When it comes to good stock control and management, there is not just one thing that you need to do. Lots of little tasks play an important part in good stock control. One of these little tasks is measuring waste. In this blog post we would like to share the importance of always measuring waste and how this helps with good stock management.

We would highly recommend that you properly record not only how much wastage you have, but also how the waste occurred. You may find that if you know where your biggest losses are you can make changes to reduce or remove this wastage all together.

A great example of this is if there was regular wastage when pints are being poured. What you may find out when speaking to your bar staff is that some beers are too frothy and large heads are served on beers which customers complain about. In cases like this additional staff training may be required for the perfect pour.

Perhaps, on a similar point, staff members don’t know how to change the barrels so when they do it there is a lot of wastage. Again, this is something that can be resolved with additional training on barrel changing and the risk of wastage is removed.

If stock is frequently going off or is out of date then a system should be implemented to resolve this. This could be as simple as the FIFO method we spoke about in a recent blog post. You could also label boxes so the expiry date can be seen clearly to avoid newer stock being used before older stock.

Why not get creative too? If you do have products going out of stock think of ways you can use them before they go out of stock. This could be a new cocktail that is available for a limited time period, or a new sauce for a popular steak choice?