Restaurant Food Cost Saving Ideas for Independent Owners

Restaurant Food Cost Saving Ideas for Independent Owners - Restaurant food cost has been rising on a weekly basis for darn near two decades now. Most restaurant operators attribute their higher food costs to these price changes. On top of that, the echo chamber of the Internet keeps compounding the problem feeding you bad information. For example, who is to say the average food cost is the right food cost percentage for your restaurant? Your restaurant is not average, and you can’t make decisions on averages. If you are an independent restaurant owner looking for restaurant food cost savings ideas, you’re in the right place. #restaurantfoodcost #howtolowerfoodcost #howtorunarestaurant ****If you would like to learn how to own a restaurant that doesn't depend on you to be successful, click this link to watch a free video course that teaches you three key principles to running a successful restaurant: https://dsp.coach/three-key-principles 📖 I wrote a book for restaurant owners and managers: https://amzn.to/2ZYlL7Y 🔔 Be sure to subscribe to this channel to get alerts when I post a new tip: http://bit.ly/2Yk484P 🎧 Take me on the go and listen to my podcast: https://dsp.coach/podcast ********************************** Welcome to my YouTube Channel. I am David Scott Peters, a restaurant coach and speaker who teaches restaurant operators how to cut costs and increase profits with my trademark Restaurant Prosperity Formula. Known as THE expert in the restaurant industry, I apply my no-BS style to teach and motivate restaurant owners to take control of their businesses and finally realize their full potential. Thousands of restaurants have used my formula to transform their businesses. To learn more about me and my coaching program, visit http://www.davidscottpeters.com. ********************************** Fallacy number one: the price I pay for my products is the real problem. Fallacy number two: you're supposed to operate based on an industry average for food cost. One of the things I've learned coaching independent restaurants since 2003 is that most restaurants run seven to nine points above their ideal food cost. What is ideal food cost? Ideal food cost is if everybody ran perfectly, portions went out perfectly. There was no waste, no theft, no spoilage. It’s a perfect restaurant, which does not exist. But if you were perfect, you would, based on what your customers order, hit your ideal food cost. Your ideal food cost is not thirty four percent. If you're a pizzeria, maybe you have a 24 percent ideal food cost. A steakhouse could have a 35 percent ideal food cost. Just using those two numbers as an example, imagine most restaurants are running seven to nine points above that because you're making mistakes in your kitchen. It's not the fifteen cents more a pound of cheese that your purveyor just hit you with because maybe it's a commodity product. Here is a short list of items you can put in place to help you gain some savings on food cost. Key Item Tracker Waste Tracker Restaurant Checkbook Guardian Portion controls Line checklists Time-temp checklists To understand why using an average food cost is probably not your restaurant’s target food cost, you have to understand prime cost, budgets, ideal food cost and menu engineering. What do I mean? Using a budget allows you to set your plan in progress for how you're going to lower your food cost to where your food cost needs to be. For example, you can put the Key Item Tracker, Waste Tracker and the Restaurant Checkbook Guardian in place to reduce your food cost by three points right out of the gate. Recipe costing cards are the second most important system for a restaurant, next to the budget, but it may take you four months to do recipe cards so you can figure out what your ideal food cost is, remember, based on no waste, no theft, no spoilage. Once you have those, though, you can use menu engineering techniques and consider raising prices, changing products on some items, reducing portions, adding new items, removing items, etc. The important thing is you'll be making these decisions based on real data – not your gut. Any of these things can be part of the work to lower your food cost. With minimum wage coming up on a federal level soon and a pandemic you need to recover from, you need to run a profitable restaurant. You need to start your journey to lowering your food cost. You need to create a plan to implement and use this short list of systems and you'll be on your way to a profitable restaurant. ********************************** Find more about how to run a restaurant business on my other platforms: 👍 Facebook:   / davidscottpetersbiz   📸 Instagram:   / davidscottpeters   📱 Twitter:   / restaurantxpert   🔔 Subscribe to YouTube: http://bit.ly/2Yk484P 🎧 Podcast page: https://dsp.coach/podcas