Most managers in the food service industry work their way up from hands-on operational roles.  In the progression from operational to managerial roles a manager must learn to let-go of day-to-day operations in order to be more effective. This is often a painful transition.

A friend recently started a new role as manager of a multi-outlet operation. When he first started he was spreading himself thin, trying to manage the business while pulling duty manager shifts at night and on weekends.

It wasn’t long before he started to struggle with his administrative duties and the business began to suffer. His first instinct was to do more shifts to reduce cost. This is the downward spiral that many operators fall into.

There is an opportunity cost of covering shifts that could be filled by a $15/hr employee. There are many things that a manager can do that are worth more than $15/hr, including:

• Recruiting – spend time recruiting the right people
• Marketing – grow the business by spreading the word
• Process re-engineering – tune processes to be more efficient
• Financial Planning – Manage Creditors and Debtors to your advantage
• Purchasing – Shop around for better deals

My friend made the right choice by stepping back from operational duties and focusing on management. The turnaround was almost immediate, as he capitalised on opportunities that were previously missed. He secured some major conferences, leveraged his suppliers to sponsor promotions and worked with a local traders association to coordinate promotional events.

Stepping-back to spend more time on management is difficult for many operators.  However, not doing so is limiting for both operator and business.

If you are in the family restaurant segment your children’s offering can make a difference. Here are 10 ways to position your business to better cater for children:

1. Serve everything with a side of Tomato Ketchup.  This will save you many trips back to the kitchen.

2. Arm your front of house team.  Teach your service staff techniques for engaging with children. Have a toolkit of ways to handle inevitable situations such as unruly monsters unsupervised by exhausted parents.

3. Always have a mop ready.  Children are still learning to drive their bodies and will spill, break and drop anything that isn’t fixed to the floor.

4. Provide child friendly activities.  Offer a play area, table activities or both. Keeping a child’s mind active will increase sales, encourage repeat business and decrease your rate of slide into insanity.

7. Get something edible on the table pronto.  This helps settle the children and keep them focused.

8. Offer a range of children’s dishes.;  Target your items at kids, but also include a couple of items that parents would prefer the kids to eat.

9. Offer children sized drinks.  Kids often struggle to get through a full sized soda.

10. Streamline your check-out process.;  Parents have a keen sense of when a child has has enough of any given environment/situation. It is often only a mater of minutes before a child changes from Dorothy from the Wizard of OZ, into Regan from The Exorcist.

This Food Cost Control Blog post has an interesting perspective on using a nominal cost in recipes to account for Complimentary Items (e.g. bread rolls etc…)

Click here to read the full post…

Many kitchens rely heavily on one or two individuals to keep the wheels turning.  If one of these individuals get hit by the proverbial bus, your business could be in real trouble.

Here are some ways to reduce your Key Person Dependency:

• Plan B, Be aware of your reliance on Key Persons and have a backup plan.
• Documentation, Procedure manuals are overkill for most kitchens, however some basic documentation can save your bacon (excuse the pun).  Consider:
  • Recipes, including photographs to show presentation standards
  • Opening and closing checklists
  • Mis en place par levels
• Training, share knowledge so that your team are interchangeable.

Very few of us live without some sort of insurance. Why should your business be any different?

Count-n-Control was recently reviewed on the Back Burner Blog. Greg McGuire blogs about the foodservice industry at The Back Burner, which is written by the employees of Tundra Specialties, a company specializing in restaurant equipment and food service supplies. Here’s what they had to say:

Count-n-Control is the brainchild of long-time industry pro Paul Clarke, and it’s a tool that is going to revolutionize how you track inventory in your restaurant. No, Count-n-Control doesn’t have some crazy new way to track your stock so that shrink is 100% eliminated, and no, it’s not going to help you find the cure for cancer.
But everything you need and expect from an inventory management system is here at your fingertips, including:

• Stock and supplier tracking
• Transaction and sales tracking
• Quick-view graphing of stock
• Roll period feature
• CSV file data importing
• Multiple users and access from any internet-enabled device

I’m not telling you anything new when I tell you that inventory control is very important in any restaurant.  But I think it’s surprising just how few restaurants view the use of scales as a way to manage shrink and really control how food product is used.  In fact, scales should be the central tool in any restaurant manager’s quest to make sure everything that comes in the restaurant goes out as a finished product a customer is paying for.

The best place to start is with a receiving scale. As product rolls in the back door off the truck, weigh each bulk item and record the weight.  That way you know exactly how much of each kind of ingredient you have available.  This helps you in two ways:

1) You’ll know exactly when it’s time to order more product
2) If you’re out of product, but you only sold X number of entrees that use that product (i.e. not enough of them to be out), inventory shrink is happening, and it’s time to hunt down the culprit

Portion scales are a necessary compliment to your receiving scale. After all, if you’re measuring what’s coming in but not what’s going out, you’ll have a hard time managing your inventory.  There are two kinds of portion scales: mechanical scales and digital scales.

