Are you missing the opportunity hiding in your inventory?

At a time when every expense your restaurant saves can give you critical leverage to innovate your menu, hire staff or invest in helpful technology, fine-tuning your approach to inventory management can help you identify and eliminate costly sources of waste. Tighten up your inventory management and you’ll waste less food, lower your cost of goods, manage and understand your vendor relationships better, avoid disappointing guests, and boost profits. This is a huge opportunity that so many restaurants are missing: According to the National Restaurant Association, the average restaurant wastes from 4-10 percent of the food they purchase. Beyond that, 53 percent of restaurants don’t track their waste (and the 47 percent that do vary widely in how they manage it). A large portion of food waste is due to spoilage, overstocking and other poor inventory practices. It’s easy for a small misstep to set an expensive domino effect in motion, so your efforts to keep your inventory organized, connected and stocked do pay off. Assess the health of your inventory management by scrutinizing the two sides of it — your team’s daily practices in moving and tracking items through your restaurant, along with your review of the reports about these items (and actions you take in response). A recent paper from Restaurant Finance Monitor outlines some best practices to follow on both sides of the inventory management process — and Team Four can advise you here too. How confident are you that waste isn’t lurking in your inventory?