Food management techniques that every restaurant should adopt

Food wastage is a major issue as a huge proportion of food is being thrown away globally. According to a study, an estimated amount of 925,000,000 people are still fighting hunger. On the contrary, about 1,300,000,000 Billion tons of food is wasted which accounts to 30%-40% of the food.

You can decrease food wastage mainly in the following four ways.

By conducting a wastage audit

There is no way to know how much food your restaurant wastes due to the current operations without a proper wastage audit. For this, implement a team to open the bags and sort the trash into categories before your trash gets picked up for at least one week.

• Paper goods like paper towels, promos or flyers, napkins, and more
• Produce like vegetables and fruits
• Plastics
• Takeout products like cups, containers, plates, and more
• Meat like poultry, red meat, and fish
• Others like broken plates, aluminum foil, and many more

Change the categories

You can change the categories according to your restaurant’s menu, waste, and offers. Once the team has sorted everything out, weigh each pile on a scale and record it in a spreadsheet. Multiply this weight with the number of days the restaurant remains open annually. It will give you a clear picture of your restaurant’s different category annual wastage. The waste categories with the highest numbers need immediate attention.

For instance, if your produce and meat wastage is high, it indicates that the menu having these ingredients is not a hit among the customers. It can also be if you get poor-quality raw materials from your supplier. This wastage audit will give you a clear insight into many aspects of the operation of your restaurant. It will show you what changes you need to make.

Order according to decrease wastage

You can decrease the food spoilage in your restaurant with orders based on par levels and perfect inventory controls. Par levels are the minimum inventory amount necessary for maintaining the demand while including a small error margin to record the daily demand changes.

To know your par levels, check out your previous sales data. For instance, you can calculate the holiday sales forecast by discovering the prior year’s sales record. You can use these projections with modifications in the seasonal recipe to better anticipate what you can use. The software can make this par-level ordering hassle-free. Modern inventory management software with procurement tools can create order guidance automatically depending on what is already present in the kitchen and what is necessary to maintain par. Thus there will be more precision and less guesswork while ordering, leading to less food wastage.

Implementing recipe management for consistent portions

Correct recipe management will deliver the batch size or yield of each recipe. Knowing the yield of each recipe is also significant in maintaining consistent portion size and calculating the plate price. Since manual recipe management can include errors and is a complicated method, recipe management software is the best. It will assist you in creating, managing, and costing the recipe yield hassle-free.

You can implement it by accurately converting the ingredients to the measurement units the chef uses to calculate the correct yield for every dish. You also have to train your kitchen staff to create a recipe as accurately as it is written, including their final size.

Store the food accurately

Always store the food at an optimum temperature and appropriate container. You can label the perishable materials with the date you received them, their expiry date, and the serving amount in every container. You can also use color-coded labeling, making it easier for the staff to understand which container includes which item.

Give attention to the food seasonality

You might have an item that does well in your restaurant, but during a specific time, you might have to throw them out more. It can be due to produce seasonality. For instance, avocados have a peak production season from May to August. But suppose you are getting the avocado supply from the same distributor for the entire year. In that case, there can be chances they can get swift, resulting in throwing the item out.

Whether you buy less produce in the off-season or restructure your menu at that time of the year, always ensure you are offering the best quality food. This way, customers will remain happy, and you do not have to throw the food out.

Begin a wastage journal

After conducting the wastage audit, record and track the numbers in a journal to decrease wasted food, and always encourage the staff to record any noteworthy items like pallets from deliveries, rotten produce, or broken pint glass. The journal will allow you to track the progress over time and assess if all these efforts have made any difference in reducing the food wastage of the restaurant.

Implementing different restaurant policies

Some restaurants have implemented policies like zero food waste or a penalty on food waste to reduce food costs and waste. The wastes that you cannot repurpose, you can consider composting instead. If you have enough space, compose the food waste into creating nutrient-enrich soil for growing vegetable or herb gardens. Always prevent food wastage before finding ways to eliminate it after making them.

For instance, the chef should know how to correctly clean, cut, portion, and trim the food. Ask the servers about allergies or preferences while taking orders to terminate the refire.

Control and calculate the inventory days on the Hand

Inventory DOH or days on Hand is the average daily number you hold the inventory before selling them. You can implement this calculation method in your restaurant inventory to the individual items or the entire system. For instance, if you have 180 lbs of chicken and use 30 lbs of chicken daily, then the chicken is on Hand for six days.

Foods with higher inventory on hand days will not sell rapidly, making customers unhappy with the menu’s corresponding dish. Food with lower hands inventory days sells quickly. Thus, reach out to your supplier for an affordable deal for these items. By paying attention to how your restaurant uses inventory weekly, you can order only the things you will use between the deliveries. If you receive a discount on the quantity, communicate with your supplier about storing the item in their space and deliver them whenever necessary.

It will ensure all your coolers remain free, and the supplier will deliver the fresh produce when needed. Constantly revisit your inventory report quarterly to know what is selling or not, the cost increase due to market, seasonality, trends, and many more.

Implement a tracker for food wastage

Tracking the food wastage will assist you in understanding what dish is not selling on the menu and indicate how much food wastage you are creating. Find out the actual cause of this problem. A display system in the kitchen can also reduce food wastage a great deal. An electronic ticket system for food wastage trackings like thrown-out food, paper wastage, and double orders will help to streamline your kitchen. It will also give you complete visibility over fulfillments and sales while decreasing food wastage.

Introduce multi-use items in the menu

Using an item differently in numerous dishes will save you money by purchasing bulk. It will also assist in reducing the DOH ratio of the inventory item and minimize food wastage because of spoilage.

Run special dishes weekly

Weekly promotions and specials are the best way to rapidly re-purpose unused food item before it goes wrong and ends up in the dustbin. If the business is slower than the previous week and you have a massive amount of chicken in Hand, try re-purposing it as promoting dishes as a limited offer.