As a manager, you’re constantly swatting back those pesky wrenches that peck at the gears of your restaurant’s machinery. Every day, you shoo away the problems before they can grind everything to a sudden halt. With disgruntled guests, for example, you must become the epitome of warmth, appeasement and unjudgmental understanding. Or, with lazy employees, you must become a firmer, more vocal and crueler version of yourself. And, with the inventory—well—with the inventory, you simply must take attendance: you must walk around your store with a clipboard and tally up all the food.
Somehow, many new restaurant managers excel with these first two responsibilities but flounder with the third. Not good. Nothing conveys amateurism quite like frequently eighty-sixing a particular dish because of poor inventory management. Inexperienced managers stockpile large amounts of ingredients in their refrigerators in an attempt to avoid these embarrassing menu adjustments, but their strategy never works. To manage your perishables reliably and affordably, there is a single preferred strategy: take inventory weekly and cycle in only the necessities.
1. Ingredients Don’t Have The Opportunity To Spoil.
It seems counterintuitive. How does buying fewer groceries prevent your refrigerator from emptying out? It all concerns food cycling. On the same day, every week, you buy a week’s worth of fresh ingredients and store them in the very back of your refrigerator. Only after the older stock in the fridge has been depleted do you cycle in these newer, fresher ingredients. This process continues. The following week you buy more new ingredients and place them in the back of the refrigerator. In this way, ingredients are always fresh, on hand, and in appropriate abundance. Compare this to buying in bulk. Every month you purchase a heap of ingredients, dump them into your cooler, use up most of them, and throw away the rest. It’s wasteful and it’s expensive. When you throw out spoiled perishables, you’re throwing away, in a roundabout way, your own profits.
2. On A Long Enough Timescale, Something Unpredictable Will Happen.
Another misconception about Less-Food/More-Inventory is, if an unexpected rush bombards your dining room, your smaller stock can’t meet the demand. Not true. Most managers who use the Less-Food/More-Inventory method keep about a week’s worth of buffer available for these types of situations. They borrow some of the extra ingredients and easily rejuvenate them later. With bulk-based buying, however, there is no such fail-safe. To explain, let’s discuss lemons.
Two types of people dine out: those who take a slice of lemon with their water and those who do not. These two peoples exist in a certain, usually predictable, equilibrium. Suppose, for the first two weeks after you do a bulk-style inventory, every person in your municipality who prefers lemon with their water tosses a dart at a tacked-up city map to choose that night’s restaurant. Suppose that each of these darts, independently, sticks into the map’s printed representation of your establishment. Dumb luck—a phenomenon of probability. So, for two weeks, an unassuming pack of people who prefer lemon with their water bound into your restaurant and demand lemon slices inside their water glasses. Eventually, caught by surprise, you run out of lemons and every visiting member of this population segment leaves your restaurant faintly dissatisfied.
Sometimes luck doesn’t favor your restaurant. By keeping a weekly instead of monthly inventory, you would have detected this lemon problem early on and had time to restock. With your finger on the pulse of the inventory, you are more agile around the problems you can’t always predict.
3. You Become Aware of the Sociological Trends Affecting Your Business.
A strange thing happens when regularly taking inventory: you learn the weather patterns of your kitchen. Surely you know that Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day are going to be busy. You know that you will sell more soup this winter than this summer. Certain trends you are already aware of. Certain things you have already intuited. But customers are much more predictable than you yet realize. With the raw numbers gathered from inventorying software , popularity trends begin to pop up. The longer you perform a regular inventory, the more data you gather and the more attuned you become to the demand schedule of certain dishes. You will begin to distinguish the forest from its trees.
4. Your Cooks’ Psychology Towards Portioning Will Shift.
You agree that responsiveness and agility are valuable assets to a manager, but you still prize cautious preparedness over profitable uncertainty. You’re not alone. Many restaurant owners prefer to have an extreme excess of ingredients: they’re terrified of possibly running out of an item so they overcompensate. But, have you tried working with less? Consider this story:
Once, when just starting out, a famous chef almost ran out of French fries during a particular shift. He only had one box left and the delivery truck wouldn’t arrive until the following day. This chef gathered his crew into the kitchen and told them that he didn’t believe this single box of fries would last four hours, much less the whole day. “Ration like your life depends on it,” he told his staff. So that day, when his cooks doled out portions of French fries, they didn’t just blindly scoop and pour, they picked out fries one by one and carefully placed them into their fry pods. This box of fries that would have normally lasted only four hours, held out for the entire day.
When employees work with an endless supply of food, they portion it out generously because it has never run out. But, when you provide them with limited supplies, their mindsets change. They now ascribe worth to your purchases and portion out ingredients to your standard. You save money and your dishes become more consistent.
5. It’s Impossible For Your Employees To Tell You Everything.
Back to the lemons: you’re about to run out and you have no idea. It’s Saturday evening and your new hire is a no-call no-show, you’re understaffed, the dishwasher is on the fritz again, and you just learned that an old couple at table whatever aren’t satisfied with the service and want to speak to you. There isn’t enough time for the lemons. Their scarcity, however, is not going unnoticed. Before the lemons completely disappear, a string of employees walk into the refrigerator, grab one of the remaining few, and notice that stock is running low. Do they search you out and tell you? Remember, you’re understaffed; these servers are no less busy than you. There isn’t enough time for the lemons, or at least, there isn’t enough time for them until they’re all gone. Other than you, no one in your restaurant is responsible for keeping its inventory well stocked. Not only does a reactionary approach to inventorying hurt your business, it hurts your employees and it diminishes your authority over them.
6. By Taking Inventory More Often, You Can Save A Life—Seriously.
Say you run out of some other seemingly innocuous ingredient, not lemons, not French fries, but sesame oil. Your cook, unmindful of nut allergies, substitutes the sesame oil with globs of peanut oil. As we’ve discussed before , restaurant owners have an obligation to respect their customers’ allergies. In a crunch moment like this, if you haven’t trained your kitchen properly in allergy etiquette, you could actually send one of your guests to the hospital. It sounds extreme, but things like this happen all too frequently .
The point is, there’s no reason why a restaurant should ever run out of important ingredients. It looks unprofessional and you lose legitimacy in the eyes of your customers. But really, it’s not even about that. Your restaurant is your machine. When it breaks down, when it putters out, when it stalls, it reflects poorly on the manager. Keeping sound inventory doesn’t eliminate all potential hiccoughs, but it does tune up one of the essential mechanisms of your restaurant’s finicky engine.
