Practical Food And Beverage Cost Control

Establishing a standard for each of your recipes ensures that both quality and consistency are maintained. Each of your bartenders needs to follow the same recipe when mixing drinks and cocktails, otherwise you have no control of your liquor and mix costs.

Practical Food and Beverage Cost Control

Standard recipes also need to be set for food items on your menu. Your kitchen staff has to know the exact amount of ingredients for each item, including the number of servings and precise portions. If you have more than one bar or restaurant, standardizing recipes helps you control and maintain consistency across all locations.

One of your best tools for controlling cost is inventory management. You need to know exactly what products you have in stock and how much of each. Every dollar you have tied up in inventory is a dollar against your profits.

For even more insight into the financial gains and losses of items on your menu, break down categories even further than just beverages and food. Have more categories within each, such as alcoholic drinks and non-alcoholic drinks, wine and beer, and appetizers and main meals.

You can improve your cost management and increase efficiency by using smart technology and bar software tools. The advantages of smart technology includes fewer errors and access to data and reports that can help you control costs. Software to consider include apps for mixing drinks correctly, accounting software to accurately maintain your business and employee costs and payroll, and Glimpse to help you manage your operational costs.

Professional foodservice managers are faced with a wide array of challenges on a daily basis. Controlling costs, setting budgets, and pricing goods are essential for success in any hospitality or culinary business. Food and Beverage Cost Control provides the tools required to maintain sales and cost histories, develop systems for monitoring current activities, and forecast future costs. This detailed yet reader-friendly guide helps students and professionals alike understand and apply practical techniques to effectively manage food and beverage costs.

Now in its seventh edition, this extensively revised and updated book examines the entire cycle of cost control, including purchasing, production, sales analysis, product costing, food cost formulas, and much more. Each chapter presents complex ideas in a clear, easy-to-understand style. Micro-case studies present students with real-world scenarios and problems, while step-by-step numerical examples highlight the arithmetic necessary to understand cost control-related concepts. Covering everything from food sanitation to service methods, this practical guide helps readers enhance their knowledge of the hospitality management industry and increase their professional self-confidence.

If the actual food cost in your restaurant or hotel is higher than the ideal food cost (aka theoretical or target food cost), the reason can always be traced back to one or more of these seven causes:

Doing all food cost calculations manually is one way to go about it, but if you are looking for ways to make kitchen operations more effective and less time-consuming, a switch to professional restaurant software might be just what you need.

Cost control is often misrepresented and misunderstood in the restaurant business. People often confuse cost control measures with cost cutting. When any restaurant business faces a sudden drop in revenue, the first attempt is to slash stuff and reduce product quality, advertising spending, and maintenance. On the face of it, these moves can protect the profits initially but end up diminishing customer experience, leading to fewer customers and diminishing the bottom line.

Cost control is a more thoughtful and planned out practice whose goal is to maximize profits and evaluate current processes, their implementation cost, and how to optimize is best to provide the best-in-class experience.

With accurate cost control, you can predict future profits, determine goals, and make growth plans. You can also find out what factors affect your food costs and how to assess your ideal food cost percentage. These are important initial steps that will help you price your menu better.

The actual food cost formula takes into account theft and waste by looking at how much food you have at the beginning and end of the day. But in an ideal world, no one would steal, and no food would go to waste. Therefore, the ideal food cost only takes into account how much each menu item costs and how much it makes.

You can figure out what your ideal food cost percentage should be by dividing your total food costs for a specific period by the total amount of food sales for that period. For example, if you spend $5,000 on food and sell $10,000 worth of food, your ideal food cost is 0.5, or 5%.

The operations of the restaurant and their service providers are critically dependent on each other, so it is imperative to maintain a positive and healthy relationship with them. You must remember that while putting a certain amount of pressure on the suppliers is necessary and inevitable; your restaurant cost control targets will fail at the cost of a healthy relationship that you may share with them.

Yield management is an integral part of food cost control as it gives you the idea of how much quantity of raw materials would be used to prepare a particular food item. The raw materials should be ordered and purchased keeping the yield of the items in mind.

Overproduction and big portions are the signs of wastage that lead to escalating food costs. You should have the tools to measure the portions and rigorous processes to control the size of the portion in order to control the price. Right plating of the food is also essential as the over-serving of food can lead to higher food prices and wastage.

Another tip for reducing your budget spent on labor and restaurant cost control is lowering your employee turnover. The restaurant industry witnesses one of the highest employee turnover rates, reaching as high as 75% in some cases.

You can define Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for each staff based on the jobs they perform. For instance, the KPI for a chef can be keeping the food costs under the standard percentage, say 30%. Similarly, for a server, you can set the KPI of ensuring sales worth INR 10,000 per day. These KPIs need to be created as per your business, and you need to analyze the POS reports to set a benchmark.

One of the significant areas where restaurants lose out on a lot of money is internal thefts and pilferage. The lack of automation and reporting often leads to rising costs. There are multiple ways internal thefts happen in restaurants, and the restaurant owners are not able to identify the point where the thefts are occurring. For example, dishonest staff members can alter the number of sales that happened on a particular day and pocket the billed amount for themselves, or keep certain inventory items for themselves. One way to control this is to assign roles and permissions for each activity and keep a strict view of the daily reports.

The purchases-sales report should be audited on a weekly or fortnightly basis depending on the size of the restaurant.Along with it, there is also a need to monitor the monthly sales report that gives you details of the sales performance of individual menu items. You should ideally weed out the low-selling, high food cost menu items every so often to reduce wastage.

There are various hidden costs that bleed the restaurant dry. This article is very well crafted and will inform the restaurant owners of the restaurant costs and how to keep them under control. I would, however, like to add that the expenses incurred behind the restaurant staff also has the potential of burning a hole in the cash register. Hence, it is recommended that you try and run your restaurant with limited permanent staff and call in for part-time or seasonal restaurant employees to manage the rush during the festive season. Such actions will help you control your restaurant cost to a great extent. ?

Cost control is the ongoing practice of taking measures to reduce business expenses as a way to increase profits. Food cost control specifically, is identifying and reducing the cost of food and beverages at your restaurant.

To determine the average cost per guest, add up all of your food costs, including ingredients, delivery, interest on purchases, spoilage, theft and waste for the month. Divide that figure by the average number of diners you serve.

This is the next step to keeping your food costs low. This includes loss from food waste and theft. Careful inventory tracking should go a long way towards helping to minimize losses, but there are still further steps you can take. These include:

Knowing what ingredients are going to become more expensive or more affordable can help you plan your menu to minimize your food costs. Definitely consult this Food Price Outlook before creating and ordering ingredients for new dishes as a method of food cost control - this page is updated regularly to reflect the current state of the economy.

In the first year, students are introduced to the hospitality industry, studying quantity foods production and food protection. In the second year students focus on hotel management procedures; food, beverage and labor cost controls; and geography and tourism development. Students must participate in an individually planned 300-hour cooperative work program, earning credit toward graduation while employed.

The Food and Beverage Management certificate at Mason teaches students key concepts and operational functions, strategies, and practical skills necessary for managing and operating food and beverage business for restaurants and catering companies.

Coursework includes instruction on food safety, culinary basics, and menu development. In addition, there is a specific focus on management issues, including human resources, buying and selling food and beverages, and cost control. The curriculum emphasizes hospitality skills and the scope and forms of hospitality organizations. 041b061a72