As a restaurant owner it is only normal that you will have a lot on your plate and a lot of those full plates to balance – literally in some cases! It is your job as a restaurant owner to balance that restaurant full of hungry customers, the busy bar area, the latest special meal deal and your stocktake too.
But, if you are a busy restaurant owner it means you may rush through things like the restaurant stocktake and make silly mistakes in your counting and calculations as you are trying to do more than one thing at a time. This sort of carelessness could result in large amounts of wasted products and money for your restaurant and your pocket.
Through careless stocktaking in your restaurant you are opening yourself up to the likelihood of waste products due to over-ordering or products going out of date, the risk of theft by staff members or customers and potential missed sales in the restaurant by not having enough food products.
Let’s say that your most popular meal is rump steak with peppercorn sauce, a delicious field mushroom, triple cooked chips and mixed vegetables.
You quickly check your stock and see the 3 cardboard boxes that the steaks are in and you’re happy that you have enough for the next day – what you didn’t think to check was that the boxes were full. In fact, the top box was full of chips because the bag had ripped open, the 2nd box only had one steak left and the final box was the only one full of steaks; giving you enough rump steaks for one hours service, maximum.
Then there are your mixed vegetables; you remember ordering lots last week so you’re pretty confident you’ll still have lots left. However what you didn’t take into account is that the chef used the extra orders of mixed vegetables in the vegetable soup and you probably won’t have enough mixed vegetables for more than about ten customers.
On top of this you see the bags of chips and you can see there are enough for the next day’s service, sadly though they all go out of date today and therefore they can’t be used tomorrow at all which leaves your most popular meal consisting of just peppercorn sauce and a field mushroom, shortly after opening the doors to your restaurant.
Of course you can place an emergency order but this will upset the supplier, that’s if they have the food products available, and they could put their price up due to a last minute order which will result in less profit being made for your business.
If you do not have the time to properly complete a stocktake in your restaurant or feel there is a need for a consultancy to take place then feel free to contact us directly; we want to see your restaurant succeed and we want to help you achieve as much profit and as many sales through well managed stock as possible.