How You Lose Money Dealing With Food
Before tackling the issue of food cost controls, it's important to have an understanding of the primary ways of losing money working with food. You'll quickly see just how vulnerable any foodservice operation is and how weaknesses in any area of the food production process can add up to significant loses quickly.
The following articles and topics in our Food & Beverage section will get into specific procedures and controls you can use to plug up these potential holes. The goal, of course, is to get as much food as possible from the back door to paying customers, and minimizing the amount product that's mishandled and lost along the way.
Purchasing Stage
1. Over-purchasing Purchasing more food than you need results in poor portion controls, excess spoilage, waste and theft. |
2. Under-purchasing Not having enough product when you need it may require having to send someone to the store and pay inflated retail prices. You might decide to save a trip and use a more expensive substitute product. Either way you lose and if you do nothing you might lose sales opportunities and disappoint your guests. |
