Cutting food cost doesn't require slight of hand or special effects. All it takes is doing what it takes, and there appears to be no shortage of things to do.
"The obvious one to start with is using an inventory system, and having periodic real-time inventories done, which a lot of operators still don't do," said Andre Nataf, national multiunit sales manager for Digital Dining in Springfield, Va.
Nataf also recommends running audit reports to see that food is being charged and dispensed honestly by cashiers.
Rudy M. Miick, FCSI, president of Miick & Associates/The Durga Institute in Boulder, Colo., and colleague Tom Costello, FCSI, of Thomas Costello & Associates, have developed a system for painstakingly tracking food usage and cost with an eye toward cutting costs.
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Among their recommendations: use the right size plates/bowls; use spatulas, scales and the right size ladles; pre-portion when possible; keep a perpetual inventory of high-ticket items such as seafood and meat; get rid of trashcans; purchase today "only what you need today"; and emphasize training.
Watch waste: A recent two-year study conducted in noncommercial foodservice by Portland, Ore.-based LeanPath Inc. found that pre-consumer food waste ranges from 4 percent to 7 percent of total food costs, and that the most common types of pre-consumer food waste are overproduction, trim waste and spoilage.
Based on dollars lost, the foods most wasted are starches, produce and soup. Produce appeared to be the most frequently wasted food in noncommercial foodservice, partly because it is the most overproduced, said Carl Nelson, LeanPath's director of Business Development.
LeanPath advocates that before food is discarded, it is weighed and the data recorded and stored in a touchscreen terminal. The data is then transferred to the manager's PC.
"Then you can slice and dice that data in all sorts of different kinds of reports," Nelson said.
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Sandra Matheson, FCSI, RD, FCDA, principal of Food Systems Consulting Inc. based in Oakville, Ontario, said she comes at the question of food cost "from a getting greener angle. That is, by responsibly managing food waste by re-asserting healthier portion sizes with add-on cost for large or extra large portions."
In catering, Matheson said the ideology this is working well.
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"We had disproportionately increased the sizes of sandwiches when we went to wraps. Clients were seeing waste, and have readily agreed to accept smaller portions for a marginally smaller price," she said.
In line with that philosophy, Clark National, based in Elk Grove Village, Ill, has developed a software program for tracking restaurant-food costs. The program can determine the cost of menu items based on the cost of each ingredient. If the menu item is costly, restaurants can take steps to change some of the ingredients, increase the price of the item, shift its position on the menu or take other actions.
Buy direct: Carolyn Archer, senior vice president of Operations for Camille's Sidewalk Café, said her company helps franchisees manage food costs by going directly to manufacturers, if need be, "rather than negotiating only with the food distributor. That way, we can negotiate based on the system-wide movement on all of our products to get the best price."
That practice cut the food cost of one of Camille's most popular menu items by 16 percent last year, she said. Franchisees also are urged to use portion-control tools for all of their food prep.
Re-use leftovers: "I was talking to an operator last week who told me how happy his employees were because they get to take home all the leftovers," said restaurant consultant Diane Chiasson, FCSI, principle of Chiasson Consultants Inc. in Toronto. "I told him that I think feeding your staff is very important, but feeding them steak and lobster could be viewed as overly indulgent."
Chiasson said many operators have leftovers and give them to their staffs, but an excellent option is to freeze leftovers, chop or mince them and add them to stews or soups, or use them for seasoning a dish.
