Menu strategies that can save you money

Posted by ianmara on Nov 7, 2011 in Bar Management | 0 comments

Saving cash in the kitchen can impact your bottom line in countless ways. It can free-up funding to maintain staff, increase training or improve design. Perhaps you can finally hire that social media marketing company you’ve had your eye on.

Here a few interesting tips we found in this article on Kraft Foodservices’ website.

1. Less (on a plate) is more – A chef interviewed by KF suggests restaurants should focus more on the “eating experience” than volume of food.

2. Emphasize side dishes – Paying attention to the side attention is a way to distract diner’s attention from cutting costs with what’s in the middle of the plate.

Read more..

3 Simple Ways to Cut the Food Costs in your Bar/Restaurant

Posted by barblog on Oct 12, 2010 in Bar Marketing | 1 comment

To work with Barry, Click Here

Download a Recipe Costing Calculator from ManageYourBar.com by clicking here

A recipe card creates:

1. Consistency in the kitchen. When I talk about consistency, I mean that very often there are changes of chefs, the head chef may be off duty, there may be new chefs in the kitchen and so it’s really important for consistency purposes to have a written recipe of exactly what goes into your dish, so that everybody who makes that dish today, tomorrow or next week can create the same dish using the same quantities and the same ingredients. Your customers who come back again and again, expecting to have that special dish they had the first time are guaranteed to get that when the same recipe is followed. Read more..

Your Kitchen is Losing Money. So Now What?

Posted by barblog on May 25, 2010 in Bar Management | 0 comments

So you’ve discovered that your kitchen isn’t the profit center you want it to be. Instead for some reason, your kitchen is dragging down the other parts of your business. Unless you are happy to run your kitchen at a loss, the chances are that you want to plug the losses as soon as possible.

If you have followed my previous recommendations to create a recipe card for every menu item,  then you have by now eliminated the poorly performing menu items, so this should not be the problem.

Assuming that you are now left with profitable menu items only, it’s time to stand back and take stock of the situation: The problem you have is that the ingredients purchased throughout the period are not being sold for profit – they are either being stolen, overcooked and thrown out, expiring before usage, not being delivered in the first place.

20% of your ingredients are going to account for approximately 80% of your profits or losses and these are usually your high end ingredients such as beef tenderloin, lamb, halibut, lobsters, crab etc.

It’s time to make a list of your top ten ingredients by unit cost.

Once you have this done, you’re going to track what happens to these items shift by shift for a week. Seems like a lot of work? So is losing your business because of a poorly performing kitchen.

I recommend doing this out of sight of the kitchen staff, even the Chef. Conduct your opening count before they come on duty and your closing count after they go home.

Use this Free Top 10 Inventory Sheet to track these items easily. If you are losing money in the kitchen, there’s a big chance it’s occurring with these items.

All you’ll need to do is an opening inventory of the items each shift, a list of the deliveries of these items each shift, the quantity sold (get this from the POS) and the closing inventory quantity. The Top 10 Inventory Sheet will then tell you if you are missing items instantly. If you have losses, it’s time to approach the Chef and ask for his feedback and answers as to the losses.

I would be very surprised if this wasn’t enough for him to take action in the kitchen and tighten things up, providing of course, that he is not the problem….

In any case, now that you are measuring regularly, you’ll be able to take appropriate action in the kitchen to put an end to the losses.

Could your kitchen be costing you your business?

Posted by barblog on May 24, 2010 in Bar Management | 3 comments

As trends have shifted over the past few years, most bar owners came to the realization that they couldn’t generate enough business by focusing solely on drink and so kitchens became a standard addition to the progressive bar.

Many of the bar owners that I have worked with were the first to admit that far from being their area of expertise, they were happy to leave the management of the kitchen to the chef. Sometimes this worked, other times it didn’t. I worked with a bar owner who ran his kitchen at a four figure loss for three months before it was brought to his attention, then there was the bar with more than 80 different dishes on the menu because the chef thought the more menu items, the more opportunities to sell…

Before you think this is an anti-chef rant, it’s not, I have great respect for the talented individuals that run profitable and award winning kitchens. However, you are the owner of the business and it is ultimately your responsibility to know where the costs, profits and losses lie in this vital area.

To work out if you have a profitable kitchen or not, follow these 8 steps: Read more..

Can you easily calculate your food cost?

Posted by barblog on Sep 22, 2009 in Bar Food, Food Cost Control | 9 comments

I come across bar and restaurant owners all the time that are unable to calculate their food cost/margin or their beverage cost/margin. These simplest of calculations can be done on the back of a napkin. I’ll try to explain each aspect of it here as simply as possible:

Whether you run a steak and seafood restaurant, a family restaurant, a pub or a martini bar, you need to know what your food cost is.

The basic food cost calculation itself is simple:

Opening Inventory Value + Cost of Purchases  – Closing Inventory Value = Usage Amount

Usage Amount / Sales Revenue = Cost of Goods Sold (%)

This formula can be used to calculate your food cost anytime you want to: monthly, weekly or daily. We will use this formula to calculate a weekly food cost.

First, you need to collect the information that is required to do your food cost calculation.

You will need to have done a physical inventory of your stock, and you will need to add up your purchases for the week. You will also need to have your food sales for the week available.

Your opening inventory is the dollar value of what you began your week with. If you do a regular food cost calculation, your opening values will be the last closing value you had.

Your purchases amount is the dollar value of whatever you purchased during the week.

Your closing inventory dollars is the value of what is still in stock at the end of your week.

When you add your opening inventory and your purchases, you calculate the total product that you purchased for the week. When you subtract your closing inventory, you end up with your usage for the week.

Because your closing inventory is still in stock, you need to subtract it from the equation, because even though you purchased it in that cycle, you haven’t used it yet.

Then you take your usage and divide that by your food sales for the week. The percentage you arrive at is your food cost.

Here is an example of how this calculation works:

Opening Inventory:     $10,300

Purchases:                   $5,500

Closing Inventory:       $8,200

Food Sales:                  $22,000

Using our formula, your food cost would be calculated in the following way:

$10,300 + $5,500 – $8,200 = $7,600

$7,600 / $22,000 = 34.55 %

In this example, you began with $10,300 of food product in stock. You purchased $5,500 through the course of the week, and at the end of the week you did a physical inventory and determined that you still have $8,200 of product in stock.

Therefore, your usage for the week was $7,600.