At Andromeda we know that many restaurant operators are seeing the effects of rising costs, with ingredient purchase prices rising rapidly.
That’s why now is a great time to implement a proper stock control system. It will take some time and effort to set up but once done, you will have a much better control of your food cost and we see operators typically saving 1-3% of net sales. That makes a dramatic difference to your bottom line.
How to start – well first you need an EPOS with an inventory system, that supports ingredients, like Andromeda’s POS.
Secondly, you need to capture a list of all of the stock items that you purchase. We can assist with some data entry sheets but for each item you need.
- Category ( Frozen, Fresh, Packaging, etc)
- Item Name
- Portion Unit ( e.g grams, each)
- Counting Unit ( e.g 2kg bag
- Size of Count unit in portion units e.g 2000
- Buying Unit / Case Size -in Counting units e.g 6 means you buy a case of 6 bags.
With this data, you can now get an accurate ACTUAL food cost.
Thirdly, if you would like to calculate IDEAL usage , you will need to go though each product that you sell and capture the ingredients used and qty- the recipe for that product
EG Chicken Burger contains
- 1 X Bun
- 1 X burger box
- 1 x Chicken Burge
- 20g Mayonnaise
You ( or our Customer Success Team), can now enter all of t this information into our menu editor tool. This is quite a lot of work but will bring immediate results
Firstly, you can now see product margin reports, showing your the profit you will make from each item in your menu.
Secondly, you are now set to start calculating your food cost accurately every week.
We recommend that you count ALL of your stock, every Sunday night, and enter this into the system.
You’ll also need to enter any deliveries of stock received, on the day you get them
Now, you will be able to report on
- Actual Food cost, ingredient by ingredient
- Total Food cost, and as a % of your sales
- Ideal food cost, based on recipes, item by item
- Variance between ideal and actual
You can also use our food order tool, to generate a recommended food order, based on your sales forecast, order pattern, product mix and stock on hand.
So, time to stop complaining about costs going up, and do something about it, Andromeda is here to help.