Cutting Down on Restaurant’s Food Cost by 10%

If you’re just starting out, chances are you don’t have food cost controls in place yet. You’re paying what your supplier is asking, and you’re just starting to consider cost reduction ideas.

What can you do to start cutting your food restaurant costs?

Do Not Provoke Bidding Wars Among Vendors

Large chain operations know that it’s best to work with one main purveyor that will supply the majority of your restaurant’s foods. It’s all about building long-lasting relationships in business, and you can’t build a lasting relationship when you’re switching suppliers every few months.

When you start working with one main supplier who might supply all of your food, or even 80% of your food, you’ll then start to discuss how to control food costs.

But when working with multiple vendors, sometimes 6–7, you will have a lot less leverage when discussing discounts.

Start by Reducing Your Waste with Proper Management

One of the key things to do to reduce your food costs is to find a way to cut back on waste.

Try and find ways to use food that has gone stale. You can take strawberries that are past their time and turn them into a jam or sangria perhaps. Bread can be made into bread crumbs or croutons.

Train all cooks to use food that is on its way to going bad, so that the food items that came into the restaurant first are also used first. This reduces the amount of spoilage that you may have.

Start using food cost management software to keep inventory of all of your ingredients. There is also ordering software that will suggest the quantities that you should buy based off of your past orders.

One thing you’ll learn as a restaurant owner is that you need to also bring your cooks on board if you want to be able to control your food costs. Cooks don’t understand restaurant food costs because they’re just doing their job.

Once this is done, you can move on to some other methods that the average restaurant can employ when learning how to cut costs.