the requirement of different ingredients for different dishes, that too in abundance.
Loads of fresh products are unavailable throughout the year, but that doesn’t mean you cannot serve dishes with ingredients just out of the basked at a reasonable price to the guests. Simply update your menu as per the fresh ingredients available in that particular season, as this is one of the best ideas to manage the cost of food, while still being able to delight visitors with innovative recipes.
Make use of a Standard Recipe
As agreed by every successful chef, making use of a standard recipe is by far the most efficient way to trim down food cost. A standard recipe usually involves specific instructions to prepare a dish and mind you, they’re tried and tested by several restaurateurs.
Making changes in the recipe more than often creates an unbalance in the food stock, requires you to purchase more raw materials and hence, increases your expenditure. However, following the same recipe helps decrease wastage of food and keeps in check the amount of raw material that’s being used.
Proper Delivery of Raw Materials
Discrepancies in expenses often take place when it’s time to receive raw materials. Any material purchased for commercial kitchens must be measured and weighed properly to make sure that the right amount is being given to you.
For example, if in the order of 5kg chicken, you only receive 4.5 kg or if it isn’t fit for consumption, then it would ultimately increase the cost of food. So, here the responsibility of the purchasing department is to ensure that all the raw materials being delivered are properly checked and are right in amount.
Control The Wastage and Storage of Products
In order to increase the shelf life of your raw material, you must store them in the right temperature and in an organised way. Storing raw materials in heavy duty plastic boxes prevents cross contamination of food and prolongs the usage. Also, making use of a POS along with kitchen management tools aids in keeping a track of the existing supplies and setting reminders for buying them before you run out of stock!
Evaluate the Food Cost
Well before you started working on these aspects, better conduct a detailed market analysis. Evaluate your outlets and the trends that are being used by other restaurant owners for the past 3 months, and accordingly prepare your plan. You also have to weigh up the possibility of orders, foot traffic and sales in order to get an estimate of how much ingredients you might need.
By planning in advance, you can ensure that the cost of food is being controlled and managed efficiently. Estimating on the basis of preceding trends, you’ll be able to stock just the right amount of raw materials, whilst preventing wastage.
So, that wraps our ways of managing restaurant food costs. Put them to use right away and see how you’re able to trim down on your expenses!
