FOOD AND BEVERAGE, F&B
Optimize Your Food and Beverage Costs with these Amazing Tips
- November 8, 2021
In order to have the customers flowing in always, you need to maintain a good ambiance and stock up your menu with good recipes. But while doing so, often you may have to spend a lot on your food and beverages. Also, there are chances where you may have to meet unnecessary wastages of food items. This can, unfortunately, lead to narrowing down your profit margin. Hence, one of the best ideas is to optimize your food and beverage costs.
Here are some of the tips that can help you in food and beverage cost control.
Maintaining Standards for Recipes:
One of the major issues that take place is not getting the same taste of food every time. If consistency is not maintained in terms of the food taste, it can lead to loss of reputation of the restaurant, ultimately leading to losses. Also, when you have maintained a proper standard for all your recipes, the customers are happy to pay the cost of these recipes. One of the best ways for doing this is by strictly following the recipes. Train your bartenders and kitchen staff not to alter anything in the recipe and to follow the exact ingredients in the exact amount and follow the exact instructions for the preparations.
Setting Prices for Drinks:
In most cases, you will earn maximum profit from the drinks only. Of course, if it is a bar, there is no doubt that the drinks will be your main source of income. Hence, you need to be very careful while pricing your drinks. If you have priced your drinks too high, surely the customers will not visit you quite often. On the other hand, if you have priced them too low, you will have a lesser profit margin. Hence, your pricing should be optimal.
Pour Policies:
Drinks are costly and spilling even a single drop can cost you. Hence, you need to consider pour policies while serving drinks to your customers. Make sure to have proper instruments through which you can measure the right amount of liquor that will go in the glass of the customers. For this, you need to train up your bartenders well so that they can understand the worth of every drop.
Happy Hours:
Often most bars and clubs offer happy hours and similar special drink offers. This strategy has proven to be a great option in driving in customers but only when it has been planned carefully. For example, you have lowered down the price of certain drinks to welcome more customers. But if you see that there are not many customers coming up getting attracted by the offer, there is no point in lowering the price. In fact, it may have caused you to lose.
Hence, there are two things that you need to think about in advance. Whether the drink you are offering at a lower price can bring in-crowd, and whether your profit ad loss calculation allows you to conduct such special offers.
Profits for Recipes:
In the same way, how you observe the profitability of drinks, you need to maintain the profitability of your food items too. Do not overprice your dishes so much that customers do not order them. Similarly, do not lower down the price so much that you start facing loss.
Now, in order to maintain a proper profit in your food, you also need to maintain a good standard. If you are regularly offering a good taste to your customers, you can always increase the prices a bit to increase your profit margin too.
Inventory Management:
Apart from fixing the correct prices for the food and drinks, it is also essential to maintain that you are not wasting food items. For this, you need to have a proper inventory management system.
The inventory should offer you insights about the items that you have in stock and that are getting replenished faster. This will help you in getting the items as soon as they get exhausted. At the same time, the inventory also controls you from over-purchasing perishable goods. Often when you over-purchase items and they are not used up on time, they get damaged and this adds up to your cost.
Divide P&L Category Wise:
Often when you calculate profit and loss in total, you are not able to analyze the items from where you are getting profits and from where you are getting losses. A much convenient way is to calculate the profits and losses category-wise. This means calculating the profits and losses of your drinks separately and your food items separately. Usually, when you have a bar setup, the profits flow in through the drinks only. But if you have maintained the standard of your food items quite well, earning through food is not a surprise.
Reliable Employees:
Even when you are implying all the above-mentioned strategies, you may still face losses if you do not have reliable employees. Make sure to have proper training and benefit your employees well so that they do not steal in between causing you loss.
Modern Technologies
The use of modern technologies not just helps you in smoothening your operations but also helps you in maintaining decorum in-house. Apart from restaurant management systems, make use of cameras so that you can have an eye on your employees whether they are working correctly or not. While the food and beverage industry is a great place for earning but it can also lead to a lot of expenditure at the same time. But if you are making use of the right ways, you can always excel in the section of food and beverage cost control.
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