Mechanical portion scales indicate weights on a large, easy-to-read dial.  These scales are ideal for measuring bulky items that you’re cooking in large quantities, like french fries or chicken wings.  You sacrifice a little bit of accuracy for speed and convenience, which makes sense if you’re just pounding out apps on Super Bowl Sunday.

Digital portion scales are much more accurate and allow you to measure ingredients with precision.  Use these scales for measuring out the ingredients to your restaurant’s world famous secret sauce, anything that needs to be baked, and other multi-ingredient recipes.  The nice thing about digital scales is that you can reset the tare and calculate ingredient proportions very easily.

For those of you who don’t know, the tare on a scale is a feature that tells the scale to ignore the current weight on the scale and measure additional weight from zero.  In other words, the mixing bowl you put on the scale will weigh zero once you press the tare button and the scale will only register the weight of the ingredients you add to it.

You can measure ingredient proportions on a digital scale easily and much more accurately than with measuring cups because different ingredients compact differently in a measuring cup.  Flour is the best example.  A cup of flour can weigh between 4 and 6 ounces, depending on how compacted it is in the cup.  If you extrapolate that out to 4 cups of flour, you’ve got up to a 50% difference in the weight of the flour.

You can also calculate proportions more easily with a portion scale because you know how much ingredients that are hard to measure with a cup weigh, like eggs.  A recipe for pasta might call for three parts flour to two parts egg.  If two eggs weigh four ounces, then you know you need six ounces of flour.

Finally, scales can help you manage another extremely important inventory item in your restaurant: alcohol. Use a liquor scale to measure the remaining amount of alcohol in each bottle at the end of the day and record the amount.  I’ve seen managers go through this exercise countless times, but never with a scale.  Usually they just look at the bottle and estimate how much is left.

You depend on alcohol sales to contribute to your bottom line entirely too much for such an inaccurate evaluation of inventory.  A liquor scale takes the guesswork out of the equation and allows you to compare hard numbers with your sales so that you can spot shrink and put a stop to it quickly.

Scales mean accuracy.  Accuracy means less waste.  Less waste means less cost.  Less cost equals more profit.  The equation is as simple as that.

Stock Rotation protects your investment. Food Poisoning incidents can ruin the reputation of your establishment. Here’s 5 ways to promote stock rotation:

1. FIFO (First In, First Out). This is a foundation rule of stock rotation: Use oldest items first.
2. Put newly received goods to the back of the store to promote FIFO.
3. Record the receipt-date and use-by date on goods as they are received.
4. Record use-by date on non-perishables when they are opened.
5. Record production-date and use-by dates on food prepared, that will not be served immediately.

For the past serveral months I have been working on an online food stock control system named Count-n-Control (CnC).  CnC is based on a simple client based system that I developed 10 years ago, and has been used in over 50 food operations.

It is only in recent times that web technology has progressed to a point where online apps are feasible for applications that require large amounts of data entry.  For example: it is now possible to enter the transactions from an invoice quickly and efficiently online.  Historically this type of data entry was slow and clumsy with web-based applications.

CnC also leverages a number of ideas from Web 2.0, including:

• “cloud-based” service delivery model, accessible for any internet enabled device
• the traditional audit log is replaced with an exposed twitter style activity log
• the “Freemium” business model means anyone is free to use Count-n-Control at no cost

Many of you will have stock control systems in place.  However, for those who don’t the barrier to entry has just been lowered.  You can now access to a tool for monitoring and controlling the performance of your operation at no cost.

I will post further insights into CnC over the coming posts.  In the mean time I invite you to sign-up and let me know what you think.

Portion Control is an effective way to control food cost at the Production Phase of the Food Service Cycle. Here are a six simple Portion Control techniques:

Document Recipes
Providing documented recipes that clearly communicates the standard portion sizes provides the foundation for effective portion control.

Plate Presentation Photos
Photograph each menu item and display them in a prominent place in the kitchen. This provides a visual reminder of standard portions and is a guide for consistent plate presentation.

Mise en Place portioning
Portion ingredients before service. For dishes that are made to order, portion ingredients into small reusable plastic containers and stack them on trays ready for service.

Keep a Measure with Ingredients
Store a spoon, cup or container that holds the standard portion amount with each ingredient.

Keep a Scales in the Kitchen
Make it easy to check portions during service by making a set of scales readily available.

Monitor Meals being Served
Assign responsibility for visually checking dishes before they leave the kitchen to a member of the kitchen team.