How Bad Receiving Practices Can Kill Your Food Cost & What You Can Do About It

Receiving is one of those areas that many operators consider to be pretty basic, low level, business 101 stuff. Sure, receiving isn't glamorous, it's repetitive and no matter how you do it, receiving doesn't bring in any more sales. However, the manner in which your restaurant conducts your receiving functions can have a major impact on how much money you get to keep.

When I work with restaurants having food cost problems, it's not uncommon to discover that over half of their losses are occurring as a direct result of what's happening or not happening on the receiving dock or at the back door.

Receiving is an area where the combination of poor systems, carelessness, mistakes and good old fashioned greed can add up to big losses for any restaurant. When it comes to controlling your costs and maximizing your potential for profit, there aren't many individual areas that are more important than receiving. If you have solid controls everywhere else, but are lax about how you check in your deliveries, chances are it's costing you plenty of money. There's no easier place to lose big dollars quickly than when the delivery truck pulls up, if you don't have your act together, all the time.